by John Gilmore
“One thing was for sure,” Mendoza said, “Hoover and his pals weren’t waitin’ in breadlines. They weren’t out on the street beggin’ a dime to feed a hungry kid. None of the rich boys lost fancy homes or were thrown out. The business boys and banks were busy showin’ profits, but not a cent was sneakin’ through their grubby hands to people sufferin’ in the steerage of Hoover’s sinkin’ ship—the United States of America—the land of the free. Our kids were hungry and sick. A lot were dyin’, and all the workin’ people no longer had jobs and were drownin’ in misery.
“John Dillinger? Sure, I knew all about John Dillinger. Everybody did. He hit the bastards where it hurt. Not in their kids’ empty bellies, but in the bankers’ swollen billfolds. An awful lot of regular folks who’d lost all they’d worked their lives for weren’t faultin’ John Dillinger for stickin’ up banks. I’d have done it myself if I’d had the nerve of a Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd or Clyde Barrow, dishin’ out hard times to the bastards starvin’ my family. Shootin’ cops? You talkin’ about the guys whackin’ your head with a club when you’re yellin’ you can’t get a job or enough to eat or feed your family? They forced an honest, hard-workin’ vet to scrounge in garbage cans for a hunk of potato so my sick wife and kids wouldn’t starve. Nobody born since then really knows what livin’ in hell was like.
“Cops were stooges for the Washington hotshots. They caved your head in or locked you in jail for stealin’ a pickle or a loaf of bread. My youngest, a little two-year-old, was sick and we couldn’t get help. The law came and threw us out on the street. Just plain shoved us out of where we’d been livin’! They threw our clothes and beddin’, our books, on top of us. Wouldn’t even let me back in to get the radio. Pulled out handcuffs and said I’d go to jail if I tried it.
“An old black family took us in, fed us, but my little one had pneumonia bad and we couldn’t get help. They said she was too far gone. They didn’t even get her to a hospital to die under medical supervision, so she died on a mattress in a little room off the kind black folks’ kitchen... Her little cheeks were all kind of pinched in.
“I didn’t care how many stooges ready to bust a guy’s head for wantin’ to keep his kids from dyin’ got his ass shot full of holes by John Dillinger or Clyde Barrow or any of them others runnin’ contrary to the so-called protectors of the law. I’m only sorry they didn’t take their war to that fool Hoover’s front door in Washington and put a bullet where it’d do the most good for the workin’ man.”
With the Oklahoma plates put on, the roadster slowed to a crawl and rolled off the highway south of Lufkin, Texas. Bonnie opened her eyes and gazed through the dusty windshield. “You think they have a hotel dinin’ room where we can eat off real china?”
Clyde said, “We won’t find any nice hotel just yet, angel.” Off the highway, he drove slowly along a west-heading dirt route until he came to a gas station. He pulled in and shut off the motor. Bonnie took a deep breath and nodded as Clyde got out. “Fill it up with your ethyl,” he told the attendant, “and wash off the windows so I can see through ’em.” He then strolled to the small station office.
Because Bonnie was rubbing her legs, it took the attendant longer to clean the windshield than to pump the gas. She was smiling at him on top of it. He then turned away when she slid behind the wheel and started the engine. She slid back into the passenger’s seat as soon as the attendant entered the station office where Clyde was studying an unfolded Texas state map. Wiping his hands, the attendant was about to say something when he glimpsed the revolver Clyde was holding beneath the map. “Open the drawer,” Clyde said. “I’ll take what you got in the drawer.”
Eyes wide and mouth working to form a smile, the attendant unlocked the cash drawer, gathered the few bills and handed them to Clyde who said, “Don’t do any hollerin’. I don’t want to do any shootin’.”
“No,” the attendant said. “I got my mouth shut tight as a clam.”
Clyde said, “I don’t like pluggin’ guys young as you.”
Nodding quickly, the attendant said, “I understand that, sir!”
“You got a safe in that floor over there?” Clyde asked.
“No—other guy—the boss, he comes and gets the receipts.... You got ’em now, sir....” He managed a smile. “I’m doin’ just as you say. You’re the boss right now.”
