by Emma Parker
My brother, Buck Barrow, was pardoned from Huntsville on March 22. The pleas of my mother and the intervention of Buck's wife, Blanche, had managed it for him. I had been going down to see Buck often while he was in Huntsville, and he certainly appeared to be a changed man. He told me he'd never do anything to get in trouble again as long as he lived; that he meant to go straight now, and make a home for Blanche.
He had worried about Clyde constantly during his stay in prison. It had been his job to sweep out the cells and generally clean up each day. He told me that he never swept around that terrible electric chair but what he thought of Clyde. "I used to dream at night that Clyde had been caught and brought to the death house," he told me. "I'd wake up in a cold sweat. I couldn't have stood it if that had happened while I was there. Something has got to be done to make Clyde straight with the law again, Sis."
It was all fantastic, for Clyde was forever beyond being straight with the law again. Soon after he came home, my sister gave Buck the money to buy a secondhand car. Buck was going to Missouri to visit Blanche's people and probably go to work on the farm. Buck had never had a job in his life, as I have said. He didn't know how to do any sort of skilled labor, and he just wasn't attracted to work, anyway. We had the highest hopes of his trying to stick to a job now because of Blanche.
He hadn't been home but about four days till he began talking about going to visit with Clyde, if he could find him. Blanche was bitterly opposed to it. Newspapers have made Blanche out as a regular gangster's moll, but nothing was ever further from the truth. She was a good country girl, timid, shy, and rather quiet. I suspect if she'd known Buck was an escaped convict when she met him, she'd be running yet instead of serving time in a Missouri prison. Buck didn't tell her till after she married him, and then she brought him right back to serve his time, as I have already related. Blanche had never been in trouble with the law in her life, and she was deathly afraid of guns, bloodshed, and any sort of outlawry. She was afraid of Clyde, too, and she didn't want to visit him then or at any other time.
Buck had never used a gun, either. Unlike Clyde, who loved his guns, named them all and spent hours cleaning and polishing them, Buck had never owned one, and was, I'm inclined to believe, scared of them himself. His record had been for petty thievery, not for murder or holdups. Even officers taunted Buck with being a coward.
I didn't blame Blanche for kicking about going to find Clyde. I told Buck so. I said: "You fool around with Clyde, and you'll land back in the pen with a life sentence. You haven't got the nerve and daring to do the things that Clyde does and get by. You'd get caught right off."
Buck laughed. "Listen, Sis," he said, "I'm no fool. I wouldn't ride a block with Clyde. I know what it would mean. But I haven't seen him in two years and I want to visit with him. That's all I'm going to do — just visit with him. Now don't you worry, Sis. I'll be back, safe and sound."
He came back safe and sound, all right — in his casket.
Blanche cried two whole days before Buck left. She kicked up a terrible row, and looked as if she had lost her last friend. I wasn't very happy about the situation, but I'd given up trying to change either one of them by this time. Buck came by my shop that morning and told me I'd get a telephone call from an unknown man. When this person called I was to say: "He's already gone."
They drove off with Blanche still boo-hooing. The man called and I delivered the message. A few days later word came that all was well. Buck and Blanche had met Clyde and Bonnie just outside of Ft. Smith, Arkansas. They had gone on to Joplin, Missouri and rented a house in the suburbs, one with rooms above and a double garage below. Here they were having a quiet time, just being together. Clyde and Bonnie, having been away from home for three months, were eager for the news. They talked a lot. They cooked red beans and cabbage, of which Bonnie was so fond, and which were never cooked to suit her in cafes. They read magazines; Blanche, her fears calmed a little, played solitaire, and romped with her little white dog; Bonnie wrote some new verses and copied some already written. They sent their laundry out; had their cleaning done; and the girls mended and darned. All in all, it was just the usual family reunion, with the exception that Clyde was wanted for three or four murders, which, of course, sounds incongruous.
I've always been glad that they had these few weeks together before they got into such desperate trouble. Blanche went against her will. She was always scared to death. She never wanted to do any of the things she did do, and she never really did anything except sit by and weep and beg Buck to take her home. Her only crime was that she was caught with the Barrows. At this time being with the Barrows was a crime.
