But my hungry strike is progressing because I knew that both the Governor and the commission have ill-treated our witnesses, wrongly, and that they believe nothing of what our witnesses say. They believe, and treat well those handful of criminals, harlots, and degenerated who perjured against us.
His stomach, he complained after a few days, affected his mind and heart. He found difficulty even in writing letters. As he saw his end drawing closer he felt a longing for his own blood, for that far-off family in Villafalletto he had not seen in almost twenty years. The day after he began his strike he asked Felicani to send a telegram to his sister Luigia. Even though it might be too late now, he wanted above all to see her again before he died.
Sacco could at least see his wife, who came daily with Ines and Dante, now grown taller than his mother. The children were not allowed to see their father but waited in the warden’s office. Seven-year-old Ines wrote her first large-scrawled letter to her father, and he was so moved that even in the lassitude of his hunger strike he sat down at once to reply:
I will bring with me your little and so dearest letter and carry it right under my heart to the last day of my life. When I die, it will be buried with your father who loves you so much, as I do also your brother Dante and holy dear mother.... It is the most golden present that you could have given to me or that I could have wished for in these sad days.
As he wrote he found himself caught up in an imagined idyll:
It was the greatest treasure and sweetness in my struggling life that I could have lived with you and your brother Dante and your mother in a neat little farm, and learn all your sincere words and tender affection. Then in the summer-time to be sitting with you in the home nest under the oak tree shade—beginning to teach you of life and how to read and write, to see you running, laughing, crying and singing through the verdent fields picking the wild flowers here and there from one tree to another, and from the clear, vivid stream to your mother’s embrace.
The same I have wished to see for other poor girls, and their brothers, happy with their mother and father as I dreamed for us—but it was not so and the nightmare of the lower classes saddened very badly your father’s soul.[26]
When Fuller came for the first time to Charlestown to interview the three condemned men he talked only briefly with the sullen Madeiros and not at all with Sacco, who shook hands but told him courteously that they had nothing to say to each other. With Vanzetti Fuller spent over an hour and a half, breaking off only to dash back to a State House reception for Lindbergh, who had arrived in Boston that afternoon on his triumphal tour of the country. Vanzetti and Fuller were open with each other. Fuller pointed out what he considered the most damaging facts against Vanzetti: his failure to take the stand at Plymouth, the revolver found on him, his quick convictions by two juries. Vanzetti gave his interpretations of these things and then quite typically began to talk of other matters unrelated to himself. As they sat together in the warden’s office the two men found each other curiously sympathetic. When Fuller broke off the interview he promised to return later. “What an attractive man!” he observed to Warden Hendry as he hurried away. Reporters noticed that the governor appeared nervous as he headed down the walk to his waiting Packard. His nervousness was probably not so much because of the interrupted interview as at the thought of keeping America’s hero waiting. Getting into the car he knocked his hat off.
Thompson wanted Vanzetti to break his fast so that he would be better able to talk with Fuller on his next visit. Vanzetti finally agreed to drink a cup of tea, and later took some coffee and milk. Fuller spent most of July 26 in South Braintree inspecting the scene of the shootings and driving over the escape route with Chief Stewart. In the evening he again interviewed Vanzetti, arriving at Charlestown just after nine and staying two hours. It was not time enough for Vanzetti. He asked if he might write Fuller at length, and Fuller, with salesman’s affability, agreed. In this second interview Vanzetti felt a growing confidence in the governor that he showed in his letter next day to Alice Stone Blackwell:
He make me the impression of being just as you say of him; an honest man, as he understand it, and sincere, courageous, stubborn man but well intentioned at bottom and in a way, clever. And I like to tell you that he gave me a good heartfull sake hand, as I lef. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe that a man like that is going to burn us on a case like ours.