by Emma Parker
Buck, we felt, was finally headed on the right path. He met and married a splendid, gentle, good country girl named Blanche Caldwell. A few weeks after he married her, he told her he was an escaped convict, and Blanche prevailed on him to come home and talk things over with his folks. She wanted a man for a husband; not one who must sneak and hide. Blanche wanted Buck to go back and serve his time, as did my mother. Accordingly, December 27, 1931, we gave the Huntsville officials the shock of a lifetime by driving up and knocking on the door and asking them to please let Buck come inside.
Naturally, this action on Buck's part, and his statement that he meant never to do anything to get in trouble again, was greatly in his favor. We felt that he too, would not have to serve his full time, and that both boys, with splendid girls waiting for them, would settle down and really do the right thing.
Just before Clyde was released, in a moment of despondency, despair, and utter hopelessness with life, he had asked a brother convict to chop off his two toes with an ax so that he would be taken within the Walls and released from drudgery in the fields. This revolting incident had just occurred when Clyde's pardon was obtained on Feb. 2, 1932. He came home to us on crutches.
My sister and I took him down town when he arrived, and bought him a complete outfit, except shirt and gloves. Clyde insisted on a silk shirt and kid gloves.
"Why, Clyde," I remonstrated, "you don’t want an old silk shirt."
"But I do," Clyde insisted. "And I mean to have it." "Listen, honey," I tried to explain, "nobody but bootleggers and gangsters wear silk shirts. Nice people just don’t go in for them, that’s all."
"I’m going to have a silk shirt," Clyde said, and walked us all over town till we found one.
Back home that night, my sister and I had a serious talk. "I don't like it," I said. "There's a new air about him — a funny sort of something that I can't put my finger on — but Clyde's changed. I'm afraid he's not going to go straight, Sis. I don't like that silk shirt business at all. It isn't like the Clyde I used to know." Clyde came out of his bath about that time and began putting on his newly purchased finery. We both tried to talk to him. "Honey," I said, "what you ought to do now is to get you a job and a good girl and get married and settle down."
"I had a good girl before I went away," Clyde returned, tying his tie with a certain swagger. "I’m going to doll up now and go over there and see if Bonnie will still speak to me. Maybe not. No decent girl would, I suppose."
It turned out that Bonnie would.
Mrs. Parker Takes Up the Story
When Clyde walked up to the door that night, Bonnie was sitting in the living room with Tom. The instant she looked up and saw Clyde, it was just like he'd never been away at all. She jumped up and ran to him where he stood, looking at the two of them, sort of uncertain and defiant, and she went right into Clyde's arms.
"Oh, Clyde — darling!" was all she said before he kissed her, but it seemed to be enough. Tom got up and went home.
I was in the kitchen, and after a little while I called Clyde and asked him to come out and talk to me. "Listen, Clyde," I said, "if you want to go with Bonnie, that's all right with me. But I want you to get a job first and prove to me that everything is going to be all right."
He was looking boyish and engaging again, his dimple and smile working. Bonnie was hanging around his neck, perfectly radiant, like a fire had been turned on inside of her. The crutches didn't seem to be noticed by either of them. Clyde sat down in the kitchen chair, parked the crutches and pulled Bonnie over on his knee. "Shucks," he said, kissing Bonnie's cheek, "no decent girl would go with me, would they, honey?"
Bonnie just kissed him back and giggled.
"Now, don’t talk that way, Clyde," I said. "Many a good boy has gotten in trouble and gone to the pen. There’s no reason why you can’t make good and go straight."
"Nobody would give me a job," he insisted. "Nell says she’s got one for me — but it’s way up in Massachusetts."
"Maybe you’d get to like it up there," I said. "And surely that’s far off enough that the law wouldn’t be knowing you every time you stuck your head out of the door. Things would work out. If you and Bonnie love each other, I’m not going to stand in your way at all."
He thanked me. He was always polite and courteous to me. He said he did mean to do everything he could to keep out of trouble, but that he didn't think he'd have much luck in Dallas, with smart cops running him in every time they saw him. I told him I didn't think it would be that bad. I went off and left him and Bonnie alone in the kitchen for awhile, because I knew that they had a lot to say to each other.
Clyde was around the house all the rest of February, and then Nell really got him the job. She got it through a friend of hers who was with a construction company in Wooster, Mass. Clyde was able to walk nicely by that time, and all of us felt very happy about the matter. I know Bonnie did, although she hated to have him go away.
But the job didn't last. By the end of the first week, Nell's friend had written that he was afraid Clyde wouldn't make a go of it. He said the boy seemed restless and nervous, and couldn't seem to settle down and get into the swing of the work. He was afraid it just wasn't going to turn out well.
He was right. At the end of two weeks Clyde was back home again. It was along about the 17th or 18th of March, as I recall, because on the 20th, Bonnie left home. Clyde's excuse for coming back was that he simply couldn't work. He said he was always looking over his shoulder, expecting to see an officer bearing down on him; that he lived in daily and hourly fear of arrest, and that the horror of prison was always with him. When Nell pointed out that if it was like that in Massachusetts, it would be worse in Texas, he said: "If I've got to hide and run away from the law all my life, I want to be around where I can slip back and see my folks, anyhow. Gosh, Sis, I nearly died of lonesomeness up there. I've been away from you all two years. I've got to stay close to home."
