My window here is peopled of recipients, it is a riot of blissing colors and beauties forms: a giranium plants a tulipan plant from Mrs. Evans. White flowers, pink carnations, roseate peaches, buds, and flowers, bush-yellow flowers from Mrs. Jack, and a boquet of May flowers from Mrs. Winslow.
Flowers he asked for instead of sweets, though as for tobacco—as he himself admitted—he smoked like a Turk. Being under sentence of death, and so exempt from prison work, he now had much more time to read and write. For Mrs. Jack he translated the last stanza of Gori’s revolutionary hymn, “May First”:
Give flowers to the rebels failed
With glances revealed to the aurora
To the gayard that struggles and works,
To the vagrant poet that dies.
Even the free jail days were too short for him. After nine when the lights went out he would prop himself up with a pillow against the wall, a blanket over his shoulders, using the corridor light coming through the bars to read some book that Mrs. Evans had just given him.
During the visiting periods Rosa came daily with the children for the allowed half-hour, and Sacco noticed lovingly how big Ines was growing and that Dante’s face was burned from the spring sun. Mrs. Evans came almost as regularly to see Vanzetti.
On June 11, Vanzetti’s thirty-ninth birthday, the two were visited by Georg Branting, a well-known lawyer and son of a former Swedish prime minister, who had crossed the Atlantic to make his own investigation. The Defense Committee had planned a parade to welcome Branting, and even though the police refused permission some fifteen hundred sympathizers met him at the South Station and escorted him to Boston Common. After ten days of on-the-scene study Branting announced that he was persuaded the two men were innocent, and sent a telegram to Sweden informing the press that “according to my best judgment, no conviction would have been pronounced if case tried under normal judicial conditions.”
Phil Stong, a young reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance, was another outsider who came to Boston to develop his opinion of the case. One afternoon he visited the prisoners in the jail library, later writing: