On November 20, a grand jury no-billed Scalley for Crowder’s murder, ruling that he must have acted in self-defense. Crowder’s reputation had worked against him. He was buried and forgotten. Clyde never expressed remorse for the murder. He had proven for the first time that he would kill without hesitation if he felt cornered.
Even with Crowder dead, Clyde’s troubles weren’t over. Though Cumie was continuing to petition the governor for a parole or pardon, Clyde worried that he’d have to serve his entire fourteen-year sentence. The prospect of suffering on the prison farm that long was daunting enough, but Clyde had to deal with another concern. He wasn’t going to have a girl waiting for him when he finally got out.
During the last few months of 1930, Bonnie’s letters to Clyde arrived less frequently until finally around Thanksgiving they nearly stopped altogether. Possibly she’d heard rumors in West Dallas that he’d said something uncomplimentary about her. A letter dated December 11, 1930, from Clyde to Bonnie mentioned that “you know I didn’t say anything like that about my little blue-eyed girl.” He was writing in response to the first letter he’d received from Bonnie in weeks, and Clyde admitted “it really gave me a great surprise to hear from you.” When Bonnie surprised him further by writing again, Clyde thanked her in a December 21 missive for the “most sweet and welcome letter.” He promised to ask his brother L.C. to bring her down for a visit, and swore that “some day I will be out there with you and then we can be happy again.”
But there were no visits, or any more letters, from Bonnie. “Some day” wasn’t good enough. She had just turned twenty. It had been four years since she married Roy Thornton, and almost a year since she became the girlfriend of Clyde Barrow. Those two romances hadn’t turned out well for her. There was nothing glamorous or exciting about being the estranged wife of one convict and the lonely girlfriend of another. Just as she’d finally cut her losses with Roy, it seemed time to do the same with Clyde. Bonnie was bored with her nunlike existence. Other girls had boyfriends to take them out for some fun. Not unreasonably, she began dating someone new.
Bonnie’s mother, Emma, later wrote, “I was more relieved than I would have admitted to anyone” when her daughter stopped talking about Clyde Barrow all the time. She hoped Bonnie’s new boyfriend, whose name has been lost to history, would be a better influence than Clyde Barrow and Roy Thornton.
Clyde knew what no more letters from Bonnie meant. He didn’t intend to give up his girl without a fight. If Bonnie wouldn’t correspond with him anymore, he’d have to wait until he got out of prison to win her back. It might happen soon. Cumie was continuing to inveigle the governor’s office into granting a pardon. Meanwhile, a major change in his family’s circumstances gave Clyde an idea about what he might eventually do for a living after his release.
In 1931, Jack, Artie, and Nell Barrow helped their father, Henry, acquire two small adjacent lots along Eagle Ford Road in West Dallas. The lots were less than half a mile from the campground and the railroad track. Though Eagle Ford Road was the main West Dallas thoroughfare, it was still hard-packed dirt and pebbles rather than asphalt. Henry moved the house he’d built on the campground to the new property. It was so small it could be loaded onto a wagon bed and hauled there. Henry made an agreement with an oil company and converted the shack into a Star service station with two gas pumps out in front. He built an extra “oil room” onto the shack to use as a business office and storage space. The Barrows’ living conditions remained primitive. During winter, icy winds whipped right through the thin walls. They had no running water. There was just one bedroom. Henry and Cumie slept in it. L.C. and Marie had pallets in the other small front room that served as a living room during the day. Henry built on another small enclosed area that Cumie used as a kitchen, cooking on her old wood-burning stove. The family’s greatest new luxury was a private outhouse in the back. Marie bragged to friends that it was a two-holer.
Gas sales—the premium Star brand was twelve cents a gallon—didn’t bring in enough income to support the family. Henry had anticipated that. The station was really intended to serve as a general trading post. Henry dug a well on the property, and sold water to his West Dallas neighbors. He charged a quarter per barrel. The Barrows later put in a telephone and charged for its use. Money was not part of many transactions. A phone call or a gallon of water might be swapped for a secondhand pair of pants for L.C., or some lightly used shoes for Marie.
