Happy May Day Nick!!!!

Happy May Day!  I am fasting for the day in honor of 

 !!! NICOLA SACCO !!!

 

He gave up three times during the Seven Years that He and Vanzetti spent incarcerated.

In November 1922 he stopped eating for 8 days.

That was followed in mid-Feb 1923, when he stopped again.  It went on so long that his lawyers started to clamor with the defense committee (a group of anarchists and socialites that banded together to raise awareness and funds for the two men) to force him to eat. The Defense Committee would not intervene.

On the 30th day of the hunger strike a Hearing was impaneled on his sanity; he was brought to a psychiatric hospital, and to stop from being force fed he agreed to start eating again.

He was also influenced by his son, Dante, who said he would start his own  hunger strike if his father didn't start eating.  A new variation on  fighting fire with fire.

His actual name was Ferdinando, but after his brother died he adopted his brother's name, Nicola.

He loved gardening and working, being productive with his hands. As a child in Torremaggiore he would often sleep out in a hayrick on their farm amidst the family's vegetable and flower garden, about 20 minutes from his home.  Before being incarcerated he would wake up everyday at 5 am to tend to his garden before heading off to the shoe factory.  He worked long days from 7am, and had actually saved up $1400 in a savings account.

Jail became the perfect hell for him, more than for others because of his interests and because of a quirk in the system.  Since he was being held under appeal for most of those seven years, he was not officially a convicted prisoner, so couldn't officially work in any of the prisoner labor systems. Vanzetti who had been "convicted" of a different crime (as well as being held on appeal for the Braintree murder / robbery), was held in a completely different prison.  They could only communicate through letters and messages carried by visitors.

Thus Sacco spent most of those seven years, alone, held in a six foot by 8 foot prison cell, with a bucket for a toilet (emptied daily).  The only natural light to reach inside came through a small, eye- level grates in the doors.   Nick was able to see a sliver of daylight if he squatted on the floor, then looked up through the grate, across the corridor, to the lower portion of a large arched window some twenty-five feet away. 

On restless nights, he paced back and forth in the cramped cell and squinted through the grate for a view of "the stars in the beauty blue sky."

So here is to Sacco.  I take a sip of this water and not a bite of this bread in his honor.

Happy May Day...