With the bills stuffed into his jacket pockets, Clyde returned to the driver’s seat in the car. He adjusted the shotgun at his left side as Bonnie waved goodbye. The attendant waved back, holding the same smile he’d fixed for Clyde.
Less than a mile north, Clyde went off the highway onto a rural road lined with wood frame houses. He stopped the roadster across the lane from a Ford sedan parked by a small Baptist church. While Bonnie again slid behind the wheel, Clyde crossed the street and quickly got the sedan started. He drove away from the church, heading south, Bonnie following close behind.
Near a small industrial area, Clyde left the highway and pulled behind an abandoned one-story warehouse. He stopped the car, Bonnie edging in close alongside. She climbed out and quickly the two unloaded the roadster, packed the sedan, and deserted the smaller car.
Inside the sedan, Bonnie said, “It’s got a radio, honey! We can listen to the radio!”
Clyde said, “I get only the best for you, baby.”
Several miles northwest, Clyde left the highway and drove behind a roadside café, leaving the engine running. He handed Bonnie a few bills, and she hurried into the building. Clyde leaned back, shutting his eyes.
Minutes later, Bonnie returned with sandwiches, cupcakes, a half-dozen hardboiled eggs, and four bottles of flavored soda. She said, “I got the bottles with screw-on caps so we can fill ’em with water.”
A half hour later, nestled in a dark, pine-wooded patch, Clyde changed the license plates from Texas to Louisiana. They spread a blanket and each ate a sandwich, a hardboiled egg, and drank flavored soda. Clyde said, “What is this I’m swallowin’?”
“That’s grape,” she said. “This one’s cherry. You want the cherry?”
“This is alright,” he said. “Tastes more like raspberry than a grape soda.”
“Well, it’s grape,” she said. “It says so on the cap.”
“Gimme a kiss,” Clyde said.
“I’m eating my egg,” she said.
“Then gimme somethin’ else.”
Bonnie stood up, stepped out of her shoes, pulled up her skirt and stepped over Clyde, straddling him, looking down at him as he chewed his egg and stared up the length of her legs. Taking hold of her calves, he eased her forward until she came down onto his chest, her knees at his sides. He said, “Tell me what you told me before about suckin’ on the cupcake paper.”
Smiling, she said, “I told you the flavor of the cupcake gets all sunk into the wax paper, and I gotta suck on it and scrape on it with my teeth so the flavor gets sucked away from the wax paper.…”
Three
An old truck belonging to Conrad Richards, formerly of Hot Springs, Arkansas, suffered a breakdown on the highway south of Dallas. Richards left the truck on the side of the road and walked several miles before he reached a store. “I went to see if I could get help,” he says, “but I didn’t have any money and these folks in the store told me to get out. So I turned around and was gettin’ out, and a young fellow in a hat and suit of matchin’ clothes was comin’ in the doorway. We were blockin’ one another from him comin’ in and from me goin’ out. He looked like one of those federal investigatin’ fellas, but that wasn’t who he was. I can tell you that. It took me only two seconds to know that face, and I saw the gun stuck in his belt, so I reckoned he was about to do some robbin’. In a hushed-up voice, I said to him, ‘Please don’t shoot me, Clyde Barrow. I don’t work here—I don’t work nowhere, and you wanna shoot someone in here I got no objectin’ to it.’ He says to me, ‘Who are you?’ So I told him I‘m a farmer who’s got no farm no more ’cause the bank took it. They stole it from under me. My w
ife fell dead with a stroke and I can’t get her grave moved off the farm that isn’t my land no more. Said they’d shoot me if I trespassed, so I’ve been livin’ in my truck that’s busted down the road a piece. I can’t get no help, can’t even get me a Royal Crown Cola from these folks in this store to quench my thirst from walkin’ for miles. ‘Rest of my family’s gone west,’ I told him. ‘My son and his wife and their kids have gone and I’ve got nothin’ left, but I guess to keep on livin’....’