Bootleg hooch was another product for sale at the Barrow service station. Prohibition was in full force, and West Dallas residents were thirsty. Henry quietly brewed beer and white lightning in his office/storage room. L.C. manned the moonshine stand. Word got around, and L.C. never lacked customers. Alcohol proved to be a more sought-after trade item than water or phone use. Sometimes, Henry could talk a really desperate drinker into exchanging a pig for a few jars of pick-me-up. Then the Barrows would slaughter the hog and trade some of the pork for other things they needed. Cumie certainly knew what her husband was up to, but times were hard and the kids had to be fed and clothed.
The only automobile service Henry was set up to provide was selling gas. Down on Eastham Prison Farm, Clyde thought he might persuade his father to expand the business. “I sure wish I was there to help you,” he wrote to Cumie on December 3, 1931. “After you get everything going ok, Papa should build him a little place and handle used auto parts. You can buy them for a song.” Like his father and brothers, Clyde had a knack for auto repair. It seemed like a decent way to make a living, and if he worked for his father he would finally be free of despotic bosses and prison guards.
In the same letter, Clyde asked if his family had “heard anything from Blanche or not?” He was really asking for news of Buck. After fleeing to Oklahoma with her fugitive boyfriend, Blanche had divorced her first husband and married Buck in July of 1931. But being on the lam was not to Blanche’s liking. She pleaded with Buck to turn himself in and complete his four-year sentence so they could lead open, law-abiding lives. Cumie agreed. Soon Buck was being constantly badgered by both his wife and his mother. After months of hectoring, he finally agreed to give himself up, so long as he didn’t have to do it before Christmas, which he wanted to spend with his family.
On December 27, 1931, the Huntsville warden was shocked when Buck Barrow drove up to the main building and announced he was back after twenty-one months on the run to complete his sentence. Cumie later claimed her son’s voluntary return was unprecedented in Texas prison history. At the very least, it was rare. Buck did have a request—he wanted a safe assignment inside the Walls, not on a prison farm like his unfortunate brother Clyde. His legs, wounded in the 1929 Denton robbery, still bothered him. He didn’t think he could physically hold up doing farm labor. Prison administrators were so impressed with his actions that Buck got the placement he suggested, and no additional time for the escape was added to his original sentence. Cumie grandly invited Blanche to live with her and Henry until Buck completed his prison term sometime in 1933.
The Barrow brothers didn’t see each other after Buck arrived back in Huntsville. Clyde was still isolated with the most hardened cons on Eastham farm. In the two months since he’d killed Ed Crowder, Clyde wore down even more from endless field work. He still faced nearly twelve more years of the same unforgiving toil if Cumie couldn’t get his sentence reduced. In January 1932, he decided he couldn’t take any more of it. Clyde’s appalling solution was common to Eastham inmates who wanted reassignment at any cost to less murderous jobs inside the main prison compound.
Eastham Prison Farm was nicknamed “The Bloody ’Ham” because of the high incidence of self-mutilation among its convict laborers. Barring parole, the best chance an Eastham inmate had of getting away from its deadly fields was to cut off his own toes, fingers, or even hands or feet. If the convict couldn’t bring himself to perform the deed, he would ask a fellow prisoner to swing the hoe or axe. Amputations had to be complete. Cons with partially severed digits were band
aged and sent back to the fields as object lessons. Grossly mutilated prisoners were transferred to the prison hospital in the main Huntsville facility, and after healing were sometimes judged to be incapable of further field labor. These lucky amputees would be reassigned to jobs inside the Walls. That was Clyde’s goal—to have easier work, and, as a bonus, to be reunited with Buck. He believed that if he didn’t do something drastic, he very well might drop dead of exhaustion in the Camp 1 cotton fields.
Though prison general manager Lee Simmons swore convict self-mutilation was relatively rare—he told one newspaper that there had been no more than twenty cases in the entire Texas prison system during his first four years on the job—it was so common as to represent an ongoing epidemic. No specific records of convict self-maiming were kept, but Clyde’s friend Ralph Fults said they witnessed fourteen separate incidents at Eastham farm in a single week.