When funds began getting low — their combined finances were down to $8 — Clyde decided to do something about it. He took W. D. and started scouting for a place to stick-up. He didn't tell Buck where he was going, but he did tell Bonnie. After he reached the car, he came back and kissed her again. "I hate to leave you, honey," he said.
"Big silly," Bonnie laughed. "I’ll be here when you get back."
"It’s not that," Clyde told her. "But I’ve got a hunch something’s going to happen." I told you he had a sixth sense. He could sense danger before it came. He was full of that feeling this morning — so much so that he hadn’t gone a dozen blocks before he wheeled the car around and went back. "I can smell it," he told W. D. "It’s in the air. We’re not scouting this morning."
He ran the car in the garage and locked the door, and just as he did, the officers arrived on the drive outside. Upstairs in house slippers and negligee, Bonnie was preparing to take the red beans from the fire and put in the corn bread to cook. Blanche was playing solitaire, the dog asleep at her feet, and Buck was lying on the couch, dozing. "It's the law, Bonnie!" Clyde yelled.
Bonnie said afterwards, the things which stood out clearest in her memory concerning this gun battle was the fact that she could smell her precious red beans burning, hear Blanche screaming and running, and the dog barking wildly. Then the guns began roaring all around her. Bonnie grabbed a gun, ran to the window and fired. "But I know I didn't hit him," she insisted. "He ran off down the street. Then before I could fire again a slug came through the top of the window and glass shattered all around me. Buck shoved me down, yelling, 'Get back, for God's sake!'
"Down in the garage W. D. and Clyde were spraying the landscape with their machine guns, and Clyde was yelling commands to me above the awful racket: ‘Get down into the car — you and Blanche — get in the back of the car!’ he called, never stopping with that deadly machine gun. ‘Lie down out of sight — no, take the guns with you, Bonnie — never mind anything else — I’ll be along. Run! For God’s sake, honey, run!’
"I ran, but there was no Blanche to go with me. Frightened to death, she had jerked the door open at the first shot and gone down the stairs, screaming with terror and fear, the little dog behind her. They were both a half block away. Without waiting to change into dress or shoes, I fled down and into the car. I remember Buck had a gun as he came down the steps but I don’t recall his shooting any. Lead was flying all around us, splattering into the walls, sinking into the doors, shattering the windows. Buck and I got in the car. W. D. had been hit in the head, and just as Clyde started to climb into the front seat, he looked down and saw blood streaming from his chest. I remember he stood there a second, gazing down, then whipped back his shirt and said: ‘Can you find it?’ meaning the bullet. I probed the hole hastily with my finger tips, felt the flattened bullet, and with Clyde’s help and a hair pin, pulled it out. It must have bounded back from the wall and struck him, because it wasn’t in deep. Clyde swore furiously and ran around the corner of the garage with his machine gun. When the seconds seemed hours, I went hunting for him. The guns were still cracking and popping. I found Clyde squatted behind the corner of the garage.
" ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried, ‘come and get in the car.’
" ‘Not till I get the dirty rat that shot me,’ he replied. ‘Get the car out and going.�
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"About that time a deputy stuck his head around the corner and Clyde let loose, blowing a big hole in the wall. Whether or not this was one of the officers later reported killed, I don’t know. I only remember that I pulled Clyde’s shoulder and he shook me loose and ordered me to get the car out again.
"I ran back to the car. Buck had got the door open but the officers’ car blocked our escape. W. D. ran out and released the brakes on the other car and gave it a shove. It ran down the drive and across the street, careening into the curb. I remember seeing it skidding around crazily, and that there was a man, all bloody and moaning, lying on the drive in front of us. W. D. started our car, but Buck grabbed his arm and yelled: ‘You’ll run over that man!’
" ‘Hell, who cares?’ W. D. cried. ‘The dirty rat!’