Richards says, “He was starin’ right at me while I was doin’ all the talkin’ and tryin’ to squeeze myself outta his way, and what he did was give me the ten dollar bill he had in his other hand. He told me get on my way as he had some business to attend to. I thanked him and gave a look back at those holier-than-thou folks behind the counter as Clyde Barrow was diggin’ in his coat pocket and pullin’ out another ten dollar bill he crumpled up in his fist, and came past me. I said to him, ‘You can attend to some of the business for me, too, Mr. Barrow.…’
“Soon as I walked outside I saw that big pretty-as-a-picture Ford sittin’ there with the motor goin’ and the exhaust kickin’ up, and behind the steerin’ wheel I saw another pretty picture—just about the prettiest face I’d seen since the last picture calendar I’d looked at—and who was I seein’ in that Ford? It was Bonnie Parker herself, and she gave me a smile like a ray of sun through a cloud. I said, ‘How do you do, ma’am,’ and as fast, I said, ‘I’m gettin’ right outta of your way quick as these old legs’re gonna carry me.’”
Like Conrad Richards of Arkansas, the Morgan Taylor family went bust on a Texas road, and soon found themselves beneath the Houston viaduct near the West Dallas railroad tracks. The area was called “the campgrounds,” a makeshift village of wanderers, hobos, a melting pot of drifters, boomers and unemployed strays with nowhere further to go. Some, more industrious than others, cobbled together shelters to shield themselves from the hard sun and harder rain.
Everson Taylor, fifteen at the time, says, “We were lost and had nothin’ to do except curl up and die. None of my family was about to do that. My folks had lost the home, and with my uncle and my sister, we went to El Paso to try and get work. We’d planned stayin’ with my dad’s other brother, but he was losin’ his property and already had two people livin’ in the house that wasn’t any bigger than a garage. We tried lookin’ for work back east across Texas, but couldn’t find anybody hirin’. We settled down on this campground, my mom and sister sleepin’ in the car while the rest of us slept on the ground.
“You’d have to steal a mattress and wooden boxes from the junkyard where there must’ve been a hundred people wanderin’ through the rubbish. I got a spade, a fan blade, and found a mattress that looked like somebody died on it. That night, three of us slept on half the mattress, layin’ crosswise, with our butts on the cardboard that we’d spread on the ground.”
Taylor says he got to know some kids around the park and the river. “There wasn’t anythin’ to do except see what you could steal or put to use. That’s when I was talkin’ to old man Barrow and his older son, older than me, who they called Buck. We swiped a load of pipes, Buck and me, sold some and stuck others in the ground to put up walls so we’d have some shelter. We almost got caught pinchin’ some boards, but Barrow wasn’t worried so much and said to me, ‘Well, what the hell, they feed you in jail, don’t they?’”
To Taylor, old man Henry Barrow looked “run down, like he’d fallen out of a truck and got run over himself. He was skinny and draggled like he didn’t sleep none too good. But he was tough, and he was a man who wasn’t layin’ down and dyin’. He was holdin’ up best he could under the crap we were all in, stranded in the middle of a dung heap. Or maybe forgotten’s the best word.”
Henry Barrow had never learned to read or write. He’d spent a life following harvests through the South, his own father having died when Henry was eleven.
While picking cotton, Henry met and then married Cumie Walker, a slim, square-jawed, wiry woman from Nacogdoches, Texas. The union bore Barrow seven children between 1894 and 1918; the firstborn was named Elvin Wilson Barrow, then came Artie Adell, followed by Marvin Ivan, nicknamed Buck. Next was Nellie May, followed by Clyde Chestnut, then L.C. and little Lillian Marie. Clyde, the fifth child, was born in 1909 in Telico, Texas, thirty miles southeast of Dallas. He was often left in the care of his sister, Nell, five years older than Clyde.
The children worked alongside their mother and father in the fields, the youngest attending various schools for short spurts, often splitting up to work the harvest migrations or parceled off to relatives throughout Texas.
Sometimes the kids would be able to go to the movies, though popcorn and candy were luxuries. Years later, Marie Barrow would say, “Gettin’ candy was like findin’ chunks of gold.” With a laugh, she said, “Lookin’ back on my life, I know that I eat so much candy now that it’ll probably kill me, but seems like it hardly matters long as I’m fillin’ up with what I missed the most.”
