Haymarket (39 page)

Captain Black continues to remind the court that we are on trial for the specific crime of murder and that all the material being read into the record is therefore irrelevant and inadmissible. It establishes no connection at all between our opposition to the current social order—openly stated by us, never concealed—and the bomb-throwing in Haymarket, let alone with the organizing of a “general conspiracy” or a plot to inaugurate a reign of terror on May 1st. Yet Judge Gary continues to accept the material from our writings as “germane and admissible evidence.” And Captain Black protests into the wind.

August 1

Mayor Carter Harrison has taken the stand. “I was present at the Haymarket meeting,” he said today, “from its start until near the close of Mr. Parsons’s speech, when not one-fourth of the crowd of some eight hundred people remained. I wish to state plainly before the court that at no point during that time did I have the sense that I was witnessing an ‘organized conspiracy,’ let alone the inauguration of a so-called Reign of Terror.”

Coming from the leading official in the city, that unadorned statement produced a considerable murmur in the audience. Grinnell shook his head from side to side in scandalized disbelief, a smirk of disapproval distorting his features. But it could not neutralize the impact of the mayor’s words, nor stop him from proceeding. “It is true,” he went on, “that the speakers made several evidently bitter remarks, but they were not sustained. I feel certain, in any case, that the majority of the crowd were idle spectators, mostly laborers or mechanics, not English-speaking people, mostly Germans. I am also certain that no speaker called that night for the immediate use of force or violence. If anyone had, I should have dispersed them at once. I saw no weapons at all upon any person.”

I believe Mayor Harrison has today destroyed his political career. Would that I could believe that he has convinced a single soul.

August 2

Restricted to my cell for so many hours, and with the trial dragging interminably on, I have to struggle to maintain my spirits. As do all the others, though Lingg, Fischer, and Engel seem, as viewed from the outside anyway, the steadiest and most stoic (though who can say, finally, what awful sorrows they bear within).

The intense heat is, on most days, nearly intolerable. I try to keep my mind off it by writing in this journal, but I stain nearly every page with drops of sweat; substitute tears is how I think of them, tears that I force back whenever I think about my little ones. How I miss them, Lulu’s sweet squeal as she jumps up and down on my lap, Albert Jr. insisting I read him
Ben Hur
“just one more time.” It may be many a week before I set eyes on them again: with closing arguments about to begin, we’ve decided, after all, to send them off to our friends in Waukesha, sparing them the worst of the emotional strain.

August 4

The children left today. I managed to keep a cheerful face when they came to say their good-byes and assured them we’d be together again very soon. Ah, if only I believed that … I feel as if my heart has been ripped out …

August 6

I’ve begun to take up whittling, having watched Lingg occupy himself with his jackknife for hours on end. I’m currently working on a steamboat; if it turns out well, perhaps I could raffle it off to bring in some money for Lucy—you know, “Carved by the hands of the anarchist beast.” She may soon have to close the shop. Yet she never misses a visiting hour, bringing me little treats and the immense comfort of her touch. We speak openly of all contingencies, concealing nothing from each other of our fluctuating hopes and fears.

Today she was annoyed with William, who’s staying in a nearby hotel and calls on her regularly. “He treats me more like your housekeeper than your wife,” Lucy told me. “You know, he’s quite fond of the sound of his own voice. Yesterday he went on and on about the ‘misguided’ notion
that workers might eventually, out of desperation, take up arms, insisting that free democratic elections were sufficient to solve all grievances.” ‘Why,’ I asked William, ‘had
he
taken up arms after Mr. Lincoln won fair and square in
a free, democratic election?’
That seemed to startle him,” Lucy giggled, “but he soon regained composure and shifted to lecturing me about the dangers of excessive reading. He says it will jeopardize my health. Reading, it seems,
overstrains the female’s weaker brain.”

“William’s the one who reads too much—too much purported Science.”

“Then your dear brother added, fatefully, ‘The particular talents of
your
people, after all, lie in other directions.’ ”

“Uh-oh …”

“I swear I kept my temper, though I could hardly let that pass without comment. ‘My people,’ I told William, ’are the American people. And my talents are ‘particular’ only in the sense of being unusually broad and deep.” Lucy laughed. “William looked utterly confounded. Which I took to be a decided advance.”