This passion for having to see his folks was one of the reasons that Clyde was finally caught, for he and Bonnie came home to see us often till the day they died.
Bonnie told me a few days after Clyde returned that she had a job with a cosmetic company demonstrating their face creams and lotions, and was going to Houston. She'd never left me before, but times were bad and jobs were hard to find. I never had any reason to believe that Bonnie would deceive me and I believed what she told me. She did have the job. I made sure of that, and let her go, never suspicioning a thing. Two days later I heard from her. She was in jail in Kaufman!
Only a mother can appreciate my feelings when I walked into that Kaufman jail and saw Bonnie behind the bars. Death would have been much easier. In fact, death was not even a tragedy when compared with the events I was to live through during the next two years. Bonnie cried a little when she saw me. The jailer and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Adams, were very nice to her. They let her sit on the lawn in the evenings and romp with their children. She wasn't treated like a criminal at all, but this didn't change the fact that Bonnie was in jail. Nothing could change that.
We had several long talks and Bonnie told me everything. She had been with Clyde and another boy, who was also in jail. They had planned a robbery and were surprised before they had accomplished it. Running away in a stolen car over country roads, they stuck in the mud, and had to take to the fields. The officers were hot after them, and in desperation, they caught some mules in the field and tried to ride them in an attempt to get away. The mules exercised the immortal prerogative of mules and refused to budge. When it became plain that the mules weren't going anywhere, they abandoned them and again ran through the fields, the bullets whistling over their heads as they ran. Bonnie lost her slippers in the soft earth and Clyde had to carry her.
Finally she and Clyde tumbled into an irrigation ditch, and here they stood, clinging to each other. "Well," Clyde had said, "this looks like where we get ours, honey."
When the gunfire died down a little, Clyde, still carrying her, found a des
erted country church and hid Bonnie in it. "I'll get a car and come and get you," he promised, and went away. Bonnie waited in the darkness, cobwebs around her, bats whizzing past, and somewhere a hoot owl cried dismally. Once the officers came by and debated whether or not to enter the church, then decided against it and went on. The hours grew, and Bonnie decided something had happened to Clyde. She left the church. Her idea, she said, was to get out on the highway, and if Clyde didn't come along, to hitch hike her way back to Dallas, but the officers caught her. They also caught the other boy, but Clyde escaped.
Bonnie and the other boy refused to tell the name of the other person with them. Bonnie was being held for questioning by the grand jury. I started to make bail, but Mrs. Adams stopped me. "Don't do it, Mrs. Parker," she said. "I know you haven't the money for bond, and she's not going to need it. They really haven't a thing against her, and when the grand jury meets in June, they'll give her a no-bill. Let her alone. She's not suffering, and time to think matters over may mean all the difference in the world to the child in the future."
That wasn't the reason I left her there. I didn't make bond for Bonnie because I really was in bad financial straits and couldn't very well spare the money. I came home and left her in jail in a cell next door to a crazy negro woman. All in all, it was enough to break a mother's heart, but I was to learn later that the human heart can stand many, many breakings and still keep right on beating.
Bonnie stayed in the Kaufman jail three months — something that Dallas officers don't know till this day. When she and Clyde were killed and their past histories were on every front page in America, reporters and policemen dug far back into records trying to find something on Bonnie and were never able to produce one bit of proof that she was ever in trouble with the law for anything till she became famous as Clyde's companion. The Kaufman thing was never mentioned. In fact, so clear was Bonnie's record that they didn't take her fingerprints till after she was dead. Why they did that, I'll never know. Finger prints are useful only when the criminal is alive, I thought, and Bonnie was beyond ever being alive again, but the law apparently required them for its files.
It was while Bonnie was in Kaufman waiting for the grand jury to meet, that she wrote her "Suicide Sal" poem. Bonnie was "Sal" and Clyde was the perfidious "Jack" who threw Sal down. That poem in Bonnie's own handwriting, written on leaves of a cheap notebook, is still in my possession and it is a revelation in psychology. Compared with her other letters written to Clyde, it shows a definite change in mental attitude, and an attempt at assimilation of underworld atmosphere which is far from healthy.
Before Bonnie went out on the road with Clyde Barrow as an outlaw, her letters had been perhaps a bit sticky with sentiment, but very lucid, very human, and very much the sort the average young girl writes when she's in love. Also, these letters repeatedly beg Clyde to keep out of jail and go straight.
It is clear from the numerous quotations used in the poem that Bonnie was learning the jargon of gangdom, and striving desperately to fit into it and become part of it. This bit of writing reminded me of a small child who learns certain grown-up words and says them over and over, often incorrectly and inappropriately, in order to prove to adults that he is getting on. I shall present the poem and ask those interested in the psychological side of this story to compare Bonnie's diary and letters written before she met Clyde with this attempt at poetry, written after she'd been associated with him the two months following his release from prison. I realize that I am not learned in such matters, but to my inner consciousness there seemed to be a strange and terrifying change taking place in the mind of my child.