They gave a nod to their mother’s insistence that they stay in school, as well as attending a church. Cumie believed in laying a solid religious foundation in their lives. She prayed daily and taught the children to pray, but the kids pretended for their mother’s sake to show an interest in “gettin’ educated” or an introduction to a “good Lord in the clouds.”
“Times were just too goddamned tough,” says Stanley Crowell, a one-legged, onetime indigent Depression refugee who remembers Marvin Ivan. “Buck came and went and never on any particular occasion.” Buck told Crowell he’d faked an interest in whatever teaching he’d been offered, more concerned in getting what he could for as little as it would take. He’d eventually learn that with a gun in his hand, it would take very little. Most of the Barrow offspring split from the family to find work in the city—away from living as their parents did. “They never had anythin’ better,” Marie once said. “Being a sharecropper gave no future except to wind you up with less on your plate than the little you had to begin with—killin’ yourself to make someone richer than they were already.”
Henry, his wife, and the two children remaining with them, L.C. and Marie, lived in a tent on the campgrounds, attached to the old wagon they had brought, creating shelter close to the Texas and Pacific railroad tracks. The area spread out as a long plain bordered on one end by the Trinity River, across which offered a Dallas skyline of tall, gray buildings.
West of the river, “the Devil’s Back Porch” spread over dirt streets, shanty shacks, and shotgun hovels. The so-called residents of the unincorporated squalor were mostly an unemployed mixture of drifters, boomers, good-for-nothings and “nickel” whores. Clyde avoided them—he said he had no use for “bums and hobos,” nor was he going to associate with any “doughnut-sniffin’ sob sisters.”
While Clyde complained, groaned, slept, or admired himself in downtown Dallas store windows and coffee joint mirrors, his father continued with his daily scrap runs, the wagon wheels creaking and his old horse slowing down. One afternoon while Henry was gathering a pile of dumped iron stakes, a car collided with his wagon, running a length of metal torn from the vehicle into the horse.
Nell, often considered the most practical if not the brightest of the Barrows, coaxed her father to hire a lawyer and sue the driver. Reluctant at first, intimidated by the law, Henry was encouraged by the rest of the family to forge ahead, and with Nell’s help, he eventually won a settlement. The victory allowed him enough money to move the three-room shack from the campgrounds to a lot obtained by Nell, located on Eagle Ford Road. She had deeded the lot to her mother and father, saying, “They worked hard all their lives, and had so little to show for it, except the love and gratitude we gave them. A lot of heartache came in to boot, but you have to take them as lessons in gettin’ tough.”
Clyde’s younger brother, L.C., later recalled Clyde rarely staying on Eagle Ford Road. “He was always hangin’ around at a couple fellas’ places and figurin’ ways of gettin�
�� money.”
Sylvia Nolan, seventeen years old when she met Clyde, says, “He was workin’ at the cracker company, and then he was missin’ work all the time because he’d run off with his brother, Buck. They were stealin’ stuff they’d take to the house where his folks were. Not that their folks knew what they were doin’. His mom and his dad were very carin’, generous people.”
For a short time Clyde was employed by Procter and Gamble, but was laid off for reasons that remained vague. “I didn’t like what he was doin’ and he didn’t last long on that job either,” says Sylvia. “I heard that later on the company was sayin’ they didn’t have any employment records for Clyde Barrow.” He tried another job, working as a glazier for the United Glass Company, and though telling Sylvia he was going to quit, “Sayin’,” she says, “he didn’t like the work any more than at Procter and Gamble, he stayed longer at United Glass than any other place he’d probably ever worked.”
She says, “He’d fuss over his clothes, so concerned with how he looked, but lackin’ the money to look as dapper as he probably thought he should. Clyde was a very vain person, though he could present himself in a soft-spoken, friendly way, and he always acted like a gentleman. His brother Buck wasn’t like that. Clyde had a way of thinkin’ highly of himself, and wanted to break off from his past—how poor his family had been, how they’d struggled to keep goin’.”