Nina Van Zandt visited the jail today. She’s been seeing Spies with increasing frequency, and the two have begun to work together on his autobiography. Because she’s not related to him, she has to surmount the various obstacles that the prison authorities put in the way of her visits. But the prominence of her family, and her own tenacity, have consistently won out. She’s as ardent and strong-willed as Lucy. Instead of ending up as friends, as they have, they could easily have become antagonists. And might yet, I suppose. Forceful people aren’t fond of sharing space.

After Nina left, Lucy startled me by saying, “Nina’s in love with Spies.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“She didn’t have to. It’s written all over her.”

“Oh, I think you’re mistaken.”

“All the telltale signs are there: the hushed, adoring tone when she mentions his name, the way she blushes at the sight of him, her insistence, even when no one’s challenging him, that he’s the most misunderstood of men. How can you
not
see it?”

“I suppose,” I finally said, “because I don’t want to. What possible future can they have together?”

Lucy gasped. “Albert, do you realize what you just said? They’ll have the same future that you and I will. A good future. A long future. You’ve heard Captain Black say that the odds are in favor of acquittal. Why do you doubt him?”

“Foster is more pessimistic,” I said, hoping the conversation would end there.

“Only in regard to
this
jury,” Lucy countered. “Even Foster believes that if the jury convicts, you’ll all be set free on appeal.”

Her tone was so assured that I hesitated. “Foster used those words?”

“Words to that effect.”

“I see,” I said quietly. And we dropped the matter there. We grasped each other’s fingers through the grating, and held on tightly.

August 7

Some newspaper reporters have been digging into my life as a young man in Waco. One, from the
Chicago Herald
, has turned up considerable detail, much of which I’d forgotten, about my early reputation as a “wild young’un.” He’s even discovered the names of several women I squired, and one I lived with briefly before I met Lucy. None of this made me turn a hair—I never claimed to have been a straight-backed Yankee, and in those years, “wild” was what was expected of a young male in Waco.

But now matters have taken a serious turn. The reporter’s latest piece is about Lucy’s early life, and she’s in a towering rage over it. The article insists she’s a negro and claims that before she met me she’d been married to a man named Oliver Gathings, an ex-slave! That’s certainly news to me, yet I realize it could be true. I’ve long since learned that Lucy will never reveal her past in full, not even to me. She may not know it completely herself, may never have disentangled all the conflicting bits of stories handed down to her. Or chosen not to, since gaps and fragments can be useful …

When visiting hours came around today, I could hardly believe my eyes: there was Lucy standing outside the cell grating, her eyes breathing fire, with the
Herald reporter in tow!
She didn’t even bother to greet me. “Tell him!” she said angrily. “Tell this fool reporter everything you know about my past—and I mean
everything.”

Since both of us are well aware I don’t know much, I realized that she
wanted me to take my cues from her. “Tell the fool!” she repeated, as if I were deliberately hesitating or withholding information.

Not knowing what she wanted me to say, I began with a digression about our political struggles while living in Texas.

“No, no!” Lucy said impatiently, cutting me off in the middle of a sentence. “Not all that tired old Reconstruction stuff. This here reporter”—she gave his shoulder a poke—“wants to hear about
important
matters, like who was sleepin’ with who. Affairs of the bed, not affairs of state. Here in Chicago, reporters leave that boring stuff to the
North American Review.”

At which point the reporter sheepishly introduced himself to me as a Mr. F. W. Peters and assured me he was not interested in gossip at all, but rather in sketching the “human” side of our story, implying that his aim was to make us more sympathetic to the reading public. Between his misrepresentations and Lucy’s, I looked for the safest way out: “I can tell you this,” I said to Peters, “I’ve never heard a word about this man Oliver Gathings, whether from Lucy or from anyone else. Are you sure he exists?”

“Oh yes, sir, he still lives in Waco.”

