When Grace got back, one of the first things she did was return the coat she had borrowed three years earlier from Martha Bensley Bruere. As Grace sat down to tea, she looked exhausted. She told Martha that she “had no thrilling adventure to relate … her travels were quite conspicuous for their lack of stirring incidents.” Grace looked around, remarking that she did miss the “modern accommodations” of home. Still, she had to admit, “it was a very interesting experience and the knowledge I acquired on this trip I could have gathered in no other way.
“You see,” Grace explained, “I soon found that it doesn’t help the immigrant to jail a few men so long as everybody outside the jail thinking it is good business to keep up the old game. It’s like teaching children that the harm in cheating is in getting caught. We have been prosecuting these peonage cases for more than two years, and yet the traffic in immigrants goes right on. Why, one of the worst offenders had himself elected to the Senate and sits now on the congressional Committee on Immigration to investigate his own crimes! I don’t believe jails ever solved any real human problems, anyway.”
As Grace spoke, she was absently dumping lump after lump of sugar into her tea. She realized her mistake and laughed.
“Oh, do give me another cup,” Grace said, smiling.
Grace paused a moment, sensing that Martha wanted to hear more. “If you saw a child that had been neglected or abused so that it had run away from home, wouldn’t you try to find out what was wrong with the home or the parents? That’s all I did about those immigrants with the whip marks on their backs; followed them into the turpentine camps, from there back to the railroad and steamship companies across the Atlantic, and into their homes. And there I found what was wrong. They were poor, hungry, tax ridden and their Governments didn’t care enough about them to protect them against kidnappers.”
The immigrants who filed into her office were the growing class of poor inhabitants of the United States. Some numbers had the unemployed hovering at three hundred thousand. Every week, more children came to school in rags. And when the teachers and visitors followed these children into their homes, they found bare, dirty, chilly rooms where the little folk shivered and wailed for food and the mothers looked distracted and gaunt.
“You don’t mean they’re kidnapped?” Martha asked, shocked.
“Well, it’s that, practically,” replied Grace. “The whole back country of Italy, Bulgaria, and Greece swarms with agents of the steamship companies who tempt them over with false pretenses of fabulous wealth. Why, one man in southern Greece, nine mule back rides from a railroad station, told me that he had cleared thirty thousand dollars in five years in commission from the steamship companies for luring immigrants to the United States! And right under the nose of the Greek Government!”
Grace sipped her tea, now a little darker and more to her liking.
“For a long time,” Grace said, with deliberation, “we have had runaway immigrants pouring in on us and have tried the man’s scheme of building a high restrictive fence about our country—and then letting them pull off the palings and creep through! Did it ever occur to any of the legal minds that they might step over to a parent State and say, ‘keep your naughty children at home?’ And yet we’ve been doing that very thing.”
After Grace left, Martha wondered if her friend was right in insisting that all the world was a neighborhood. Was she right that it was time to take “the bandage off the eyes of international Justice, lay down her sword, get her mind off the thief and the jail, and become a kindly, intelligent mother to the world?” Martha thought that might not be fair. She thought that law school graduates as a whole “were like too many carrots in a row—they crowd and crush one another, and nobody grows very big. But the women who transplant themselves into new fields grow like everything.” Martha liked that thought very much.
8
The Giant and the Chair
July 1916
As Grace drove up along the east bank of the Hudson, about thirty miles north of the city, she saw Sing Sing prison rising like a pile of stones by the sea. The prison wasn’t tall, not like the buildings she had left behind in New York. There were white structures in the back and a dark tower near the front, all framed by train tracks and wire.
As Grace’s car crossed over the bridge and approached the gatehouse, she went through the unnatural routine of gaining entrance to a prison. She flashed a smile beneath her hat at the familiar faces at the door. Grace had reclaimed her role at the People’s Law Firm. The woman in black had become, once again, a usual sight in unwelcome places.
Grace walked past the exercise yard, and they took her straight to the Death House, a flat, irregular-shaped building floating like an island within the rest of the compound: a prison within a prison, it was made almost entirely of stone. All of its residents were housed in cells with fairly open bars so that the guards could watch them at all times. There were twenty-four cells in total, with room for three men in each. The cells were never empty, though there were always new faces on the Last Mile, which was what the short hallway was called. At the end of the thin corridor was a green door.
Today, Grace was seeing a client named Gennaro Mazella, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of Antonio Castigliano. Mazella had shot him dead on the street in Brooklyn. He pleaded self-defense, but the jury disagreed. Grace was working to commute his sentence down to life based on new evidence that seemed to back up his claim. She had already gotten him two extensions and was confident of a full reduction. After speaking with Mazella in the visiting area, Grace was stopped in the corridor by Spencer Miller Jr., the young assistant warden at Sing Sing.
“Well, we don’t know about Mazella,” the warden said, shaking his head. “He did kill the man, you know. But if you’re in the saving business, here’s a man we all feel confident is innocent and they’ve convicted him. Take hold of that.” The warden began leading Grace down the hall. A recent graduate of Columbia, Miller worked in the deadliest prison in America—yet he was determined to reform it. He knew Grace from her work with the Mutual Welfare League, an organization seeking to abolish the death penalty. Miller once left the prison two days before a double execution to personally scour a stretch of New York tenements for clues to prove their innocence. He was not successful. But Miller kept trying, with each subsequent prisoner who was sentenced to die. That is why he wanted Grace to meet Inmate No. 66335.