Yet from these men representing a new emergent class I should somehow have expected more charity for the two dead Italians. Instead there was entrenched hatred, concentrating in the chairman as he interrogated Judge Musmanno.
Justice Michael Musmanno of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, one of Sacco and Vanzetti’s final counsel, was the main speaker in favor of the committee’s bill. Silver-maned and silver-tongued, he unwound reels of words until he was stopped by the chairman’s hard voice. The latter had the features of the ur-Celt: savage blue eyes, gray shaggy hair looped over the back of his collar like an old-time United States senator.
“Look, Judge, why did Vanzetti have the loaded revolver on him, and a pocketful of slugs that fit it and why did he go for it when the police grabbed him?”
Musmanno tried to explain that carrying revolvers was then a common custom in America, especially among Italians, and that it was a right guaranteed by the Constitution. The chairman’s voice, burred as a cat’s tongue, broke in.
“You mean to tell me that the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the governor, the president of Harvard, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, the Supreme Court of the United States—they’re all wrong and you’re right?”
Musmanno maintained that this was just what he was trying to tell him. Applause from the audience, in which I saw old Felicani join, brought the familiar threat to have the hall cleared. That audience was a curious conglomeration of the elderly, a scattering of students, and a cluster of beatniks at the side in beards and blue denims tied up with rope.
The elderly were survivors of an old storm, their eccentricities accentuated by age, the crackpot label attached to their clothes, their hats, their gestures. Emotionally they were drawn to lost causes, and here they gathered again like old soldiers at a reunion. The Sacco-Vanzetti case with its drawn-out tragic climax had been for them a generation ago a self-fulfillment in indignation that they were now reliving. At one point a woman near the exit caused a stir, almost a suspension of the hearing, by holding up Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s death masks.
Felicani’s Excelsior Press was on the ground floor of a decrepit building near the foot of Milk Street under the shadow of the new John F. “Honey” Fitzgerald Expressway where the business district fringes into the Italian North End. Every time I saw the large red and green linoleum squares on the floor of that familiar little office I thought back to the hopscotch games of my childhood. The walls were of pebbled tin sheeting painted with mauve Chemtone. Next to Felicani’s desk was a pay telephone and just above it an oak-framed clock, invariably six minutes fast. On top of a filing cabinet next to a spindly philodendron plant was a plaster bust of the dead anarchist leader, Carlo Tresca.
I was glad to find the old man there on this hot August afternoon. A man who towered in any crowd and looked more like a viking than a Latin, he was wearing a brightly patterned sport shirt. His gray eyes peered with astigmatic blankness until he recognized me and smiled. I told him of the mass of bumf I had just encountered.