“Sounds to me like he’s trying to get a bit of publicity for himself,” I offered blandly. “Some people will say anything to get their names in the paper. Take me, for example, why I’ve gone so far as to denounce wage slavery just to get my picture plastered on the front of the
Herald.”
My effort at humor went unappreciated. Lucy shot me a furious look, and Mr. Peters stared in embarrassment at the floor.

“Well, I’ll tell you two things here and now, Mr. Peters,” Lucy said, glaring at him, “and after I say them I’ll have nothing more to say. One is that my heritage is Mexican and Creek Indian. And the other is that I have no idea who this man Oliver Gathings is. Now you can either accept that and print an apology in your paper, or you can bring me up on charges of bigamy. You practically have, anyway. You might better spend your time ‘investigating in depth’ the recent lynchings in Carrollton, Mississippi. Apply some of your research skill to probing why vigilantes lynched a black man simply because he tried to defend a black woman from being gang-raped; and why then, for added sport, they shot up a courthouse and killed thirteen more black people. I’d be willing to bet that the private lives of those Carrollton men would make for some mighty spicy—excuse me, ‘human interest’—reading.”

With that mouthful, Lucy turned her back and strode off down the corridor. Mr. Peters tipped his hat to me and without another word, was gone.

August 13

The closing arguments are in their third day. Messrs. Walker and Ingham for the State have done little more than repeat, at excruciating length, points already made many times over during the course of the trial. Walker even dared to characterize the Haymarket protest meeting as “an unlawful assembly.” Why? Because it was held, he declared, for the deliberate purpose “of committing riot.” This, after mountains of testimony, including that of Mayor Harrison, that the meeting was very nearly impromptu and was throughout utterly peaceful—that is, until the arrival of Bonfield and his men, who
were
determined on violence; therein lies the true conspiracy.

Walker said of the defense witnesses that “not a one of them is an American citizen or a naturalized citizen”—inaccurate, and a brazen attempt to arouse nativist sentiment among the jurors. In the same spirit, Ingham advised all men who do not believe in private property to take themselves off to live among the Hottentots of Africa or the Fiji Islanders. He chose those places, I suspect, because of the color of their inhabitants’ skin.

Ingham
twice
reminded the jury that they must not entertain a verdict of acquittal simply out of “fear of the consequences”—meaning, out of any humane reluctance to see us hanged.

August 14

Today it was our turn. Mr. Foster opened for the defense, and for once his caustic temperament served us well. I’ll never like the man, but I have newfound respect for his abilities. He went straight to the heart of the case—and for the jugular. “There is one question and only one question,” Foster said, his voice rancorous, and glaring directly at Judge Gary. “Are these defendants responsible for murder? The elaborate—and refuted—charge of conspiracy has been designed to divert attention to immaterial issues. The defendants should never have been called upon to resist the conspiracy charge, since holding opinions about the desirability or likelihood of social revolution, and announcing those opinions publicly, are the right of every citizen as guaranteed in our Constitution.”

Judge Gary chose precisely that moment in the argument to whisper into the ear of a fashionably gowned lady sitting close to him on the bench; she covered her mouth with suppressed mirth. Dumbstruck at Gary’s provocation, Foster stopped in the middle of a sentence. The silence managed to restore Gary’s attention.

“If we are to start hanging men for their political views,” Foster continued, his voice edgy, “what then should be the fate of those newspaper editors and public figures who have so frequently called, as the defendants have not, for initiatory violence? The editorials of
Tribune
owner Joseph Medill have happily envisioned, and I quote him directly, ‘communistic carcasses decorating the lamp-posts of Chicago.’ Should not such a call to murder be strenuously punished? And what penalty should be meted out to the proprietors of the
New York Tribune
who have stated in print that ‘these brutal creatures’—meaning men who go out on strike—‘can understand no other reasoning than that of force and enough of it to be remembered among them for many generations.’

“Surely such vicious sentiments deserve stern rebuke. Or would you prefer to say that every newspaper shall be protected in the expression of opinion except for the
Alarm
and the
Arbeiter-Zeitung?
—though neither has ever urged, as the
Tribune
has, throwing hand grenades at our fellow citizens?”