Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency

Preface

Preface This study began on Chios, before I was born. John Michalakes was a gunrunner in the Greek resistance against Turkish occupation of the island. In 1822, the islanders living on Chios joined the Greek War of Independence agains Ottoman rule. They suffered massive casualties in the ensuing massacre. Fully 100,000 of the island’s 120,000 Greek inhabitants were killed, expelled, or enslaved. The lingering animosity in the survivors fueled continuing unrest. In 1910, as tensions were building toward outbreak of the first Balkan War, Turkey was impressing Chiote men into its army. Turkish soldiers grabbed John in the streets of Chios Town, the island’s capital city. A fistfight ensued; he broke free and fled. Knowing he could not return home without endangering his wife and children, John made his way to the shore, where he found a tender that took him to the Pagasitikos Gulf city of Volos on the Greek mainland. Although he had found safe haven, the political situation on Chios made it impossible for John to liberate his wife, Marcella Christophos, and their two children , Irene and Christ, from the island. He believed his only chance to reunite with his family was to get himself to America, where he hoped to eventually secure them an immigration visa. John signed a letter of indenture to gain passage and entrance to the United States, but once processed through Ellis Island he immediately disappeared, assumed an alias, and led a life in the shadows until he had made the necessary connections to get Marcella an immigration sponsor and saved the necessary resources to pay for his family’s passage. When she arrived, in December 1916, she had their two children in tow—boys. The older child, Irene, had died. The younger of the two boys— George—John had never seen. My grandmother was pregnant when he had fled. My childhood was filled with stories of my grandfather’s srength and guile. He had supported his family by running a jitney service to the steel mills in Buffalo, New York. His customers were black workers, which brought him grief from the other cabbies who disapproved of his choice of clients. He told them these men had done him no harm and to mind their own business. My uncles would tell of moving often to new flats—whether to avoid being caught by the authorities for not honoring the letter of indenture or from economic hardship they were uncertain. What they did recall was that my grandfather was a shrewd negotiator. The family was growing, and he would use its size to play on a landlord’s sympathies. Here he was, a poor immigrant cab driver with six or seven or more mouths to feed. Could the landlord find xii Preface compassion for his family? After he had negotiated a favorable rent, he’d then negotiate an equal rate for the other tenants in the building. He died when I was six, but the stories remained and became a source of moral instruction from my relatives about the meaning of freedom, democracy, community, and family. They instilled in me an abiding curiosity to learn more of his adventures, perhaps because my childhood memories of my grandfather were uniformly fond and his absence left a void. They also were an opportunity for my family to share other stories of Greek resistance, struggle, and the resilience of the human will to survive. This book is, in that sense, in honor of my grandfather and his children, who stoked admiration for freedom fighters and curiosity about how these underdogs kept their struggles alive. Freedom fighters are difficult to write about without falling into snares of romanticizing an oppressed group that in some cases, if given the opportunity, would gladly visit the same harsh treatment and more on their oppressors. It poses the challenge of making sense of violent acts committed for political motivations. The truism that one person’s freedom fighter is another’s criminal reflects the hopelessly partisan nature of considering their pleas. It poses the further difficulty of interpreting the historical context that explains their actions. What, from the insurgent’s perspective, seems a history of injustice is from another point of view a legitimate exercise of the state’s responsibility to steer a political course responsive to the social and economic realities of the times. Still, as my mentor, Lloyd Bitzer, once remarked when discussing the civil rights movement, sometimes an issue doesn’t...