"‘I’ll move him,’ Buck said, and darted out in the hail of bullets and dragged the dying officer to one side. Clyde staggered around the garage just then, running. The firing had never let up an instant. It was hell. I’d never lived through such hell. Every minute seemed like it would be our last. Clyde was wounded, W. D.’s head was spouting blood, Blanche was gone, and the shells were still spatting and snarling at us. Still firing with one hand, Clyde slipped under the wheel and we roared down the driveway. W. D. was taking care of his side of the car with another machine gun. I tugged at Clyde’s shoulder and pointed. ‘Blanche went this way,’ I yelled above the din. Clyde nodded and turned down the street.
"We found Blanche two blocks away from the house. She was still running and sobbing, her face white as chalk and her eyes popping out of her head with fright. The little dog was in her arms. She got in with us in a sort of dazed, numbed way, and sat in the back seat with me. I had W. D.’s head in my lap and was trying to stop the blood which poured from his wounds. Blanche still had the deck of cards gripped tight in her hand, and after I had got W. D. fixed up — I bandaged his head with a piece torn off his shirt — I tried to get those cards out of her hand. I had to work for thirty minutes. The poor girl was petrified with fear, and kept whimpering pitifully: ‘I want to go home — I want to go home!’ Well, didn’t we all?"
Driving like an insane man, Clyde was rolling into Amarillo in less than eight hours, where medicines were purchased for W. D.'s wounds. The officers of three states were now wanting not only Clyde and Bonnie, but Buck and Blanche, and an unidentified man as well. Identification of the first four had been easy, for the group had fled, leaving everything behind. Blanche's purse contained Buck's pardon and their marriage license, and several roles of films, which after being developed, proved to be snapshots of four of the wanted fugitives. In this group was the one of Bonnie, with the cigar in her mouth and the gun on her hip, which was to brand her forever as Clyde Barrow's "cigar-smoking gun moll." Other pictures which par-ticularly outraged the Missouri officials showed various members of the gang posing with Officer Persell's stolen gun. Being dumped in the back end of a car and carried out of town under a blanket had not appealed to Mr. Persell's sense of humor, although Clyde and Bonnie had considered it a great joke. When one remembers the dead men Clyde had already left behind him, I suppose Officer Persell should have been glad that the situation made him only ridiculous and not a corpse. The big man-hunt was on. Both my brothers were being tracked down like animals, and neither would be given the slightest chance, nor shown the least mercy when caught.
Buck's chances of becoming a regular citizen were now gone forever. The chair was waiting for him, also. You can well imagine that ours was not a happy family during this period. We seldom spoke the names of the fugitives, and if someone mentioned them, another would hastily change the subject. Talking would do no good. We knew nothing about them except for a few hastily written words bidding us not to worry and not to believe all that we read in the papers.
They were constantly on the road during this time. Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Iowa, and Illinois — there was never any telling where a letter would be postmarked. They avoided tourist camps and never slept in beds, living, eating, sleeping on the road, often going sixty miles an hour for hundreds of miles before stopping. They camped along little used country lanes in dense underbrush, sleeping always in relays so that someone would be on guard to call out and awaken them.
W. D.'s wound healed in time, with the doctoring they could give it, and so did Clyde's. Neither wound was deep or severe. Their laundry and bathing presented the greatest difficulties. They were particularly sensitive about cleanliness, and Clyde wanted his suits always cleaned and pressed. Often they suffered acutely between washing and bathing days. Getting a bandit's family wash done was a ticklish job. They would usually leave the clothes in some small, sleepy little town, then drive on for a couple of days, circling back to get it. Getting it was the dangerous part. They never knew whether they had been recognized and a trap made for them for their return. Such was their standard of cleanliness that they placed themselves in this danger week after week, in order to be decently clothed.
Since they were denied the use of showers or tubs, bathing was more difficult. When it was freezing weather, they would often find a stream and take turns standing in the icy water with a cake of soap, hastily scrubbing themselves of the accumulated grime of several days, returning to the car, blue and shivering, and dressing while the winds whipped around them. Often they were cold and stiff for hours after these baths. The boys shaved in wayside streams in cold water, and got haircuts in small town barbershops while someone stood guard in a car in front, ready to blow a signal on the horn if danger threatened.
