"It's
paved today, but Suosso's Lane is still a narrow public way off Court Street in
North Plymouth, where Valente's Florist sits on the corner. Across Court Street
are neighborhood fixtures like Charlie's Hardware Store. St. Mary's Church is
just two short blocks north. Suosso's Lane is a short street, cut off almost
immediately by High Cliff, the bluff that Bartolomeo Vanzetti and his North
Plymouth neighbors climbed in order to look down on the seashore..."
Published
by Plymouth Public Library Corporation in 2002, edited by John Chaffee and Plymouth
library staff members such as the late Lee Regan, reference librarian Bev Ness, and current library director Jen Harris, the 20th
century history anthology was a great project for a town with a
deep and (one of the few occasions when this adjective is appropriate)
unique history.
Given the glare
of attention paid to the Pilgrims, the first real English-language
community in what became the United States (pay no attention to those disreputable
gold-diggers in Jamestown, Va.; I never have), it's easy for the town's later
generations to get lost in the shadows.
With
memoirs by then-contemporary (now deceased) residents such as Alba Thompson,
Peter Gomes, and Karin Goldstein and essays by many other local voices, the "Beyond
Plymouth Rock" anthology remains a gold mine of local
perspectives on change and growth in a growing community through a century of industrial
breakthroughs, advances, losses, foreign wars, other challenges, and sustained vitality. (The books is available at http://www.support.plymouthpubliclibrarycorp.org/Beyond-Plymouth-Rock-Vol-I-The-Ties-That-Bind-BPR1.htm) Plymouth's
20th century, like America's, was fired by the expansion of new immigrant
communities. North Plymouth, where Vanzetti found a home in 1913 after five
years of disappointment in the promise of the 'new world' spent in New York
City and a few smaller cities, was the center of the Italian community and
other immigrant groups.
Vanzetti,
to continue the narrative, found a home on Suosso's Lane with the family of
Vincenzo and Alphonsina Brini and their two children in a simple two-story house
on Suosso's Lane:
"There's
an old garage behind it on one side of the lot and a garden area on the other
side -- maybe the same garden where the Brinis grew vegetables and Vanzetti,
their boarder, pulled weeds. At the street's dead end, railed concrete steps
lead upward to a townhouse-style senior housing complex. The view from the
bluff is still magnificent, though screened by trees. Parked cars in a
black-topped lot take up space across the street from the Brinis' house. The
unpaved lane would have seen few cars when Vanzetti came there to live in
1913."
Across the
street sat the the old wood frame building that served as the Amerigo Vespucci
Hall, a social club and gathering place in the old days for "Plymouth's
Italian colony."
The essay I
wrote for the anthology (Titled "Trial of the Century: Local
Amnesia") continues with an incident I found in a book of oral histories.
"Beltrando
Brini, then age 13, chased a ball into a neighbor's vegetable garden on the
last day he spoke to his friend as a free man. Vanzetti told him -- very gently,
Brini recalled -- not to trample people's gardens or speak rudely to
adults."
Just one
more point, the premise for distaff piece of that title: local
amnesia. Vanzetti's arrest, conviction, and ultimately execution for a crime
few people believe (or have ever believed) he committed remains a part of
history the town of Plymouth has largely expurgated from its past. To quote again from the anthology:
"Plymouth
has always been ambivalent about Vanzetti, a defendant and arguably the central
figure in one of the most famous criminal trials of the 20th century. By the
end of the century even long-time Plymouth residents had largely forgotten that
he lived [in Plymouth]... when he was arrested on a Brockton street car in 1920."
My recently
published novel, "Suosso's Lane," picks up from the factual account
presented above. The novel 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
The book is
available at:
www.web-e-books.com/index.php#load?type=book&product=suosso
www.web-e-books.com/index.php#load?type=book&product=suosso
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