Yet, although his studious celibate nature was more adaptable to constraint, in his own way he found jail as constraining as did Sacco. He, too, would face a period when his mind failed him. Unlike Sacco, he had never experienced an emotional outlet in his work. Sacco was the good shoe-worker, he the poor fish peddler. It was not a garden or a wife or the starting hum of a factory at eight in the morning that he missed, but the days of sun and wind when he ambled along the lanes of Plymouth with his cart, the salt odor of the flats where he dug clams.
To Mrs. Evans he expressed his longing for the earth in phrases that suggest Whitman:
O the blissing green of the wilderness and of the open land—O the blue vastness of the Oceans—the fragrances of the flowers and the sweetness of the fruits—The sky reflecting lakes—the singing turrents—the telling brooks—O the valleys, the hills—the awful Alps! O the mistic dawn—the roses of the Aurora, the glory of the moon—O the sunset—the twilight—O the supreme extasies and mistery of the starry nights, heavenly creature of the eternity.
Yes, Yes, all this is real actuallity but not to us, not to us chained—and just and simple because we, being chained, have not the freedom to use our natural faculty of locomotion to carry us from our cells to the open orizon—under the Sun at daytime—under the visible stars, at night.
During his first year in Charlestown, preoccupied with the approaching Dedham trial and learning to accustom himself to the regimen of prison life, Vanzetti came for the first time in his thirteen years in the United States to know Americans—the various assorted liberals and radicals whose interests and emotions drew them to the case. Moore, through his contacts with the New England Civil Liberties Committee, had brought Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Jack, and a number of other Back Bay women as visitors to Charlestown. With Vanzetti, if not so directly as with Sacco, they developed a maternal relationship as engrossing to them as to him. He for the first time in his life discovered people with whom he could share his profounder feelings.
The week after the Dedham trial, writing to Mrs. Evans, he composed his first letter in English, struggling with the language.
I was just thinking what I would do for past the long days jail. I was saying to myself: Do some work. But what? Write. A gentle motherly figure came to my mind and I rehear the voice: Why don’t you write something now? It will be useful to you now when you will be free. Just at that time I received your letter.
Tank to you from the bottom of my earth for your confidence in my innocence; I am so. I did not splittel a drop of blood, or still a cent in all my life. A little knowlege of the past; a sorrowful experience of the life itself had given to me some ideas very different from those of many other umane beings. But I wish to convince my fellow men that only with virtue and honesty is possible for us to find a little happyness in this world. I preached; I worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social whealth should belong to every umane cretures, so well as it was the fruit of the work of all. But this do not mean robbery for insurrection.
During his prison years Vanzetti studied English with Mrs. Virginia MacMechan, a friend of Mrs. Jack. About his uneven progress he could write wryly to Mrs. Evans, “One Friend tells me that my English is not perfect. I am still laughing for such a pious euphension. Why not say horrible?” Vanzetti always had this capacity for laughing at himself, for seeing the humorous side of even the jail world—a quality lacking in Sacco. His difficulties in English, as he explained, did not come from the big words derived from Latin and Greek and familiar to Italian, but from the tricky monosyllables of Nordic origin. In the solitude of Charlestown he felt the renewed lust for learning that had enveloped him so long ago when he had read Dante, Renan, and Malatesta in his squalid room by the flickering gaslight until the stars faded. Now, however, he would read Longfellow and Franklin and Paine and Jefferson. By 1923 he was reading James Harvey Robinson’s The Mind in the Making; William James’ Psychology; books by Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and Upton Sinclair; and such periodicals as the Survey Graphic, the New Republic, the Nation, and the Daily Worker. He felt himself carried away by a Faustian longing to know mathematics, physics, history.
For all its galling restraints, imprisonment was to provide the key that would unlock his personality. His tragedy was to be, as he said himself, his triumph. Earlier than Sacco he sensed that the two of them had become symbols such as Moore had foreseen at the very beginning. The week before the Dedham trial he had written to Alice Blackwell: