by John Gilmore
The bad angle, Henry said, was Clyde being a little fast on the trigger. “Not that he set out that way,” he said, “and told me as much. But if he’d get cornered, and again it’s a part of the job that happens, as the law’s there with the same idea—same occupation. You took your chances. A guy couldn’t get work, so you stole a hunk of cheese. You stuck up some smart-ass fucker, and soon you saw the profits they’re makin’ and you say well, so what the hell, let’s join the party if you got the stomach for it.
“I wasn’t comfortable with puttin’ down the law,” Henry said. “In the end you get the same ride for pluggin’ a John Doe, except for a cop they’re on your ass like it’s never goin’ to get easy. Their whiskers’ll reach past their balls as far as forgettin’ about you, and any chance of walkin’ away clean on a job is messed if the law’s on your neck.
“Clyde was looking at me and sayin’ he wasn’t goin’ down. He said he’d stand up to the end of it. Understandable he’d get a lot of mileage with the artillery he was haulin’, like he wasn’t as keen to hit a bank as startin’ a war.”
Henry ate soft-boiled eggs and drank buttermilk. He said an ulcer was gnawing through his stomach like “a badger in a box.” He blamed the condition on a life of looking over his shoulder to see if a shotgun was aimed at his shoulder blades.
He said he knew Clyde’s brother, Buck, after the older Barrow busted out of Huntsville prison. “He’d married Blanche and was hidin’ out, hopin’ nobody’d miss him. He was easy to figure, but Clyde—and Bonnie, too, she was like a little vaudeville actress—always actin’ but she was a thinker, too. Both of them were hard to know and that made it tough.
“They stayed in a shed behind a garage owned by a guy Buck knew, and were headin’ to Abilene for a job—wasn’t goin’ to be Jasper. When you look right at it, what Clyde said, more or less he had you like a dog chasin’ its tail because he was cagey. Not lettin’ you know where you stood.… You had to have trust, but he had Bonnie, you see, and the others who came and went didn’t count. You could get a straight deal out of Buck, though he wasn’t smart. Clyde was the smart boy, and wouldn’t say anythin’ you might piece together and get ideas he hadn’t figured out. When we got together about a job,” says Henry, “he must’ve had half a dozen killin’ warrants on him. I had to say I never shot at nothin’ but cans or beer bottles, and for that they don’t stick you on the hot seat.”
Henry told me, “Him and Bonnie were eatin’ in a little joint when we talked about the parish and Jasper. Bonnie lookin’ half-asleep, but eatin’ chicken like a last meal. She had a big wad of mashed spuds and a mess of gravy she slopped around with a spoon. Clyde wasn’t eatin’ until she broke off a hunk of the chicken. He ate in a dainty way, pickin’ while she shoveled it in like she hadn’t eaten in days, and maybe she hadn’t. Livin’ out of cars they’d swipe. Imagine that? Maybe two cars or three a day, and if they weren’t sleepin’ in them, they’d shack out in sheds or on the ground in woods, or empty cabins where nobody saw who they were. After that Joplin shootout, though, newspapers all over the country had so many pictures of them you’d be hard-pressed not to see you were lookin’ square in the face of Bonnie and Clyde.…
“So she ate the potatoes and gravy while I fished information out of Clyde. I gotta say I wasn’t as sharp as he was. He talked about what he wanted but he wasn’t sayin’ any facts, see, and in the middle of it he put his hand in Bonnie’s lap right down at the bottom of her belly, and kept lookin’ at me. I knew he was figurin’ how he’d take that parish bank on his own, Bonnie with him, swipin’ another car, she’d drive and he’d take it all like a king on his own man-made mountain—his queen right beside him and him showin’ what he owned....
“You could see he was tickled by Bonnie and how he got a bang out of what she did. It was like they didn’t hardly have to talk. More like a mind-readin’ act, each knowin’ what the other was thinkin’ or goin’ to say. When you got right down to it, you had to figure they were two of a kind, twins with a pair of aces, and a spooky language they’d be speakin’ when they weren’t even usin’ words like you and I are doin’.”
When Bonnie told Miss Johnson her name was Elizabeth, she was telling the truth. Elizabeth was her middle name—Bonnie Elizabeth Parker, born in a sun-bent, pot handle of a Texas town named Rowena, some two hundred dusty miles from Dallas. By the time of Bonnie’s birth, October 1, 1910, the town of Rowena had boomed to over six hundred residents—mostly Czechs, Germans, and railroad refugees. Her father, Charles Parker, a bricklayer and an avid Baptist, spent every Sunday bringing his wife, Emma, to Rowena’s First Baptist Church, along with the three children—a boy called Buster, and Bonnie, then little Billie Jean.
Bonnie would later tell a waitress friend that her sharpest memories of her father always spiked when she got a whiff of cement or wet mortar.
Charles Parker once said that working in an undertaking parlor promised a more prosperous profession than laying bricks. Bonnie was four years old when her father “kicked the bucket,” as she said, also remarking, “My mother cried and said he’d lost faith when he thought he was dyin’ and God wasn’t going to save him to see his kids grow big enough to tie their shoes.”
His death left widowed Emma broke. She needed work, but who would take care of the children? Could she earn enough to pay someone to watch after three kids?
With little or no employment offered in Rowena, Emma packed up, gathered the kids, and made the trip to her mother’s in West Dallas.
Mary Krause lived in a runoff area called Cement City. Chalk, limestone, and shale half-formed the ground upon which puddled the town, supported by Portland Cement workers who lived in houses owned by the company. While the few stores and markets were owned by Portland Cement, a post office that had opened in 1907 shut down the year Emma brought Bonnie, her brother, and her sister to settle in with their grandmother.
Her father’s death would linger as a mystery to Bonnie. At age eight, she’d attended a funeral in Dallas with her grandma and brother Buster. The deceased in the open casket was an elderly acquaintance of Mary Krause, remotely resembling Bonnie’s father. His hair seemed white while his mustache looked almost black. Bonnie asked her grandma why the man’s mustache was “the color of tar,” yet his hair pale as gauze. Buster spoke up, saying, “Somebody glued a mustache on his face so he won’t look so dead!”
Both children giggled. Their grandma said, “He was a nice man and this is a sad occasion. A funeral is no place to giggle like a pair of fools.”
“It isn’t sad for you when you’re dead,” Bonnie asked, “is it?”
“Not if you’re in heaven,” the woman replied. “There’s no sadness in God’s house, but for us on the earth it is sad, and you can’t laugh at somebody’s funeral.”
Bonnie said, “What happens if you go to hell?”
Her grandma looked at her, shaking her head. “I imagine it’s sad for everyone,” she said, “especially yourself if you’re visitin’ with the Devil.”
The words of her grandma about dying would simmer in the secret corner of Bonnie’s “private thinkin’,” as she called it. Early in her life, she’d started writing details of her private thinking in a small kind of notebook she called a diary. “She’d imagine herself in a coffin with silk and satin all around her,” said Billie Jean years later. “Seein’ she was lookin’ beautiful as the evenin’ sunset.”
At twelve, Bonnie visited a Dallas undertaking parlor and ran her fingers along the shiny linings of expensive caskets. She then wrote a poem about a coffin floating like a cigar-shaped boat “on a body of bright blue water.” Billie Jean says, “Bonnie read in the newspaper about a man in Niagara Falls who got inside a barrel and went over the falls, livin’ to tell about it.” Bonnie wondered if it was true, and if someone could go over the falls in a coffin. “That kind of thinkin’ was disturbin’,” said Billie Jean, “but that’s how Bonnie amused herself.”
Entitling her poem “Forever,” Bonnie g
ave it to her teacher, who asked if anyone was inside the coffin. Billie Jean says, “Bonnie told her it was herself inside the coffin, that she’d written a self-portrait with the lid shut down. Some people said she had a peculiar streak of humor that didn’t fit in with the way everyone usually thought, but Bonnie persisted in jokin’ or teasin’ people, half the time gettin’ their back-hairs risin’ up.…”
Two
Jennifer Harris worked as a waitress in Dallas during the Great Depression, and says she’d met Bonnie in a café. “She was still in school. A sweet girl with a beautiful smile that lit right up.” As a waitress, Bonnie was liked by people, and regular customers thought highly of her.
“One time we were talkin’ about the food being served, and she told me how her grandmother had fixed meals special, even though there wasn’t much to go around. She’d taught Bonnie how to fix a stew they’d fill full of bread instead of meat, and seasoned to taste like lamb. Bonnie told me how much she loved her grandma but wanted to be more with her mother who’d worked whatever jobs she could find, accordin’ to Bonnie, so the kids were taken care of.
“Boys were always tryin’ to get Bonnie’s attention,” says Harris. “She’d smile and you could see them melt in their tracks. Her smile was like that flash you get when you first strike a match. She was fast-thinkin’ and smart, she’d write stories and give speeches, excellin’ in school where others asked her opinion or even tried to get her to write papers for them.... Then sometimes like it was the other side of a coin, she’d be scrappin’ with bully kids bigger than herself, and plain determined not to show fear. You wondered if she didn’t care if she got socked or hurt because she wouldn’t let go.... Then all of a sudden that switch in her nature and she’d be sweet as pie.”
Unlike her brother or sister, Bonnie’s personality seemed “scrambled underneath the surface,” according to Harris. “A few times when we were workin’,” says Harris, “she and I got to talkin’ about boys we’d known, and Bonnie was sayin’ they’d confuse you. She talked about one she’d chased—admittin’ she ran after him, knowin’ he was a troublemaker. ‘Everyone knew it, includin’ me,’ she’d said. Bonnie couldn’t help chasin’ him in spite—or, rather, because—of people sayin’ he was bad. She said he stole a motorcycle, got kicked out of school, and then got in trouble stealin’ a car. Last she’d heard he’d been locked up in prison.”
At sixteen, Bonnie got involved with “another sour apple,” says Harris. “Roy Thornton was older than Bonnie. She got tattooed on her leg, showin’ a heart with their names linkin’ together like weeds. I suppose Roy was a charmin’ show-off—in and out of trouble same as the boy she’d chased in school—the kind Bonnie seemed to fall for. They were no good. She married Roy, and he’d take off for a week or two weeks, then finally seemin’ to desert her, gone practically a year....”
Bonnie wanted romance, and wanted excitement. She wanted someone to love her and pay attention to her. She’d do whatever she could to gain their attention but then they’d be gone. Harris says, “Bonnie was sick of Roy’s ways and when he finally showed up after nearly a year, she chased him out, yellin’, ‘Get out of here!’ She didn’t want him in her life even for one night on the couch. She tossed out what he owned, threw it right in the road, and after that he got arrested for robbin’ or burglary and sent to prison.”
Bonnie’s mother coaxed her to divorce Thornton. She’d say, “You can’t bind the rest of your own life to someone careless as Roy.” She had to set herself free.
“Only Bonnie couldn’t do it,” says Harris. “She said he’d been knocked down by fate, and even though she didn’t love him anymore, and maybe it was only infatuation from the start, she couldn’t kick him while he was down. Emma, her mom, tried to shed light, sayin’ Roy had showed her no respect, and he’d knocked himself down by his own hand. Nothin’ to do with fate. Bonnie had no call to share a part of Thornton’s personal unhappy consequences.”
Although the devotion Bonnie showed for her mother seemed unshakable, she extended little of what she felt in her heart. She couldn’t cut herself free from Thornton by divorce because something more than a sense of fairness had tied her to the situation. “Some sort of bond,” says Harris, “that Bonnie had little control over. Some part of her deep nature had little to do with the world around her, as if Bonnie was chained to this bond—tied hopelessly without even knowin’ it. Someone could be bad and wild as a dog, even with somebody havin’ to get a gun and shoot the beast, but Bonnie could get all worked up about that person, even someone she’d see in a movie, like Billy the Kid or Jesse James, and they could have her shinin’ with excitement, like a little tyke tellin’ you she’d just got all she dreamed for, even though she was seein’ the guy on the picture show screen and it had nothin’ to do with real life.”
Billie Jean remembered a time when Bonnie brought home a cat that had been hit on the street. “Too far gone to live,” said Billie Jean, “but Bonnie placed the injured animal on a wad of rags in a box and surprised me—I guess shocked me—tellin’ me and Buster she was keepin’ the cat so she could watch it die.”
Harris says, “A lot of folks couldn’t imagine Bonnie doin’ that—bein’ so keen on the process of dyin’. That cat had to be so torn up there wasn’t anythin’ to do except maybe bury it, or put it out of its misery. Billie Jean said Bonnie fooled with that sort of talk, and I was reminded of Bonnie’s notions about Jesse James and Billy the Kid from picture shows and the stories she’d read, and wantin’ to write them herself.”
Outlaws—train robbers and gunmen—held a fascination for Bonnie. “She once told me she’d dreamed about marryin’ Billy the Kid,” says Harris. “He gave her a spotted horse and she rode alongside him, even fancied packin’ a sidearm and a rifle in this dream. I asked, ‘What’re you dreamin’ about pistols and rifles for? You got ideas of shootin’ up the town?’ She laughed and got a look her sister said was a piece of her ‘private thinkin’, and she said she wasn’t goin’ to shoot up the town, though half those she’d meet, she said, deserved a bullet between the eyes. No way of knowin’ back then that what would happen wasn’t too far in the future. And though she didn’t do any shootin’ or robbin’ herself, she got as attached to it sure as wings on an angel.”
Bonnie was nineteen when laid off from her waitress job. The business folded as the bottom fell out of the country. She watched things turn bad—then worse, as the Depression washed across the nation like a plague. Thousands upon thousands of citizens fell into despair and loss unprecedented in American history. Industry ground to a standstill. Small businesses collapsed. Evictions and foreclosures rampaged, devastating families. People were going hungry. “Brother, can you spare a dime?” became the new national anthem. The American Dream became yesterday’s newspaper, flushing away in a downhill gutter.
Meanwhile, not everyone considered suicide a viable option. Not everyone walked the streets on “Hoover leather” (cardboard wadded into shoes to cover the holes), or gulped a cup of “Hoover soup” (boiled water with a root or weed plucked from the road). The bankers and their Washington cohorts sat comfortably in amassed wealth while hordes roamed the streets below, refugees without homes, without jobs, turning into bums on boards or boxcars or sleeping in the mud of a hobo hollow.
Ralph Mendoza, an elderly Fort Worth resident managing a motel, recalled his younger years during the Depression as “nothing but pain and anguish. I was raised in Louisiana, spent half my life workin’ my ass off in Texas, then windin’ up in a Dallas breadline that doubled around a city block. I walked six miles for a doughnut and cup of coffee at a Salvation Army stand. My wife was sick, the kids were hungry, and I walked back with half the doughnut wrapped in wax paper, lookin’ for butts on the street.…
“Instead of things gettin’ better as Washington was sayin’, the breadlines tripled. We got kicked outta the two-room flat because we couldn’t pay the rent. I had a college degree. My wife had run a bakery. The law came and put us out
on the sidewalk. Killin’ myself and my family crossed my mind more than once. Other guys told me they thought of killin’ themselves, and some did. I saw a lady with a little baby throw herself in front of a garbage truck. She got tangled up in the wheels but the baby was bounced ahead into the street, squallin’ and cryin’. Some other lady picked the baby up and went off with it. One pal I’d worked with jumped off a bridge into a train yard.
“I wasn’t alone in thinkin’ how bad it could get that you didn’t want to live. Not that killin’ myself or the family was somethin’ I could do, but thinkin’ it out made me feel at least I’d hold out another day. Maybe by the next mornin’ somethin’ would happen that’d change things. Only what happened was nothin’ happened the next day, and the day after that just promised that things would get worse than they were the day before.
“I was a veteran who’d fought in the war to make it a better world. They took our furniture and what little we had. The church turned us away, sayin’ they had too many others lookin’ for help.
“Folks without homes or jobs or places to go gathered in vacant lots and parks on the edges of towns. Sometimes right in the middle of the city, and cops would come and bust you with clubs to get you out of the public parks.” The unemployed squatted in makeshift shacks made of cardboard and hunks of wood, or scraps of metal, rags, and squashed cans to shim out the ice. Sorrowful pits of humanity called Hoovervilles—in dishonor of then-president Herbert Hoover, who Mendoza says, “kept tellin’ us everythin’ would be fine! All we had to do, Hoover kept sayin’ to a country which couldn’t find wages anywhere no matter the beggin’, was we had to spend money to get the economy on its feet. Buy houses! he’d say. Invest! Invest? We couldn’t scrounge a half buck to feed our family. People looked bewildered as hell when you heard Hoover talkin’ like a crazy man. You asked, ‘Is he livin’ on the moon? Is he talkin’ to Wall Street or a people goin’ hungry?’ Sayin’ how everythin’’s gonna be fine as long as we do the impossible!