Their food too, presented a problem. Restaurants were denied them, and supplies were purchased in small, isolated towns where the choice was limited to pork and beans, canned soups, cheese and crackers, and canned meats. Bonnie, who loved red beans and cabbage, had little enough of them during these days, for beans take time to cook, and they did not dare make a big fire or keep one going long. Clyde also had to forego his favorite drink, hot chocolate. Occasionally Bonnie would concoct it for him out of canned milk, but he liked it with whipped cream and oceans of marshmallows, which were unobtainable in the places where they shopped.
On the Wednesday after Mother's Day in May, 1933, Blanche came riding into Dallas on a bus. This may have seemed a foolhardy thing to do, considering the Joplin affair and the two murdered officers, but remember that Blanche was not known to the law, and they never had a picture of her till they took one the day she was captured at Dexter, Iowa. She was perfectly safe. She took a taxi and came out to my mother's house. She told us where we were to meet the kids.
We had not seen Bonnie and Clyde for five months, nor Buck since he went to find Clyde. There was a great deal of excitement in the Parker and Barrow families. The usual message about red beans was telephoned and we made ready to go. We were all nervous, eager, and scared to death — so much so that we overlooked taking any food with us, and the whole crowd spent the day without a bite to eat.
While we got the clan together for the trip, Blanche went into town and shopped for some riding boots and breeches, and very nice and trim she looked in them, too. We were to meet Clyde, Bonnie, and Buck near Commerce, Texas, on a country road where there was a bridge over a ravine.
I don't think there was ever a visit filled with so much happiness and sorrow. We had lived through a million hells since last we met, and we had no assurance that we should ever behold their faces again in this life. It was a great deal like visiting those in prison condemned to die. We knew that death was coming eventually, as surely as the sun rose. But we could not know when.
We tried to be gay and nonchalant, and to gloss over the horror of the happenings in the past five months. There were times when we succeeded in laughing merrily over the stories they related to us. Clyde teased Blanche about her newly purchased boots. "They'll be awfully hard to run in, Blanche," he told her. "And running is one of your best accomplishments." Then he related her flight at Joplin with the deck of cards a
nd the dog.
If it seems bizarre and fantastic to the reader that we should laugh about these things, please remember that such happenings were all they had to tell us, and that we had to laugh or burst into hysterical weeping. In fact, I kept an eagle eye on both my mother and Mrs. Parker during the whole day, dreading just such an occurrence, and we headed it off by strategy more than once. Both mothers were suffering; the nerves of both were ragged, and both were heart-broken, graying, and older looking by years.
Blanche retaliated for the dig about running away by relating to us the big spat Clyde and Bonnie had had recently. Bonnie had gathered all her clothes and put them in a paper sack and marched off down the road, "going home to mama," she said.
"You should have seen old Clyde’s face," Blanche laughed. "It was a study. He hadn’t an idea that Bonnie really would leave him. They started fighting about something — I don’t remember what, it was such a little thing — and the row grew and grew till Clyde told her to shut up. That finished matters. Bonnie told him to stop the car and let her out; she was going back to Dallas if she had to thumb it all the way. Grinning all over his face, Clyde stopped the car, and out Bonnie got, gathered up that paper sack and started marching away down the road.
Clyde sat there and laughed and laughed, thinking Bonnie would come back, but she didn't. Pretty soon he started honking the horn; then he yelled at her. Bonnie kept right on going. When Clyde started the car up to catch her, she turned into a corn field and went running down the rows, still lugging that sack of clothes. Buck and I just howled, which didn't help matters. Honestly, it was the funniest thing to watch him chasing Bonnie up and down those rows, begging her to come back, and to hear her answering that she'd never do it — she was going right home to her mama!
"Finally, Clyde caught her and such a fight as they had. He picked her up and brought her back, kicking and scratching and crying. The paper sack was torn and her clothes were scattered from one cornstalk to another. Buck collected them, because Clyde was too busy holding Bonnie in his lap and trying to get her to make up."