THE STORY OF SUICIDE SAL
We each of us have a good "alibi"
For being down here in the "joint;"
But few of them really are justified
If you get right down to the point.
You've heard of a woman's glory
Being spent on a "downright cur,"
Still you can't always judge the story
As true, being told by her.
As long as I've stayed on this "island,"
And heard "confidence tales" from each "gal,"
Only one seemed interesting and truthful —
The story of "Suicide Sal."
Now "Sal" was a gal of rare beauty,
Though her features were coarse and tough;
She never once faltered from duty
To play on the "up and up."
"Sal" told me this tale on the evening
Before she was turned out "free,"
And I'll do my best to relate it
Just as she told it to me:
I was bom on a ranch in Wyoming;
Not treated like Helen of Troy;
I was taught that "rods were rulers"
And "ranked" as a greasy cowboy.
Then I left my old home for the city
To play in its mad dizzy whirl,
Not knowing how little of pity
It holds for a country girl.
There I fell for "the line" of a "henchman,"
A "professional killer" from "Chi;"
I couldn't help loving him madly;
For him even now I would die.
One year we were desperately happy;
Our "ill gotten gains" we spent free;
I was taught the ways of the "underworld;"
Jack was just like a "god" to me.
I got on the "F. B. A." payroll
To get the "inside lay" of the "job;"
The bank was "turning big money! "
It looked like a "cinch" for the "mob."
Eighty grand without even a "rumble"—
Jack was last with the "loot" in the door,
When the "teller" dead-aimed a revolver
From where they forced him to lie on the floor.
I knew I had only a moment—
He would surely get Jack as he ran;
So I "staged" a "big fade out" beside him
And knocked the forty-five out of his hand.
They "rapped me down big" at the station,
And informed me that I'd get the blame
For the "dramatic stunt" pulled on the "teller"
Looked to them too much like a "game."
The "police" called it a "frame-up,"
Said it was an "inside job,"
But I steadily denied any knowledge
Or dealings with "underworld mobs."
The "gang" hired a couple of lawyers,
The best "fixers" in any man's town,
But it takes more than lawyers and money
When Uncle Sam starts "shaking you down."
I was charged as a "scion of gangland"
And tried for my wages of sin;
The "dirty dozen" found me guilty —
From five to fifty years in the pen.
I took the "rap" like good people,
And never one "squawk" did I make.
Jack "dropped himself" on the promise
That we make a "sensational break."
Well, to shorten a sad lengthy story,
Five years have gone over my head
Without even so much as a letter —
At first I thought he was dead.
But not long ago I discovered
From a gal in the joint named Lyle,
That Jack and his "moll" had "got over"
And were living in true "gangster style."
If he had returned to me sometime,
Though he hadn't a cent to give,
I'd forget all this hell that he's caused me,
And love him as long as I live.
But there's no chance of his ever coming,
For he and his moll have no fears
But that I will die in this prison,
Or "flatten" this fifty years.
Tomorrow Fll be on the "outside"
And I'll "drop myself" on it today:
I'll "bump 'em" if they give me the "hotsquat"
On this island
out here in the bay . . .
The iron doors swung wide next morning
For a gruesome woman of waste,
Who at last had a chance to "fix it."
Murder showed in her cynical face.
Not long ago I read in the paper
That a gal on the East Side got "hot,"
And when the smoke finally retreated,
Two of gangdom were found "on the spot."
It related the colorful story
Of a "jilted gangster gal."
Two days later, a "sub-gun" ended
The story of "Suicide Sal."
Bonnie was lodged in the Kaufman jail on March 22, 1932. On March 25, Clyde staged a robbery in Dallas, Texas, and made good his escape. This was at the Sims Oil Co. The manager, down at headquarters, identified the bandit as Clyde Barrow by pictures. Since Bonnie was not at home nor working in Dallas, she was supposed to have been with him, and the order for Clyde's arrest was made to include her also. She was said to have waited outside for him in a car. Already, the legend of Bonnie Parker, the girl with the "bright yellow hair," was beginning to grow, and on every occasion that Clyde was implicated in anything, Bonnie was reported to have been with him, whether she was or not. Twice during her stay in the Kaufman jail, newspapers stated that Bonnie was with Clyde, when it was humanly impossible for her to have accompanied him. Once in August, when the killing at Atoka, Oklahoma, occurred, Bonnie was said by the papers to have been Clyde's companion. As a matter of fact, she spent the night with me, and Dallas officers knew it, because they checked up.
On April 27, Clyde was charged with his first murder —the Bucher killing at Hillsboro. Clyde insisted till the day he died that he had nothing to do with that murder, and since he later killed so many men and admitted the killings to us, I believe that he told us the truth about the Hillsboro affair. Again newspapers stated that a girl with bright yellow hair waited outside for him in the car, but Bonnie had another month or two in the Kaufman jail yet. As to the Hillsboro affair, I was not hearing from Clyde then, and Nell is far more competent to relate the story of what really happened, according to Clyde's version.