It’s not clear whether Clyde wielded the axe himself, but on January 27, 1932, he was admitted to the main Huntsville prison hospital after cutting off his entire left big toe and part of a second toe. The loss of the big toe affected Clyde’s balance. He never walked normally again. He was that desperate to get away from Eastham.
Ironically, the painful ploy was unnecessary. Clyde’s timing couldn’t have been worse. On February 2, he was still learning to walk on what remained of his left foot when the news arrived. Thanks to Cumie’s incessant pleading, Texas governor Ross Sterling had finally paroled him.
Clyde hobbled home on crutches. In slightly less than a year and a half on Eastham farm he’d been half-starved, beaten, and raped. He’d killed Ed Crowder, worked to the point of physical collapse, and cut off two of his own toes. He might be returning to the noxious West Dallas slums where an uncertain future awaited him, but the intent of the Texas prison system’s brutal hospitality had, in Clyde’s case, been fulfilled. The twenty-one-year-old told his family that prison had been “a burning hell.” Clyde swore to them that he’d die before he let “the laws” send him back there again. There was no doubt that he meant it.
CHAPTER 7
Decision
During the seventeen months Clyde served on Eastham Prison Farm, Bonnie found a new job and a new boyfriend. There are no specifics about the employment or the romance. Apparently, there was nothing special enough about either to merit recording. So when Clyde limped up to her front door as soon as he got back home in early February 1932, Bonnie yelped “Darling!” and ran to him, even though her current beau was right there in the living room with her.
Without Clyde, Bonnie’s existence had become humdrum. She had some low-paying job. She hadn’t divorced Roy, so she couldn’t remarry even if she wanted to, and, besides, her boyfriend of the moment was an ordinary guy who clearly wasn’t fantasy material even in Bonnie’s rich imagination. Far from fulfilling her ambition to be famous, she was depressingly ordinary. On her next birthday she would be twenty-two—her life was dwindling away in spirit-crushing tedium. And then, just like it might have happened in the movies, her tragically crippled former lover unexpectedly arrived to reclaim her. Clyde and Bonnie fell into a passionate embrace while her suddenly ex-boyfriend slunk out of the house.
Emma tried to talk her daughter out of rekindling the romance with Clyde, but Bonnie was having none of it. When her mother’s carping made her uncomfortable, Bonnie began staying every possible minute with Clyde at the Barrow family’s service station on Eagle Ford Road. Clyde spent his first week at home helping Henry with small chores. His real challenge was learning to walk without crutches. He eventually managed to move around reasonably well, though there continued to be a slight lurch in his step. Bonnie was constantly at his side, which didn’t please Cumie. She wrote in her memoir that “Bonnie came here and you might say stayed here at the house until Clyde got off his crutches, then they started running around together.” Clyde wanted badly to run around, to act carefree again. When his sisters offered to buy him a nice wardrobe as a welcome-home gift, he insisted that all his new shirts be made of silk. Nell Barrow told her brother that only bootleggers and gangsters wore silk shirts. That pleased Clyde rather than changing his mind. He got the silk shirts, and a pair of fancy dress gloves to wear with them.
Clyde did impress his family by offering to join and expand the Barrow business. As he’d suggested in his letter to Cumie from prison, he wanted to open an automotive parts and repair shop on the small lot the family owned adjacent to the service station. It was a sensible idea, but one that would require capital. Henry and Cumie didn’t have money to spare for building materials and an initial inventory. Clyde had to go out and find a full-time job so he could save up his salary.
