Suosso’s Lane
Robert Knox
Author Bio
I am a husband, father, rabid backyard gardener, Boston Globe freelance writer, and blogger on nature, books, films and other subjects. I majored in philosophy at Yale, took a master’s in English at Boston University, taught composition and literature at various colleges, and edited community newspapers. In recent years I’ve been writing as a freelance reporter for the Boston Globe, covering environmental issue and the arts, among other subjects. My book reviews have been published by the Globe and other newspapers
My short stories, poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous literary publications. I was named a Finalist in the Massachusetts Artist Grant Program in fiction for a story about my father (“Lost”). My story “Marriage” placed in a fiction competition held by Words With Jam and was published recently in the anthology “An Earthless Melting Pot.” Another story, “Love in the Other Place,” was published in the latest issue of The Tishman Review. “Commitment” recently appeared in the debut issue of 3288 Review. My nonfiction story “Preparing A Place” was published this month in Lunch Ticket.
My novel on the origins of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, “Suosso’s Lane,” was published in October 2015 by Web-e-Books.com. The book developed from my research as a reporter into the little known history of Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s years in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he lived at the time of his arrest in the case that became an international cause.
Description
Based on the scandalously unjust trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti for a murder most people believe they did not commit, the international cause-celebre of the 1920s, my novel “Suosso’s Lane” follows the search for evidence of Vanzetti’s innocence lost for decades to a government sanctioned railroading of two Italian immigrants with radical beliefs during a time of anti-immigrant hysteria.
“Suosso’s Lane” revisits the history of Plymouth, Massachusetts, “America’s hometown,” during the unregulated industrial age when immigrant factory workers struggled to make their way in an America of long hours and low wages. The book traces the circumstances that led to the notorious trial and widely protested executions of Nicola Sacco and Plymouth dweller Bartolomeo Vanzetti, targeted by local authorities for their anarchist politics and charged without evidence for a factory payroll robbery and the shooting deaths of two security guards.
A self-educated laborer known for his kindness to children and courtesy to all, Italian immigrant Vanzetti suffers from the exploitive treatment of factory workers and other laborers in the early decades of the twentieth century. Outraged by the greed and injustice that mar his idealistic hopes for the “New World,” he joins other anarchists in promoting strikes and preaching revolution. In 1920, Vanzetti and his comrade Nicola Sacco are nabbed by police looking for radicals and subsequently convicted of committing a spectacular daylight robbery and murder. After seven years in prison, even as millions of workers and intellectuals around the world rally to their cause, the two men are executed.
Seventy years later, when a young history teacher moves into Vanzetti’s old house in Plymouth, Massachusetts, he learns of a letter that might prove Vanzetti’s innocence. His attempt to uncover the truth is hindered by obstacles set by a local conspiracy theorist, the daughter of Vanzetti’s lover, a shady developer, and a suspicious fire during his search of an old Plymouth factory.
“Suosso’s Lane” departs from the historical record in inventing fictional characters who people Vanzetti’s 1920s Plymouth, including the Mayflower-descendant suffragist who becomes his English teacher and eventually his lover. The story’s 21st century characters include a nosy reporter digging into an old murder, a sharp-minded octogenarian who knows more about the events of Vanzetti’s life than she’s telling, and an African immigrant struggling with the starvation wages of contemporary service workers.
Book excerpt
The road went on, he did not know how far. Perhaps the place he was going to would be the end, at least a temporary end, a place to rest.
The wanderer looked about him. Brown fields, ragged fences. His father, back in the Piemonte, would never have tolerated sagging fences. The houses were beginning to get closer together, but no one was in sight. No one would hear him.
He tried his voice. It was not a true voice — he had heard a real voice in Turin and, for a brief time, devoted himself to its possessor — but no one would hear him out here, alone on an unpaved road.
“We will live from love!” he sang, not sure his ear kept any of the original tune. “We will live from kindness!”
The words were from an opera foolishly — absurdly in his opinion — set in place called “the West,” the American West, but this place was nothing like the America he knew. Where men worked until they dropped. Where Vanzetti himself worked twelve hours a day for months washing dishes in the stinking kitchens of a great city, only to be discharged without a reason, without warning.
Don’t come back, foreigner. We don’t want you.
So they said, his countrymen, why don’t you go to the bakery, Barto, you are skilled in the pastry business, no? Yes, he answered them in his mind. In Italy. And it had nearly killed him. Long hours in the overheated air of the oven rooms, breathing the exhalations of too many people working too close together. He fell ill. They thought he would die, so they sent him back to the Piemonte, the hills, where his mother — no, Barto, he told himself.
Do not think of your mother. He has known a mother’s love.
He has stopped walking, the immigrant realized. He looked around. Some more houses. Wood houses; some painted white with black trim. A dog on a porch on the other side of the road. Vanzetti has learned about dogs. This one will not bother him.
He told his feet to start walking again. He has been on the road for a long time, this was the third day since he slept indoors — a long way from the city of Worcester. Almost a year since he left the great New York City; almost five since he left Italy. In Worcester (they call it “Woo-stah”; the letters make no sense) he lived with some of his own people. But the work was not steady and he would not live on the labor of others, on people who had wives, children to feed, sometimes an old one to look after. Though it seemed to Vanzetti that the old ones did not live long in this country. They stepped off the boat — confused, paralyzed, defenseless — as all newcomers did, but the old ones no longer had the strength or the hope for the future to put one foot in front of another. He watched an old woman look around, cross herself and say aloud in Bolognese, “Now my life is over.”
In the New World, they have taken all of the bad and built it bigger. The factories are bigger, the rich men richer, the police more brutal. The buildings taller. He wants to build his New World differently. On a different foundation. On brotherhood, the care for one another, the cooperation between one man and another, the kindness of women, the love of children, the gentleness all must show to women and children and the old. The sharing of the riches of the earth. Build it new, he thought, without force or the power of money.
Even if the building up means some knocking down first.
It was only this false New World, this self-deluded America, that taught him who he was, even before any of all the other things he was: a man, an Italian, an immigrant, a pastry chef, a reading man, a kind man, even a son. He was an anarchist.
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