But he began job hunting at a time when the state and local economies were at their lowest point yet. Particularly in the South and Southwest, 1931 had been financially devastating. Cotton prices dropped to four cents a pound. The year’s wheat crop set a record of 250 million bushels, but the twenty-five-cent sales price of each bushel was half of what it cost the farmer to grow it. Banks had no choice but to foreclose on farms, and then the government began its own stream of farm foreclosures for failure to pay taxes. An average of twenty thousand farms across America failed each month. Destitute families abandoned the country for cities that had no jobs or shelter to offer them. Like every major city in the region, Dallas was inundated with new, desperate residents. City leaders conferred, trying to find some solution, and in February 1932 made an announcement: All “negro unemployed” in Dallas were strongly advised to move back to the country, since their swelling numbers took up space in breadlines intended for white indigents. Negroes who did so would have plenty to eat, the “Committee for the Relief of Unemployment” promised, because farm surpluses meant “farmers have made their houses storehouses.” Apparently, cotton and raw wheat made for satisfying meals. There was however no Negro exodus from Dallas, and breadlines there remained impossibly long. Then nature commenced its own ferocious attack on the city.
For more than a year, West Texas and parts of adjacent states had been raked by corrosive dust storms. These were the result of modern farming technology wreaking havoc on the natural order. The grassy plains several hundred miles to the south and west of Dallas were camouflage. The grasses sealed off grainy soil, and when farmers first brought plows, then tractors, to tear up the grass and clear land for crops, there was no longer a protective covering to hold the dust at bay. Within a few years, journalist Timothy Egan notes, “the tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought, no epic siege of frost, no prairie fire, nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done. They had removed the native prairie grass…so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land—thirty-three million acres stripped bare in the southern plains.”
The first resulting massive dust storm hammered southwest Kansas, Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle in September 1930. It was disastrous for people living in those regions, but far enough removed so Dallas residents could consider the storm a news item rather than a threat. But the storms kept coming, and gradually they advanced eastward. In late January 1932, about the same time Clyde cut off two of his toes, a ten-thousand-foot-high black cloud enveloped Amarillo and moved east. Witnesses described it as “a black blizzard…with an edge like steel wool.” Almost immediately, there began to be days in Dallas and all of East Texas when the sky was dingy brown instead of blue. Until the Dust Bowl blew out its filthy heart some seven years later, it was impossible to draw a secure breath. The storms occasionally raged all the way to the East Coast. Even New York City residents endured several panic-stricken days of grit-filled lungs.
In West Dallas, the effects of the dust storms were especially dire. The slatted sides of the Barrow shack on Eagle Ford Road, unequal to holding out cold winter winds, yielded easily to suffocating dirt. During dust storms, government agencies counseled, wet sheets should be hung on windows to keep out as much dirt as possible. But Cumie would have had to wal
lpaper her entire shack with wet sheets, and she couldn’t. The dirt whistled through loose seams, and Cumie’s floors disappeared under inches of grime.
If it was bad sheltering from the storms inside, it was worse to be caught in them on the outside. The land around Dallas was mostly flat, so it was possible to see the storms coming from the west. But they hurtled in, sometimes arriving mere minutes after their first sightings, and Clyde’s little sister, Marie, out riding L.C.’s bike or Bonnie walking home from work would sometimes be caught in them. Then came the sensation of being encased in a dirt coffin, with clots of dust clogging mouths and nostrils and other flying granules stinging any additional exposed skin. It was terrifying. Nature had become a murderous adversary. Gradually, because the storms just kept coming, people adjusted to the latest crisis. They didn’t expect the storms to ever end. The black cloud assaults became one more thing to endure in already hard lives.
During the last few weeks of February 1932, Clyde went into Dallas whatever the weather to look for work. He was hired, then fired, in several places. The cause for dismissal was always the same. The Dallas police were well aware he was back, and they didn’t want him around. As soon as he returned home, the old pattern of being regularly picked up for questioning resumed. Clyde swore he intended to go straight. The cops didn’t believe him. Clyde and the rest of the Barrows were convinced the police wouldn’t stop harassing Clyde until he gave up and left Dallas for good. His employers, deluged with applicants for the most menial jobs, didn’t have any patience for an employee who was regularly yanked away from work by the law. So Clyde was fired. He never lasted more than a few days in any job.
Jeff Guinn Page 10
