The Curse of Romeo and Juliet
Frankie Mitchell and Janet Evans want to be together, but their families are feuding. It’s a story as old as Shakespeare—older, in fact, because they’re Gypsies, the children of two prominent Dallas clans, and ancient superstitions guide every aspect of their lives. Even love.
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The living room had the look of a nineteenth-century funeral parlor: There were gold-tipped, rococo-style pieces of furniture, white porcelain lamps, sumptuously draped windows, and artifical flowers on table stands. Against one wall was an elongated couch with dark cushions, and next to it was an oversized wingback chair that resembled a throne. I was mulling over where I should sit when Mrs. Mitchell directed me into the kitchen and pointed to a particular chair at the corner of the kitchen table. Then she disappeared into the back of the house—an area I would never see in all my visits—and returned to the living room with a vacuum cleaner. As I watched, she started vacuuming everywhere I had stepped.
At most Gypsy homes, certain areas are designated for visiting gadje. Often—but not in the case of the Mitchells—the chairs for the gadje are covered in plastic. If drinks must be served, the Gypsies use one set of glasses for the gadje and another set for themselves. For centuries Gypsies have believed that the gadje are mahrime (“unclean”) and that their germs cause many diseases. Spending too much time in the presence of the gadje puts a Gypsy at risk of contamination. If Gypsies move into a home previously occupied by the gadje, they will diligently clean the entire place with bleach, repaint it, and replace the carpets and drapes. There are elderly Gypsies who are so uncomfortable about eating at a gadje-owned restaurant that they bring their own silverware. They will never use public restrooms except to wash their hands—and even then they still can be seen using paper towels to turn on the water faucets.
Suddenly Mrs. Mitchell switched off the vacuum cleaner and said, “Bucky is coming now.” I felt strangely nervous, as if I were about to meet the Gypsy equivalent of a Mafia leader. Several of the Evanses had warned me that Bucky had “soldiers” to protect him, his territory, and his fortune-tellers. A Dallas police detective had told me that Bucky was nicknamed the Fixer because he often came to the police department to help out Gypsies in legal trouble. And that wasn’t all he could do. “This Bucky, he was supposed to have died years ago from cancer—and he is still alive,” marvels George’s brother Bill, who lives in Fort Worth. “Tell me, how can a man cheat death this way unless he made a pact with o Beng?”
“So this is the reporter,” said a cheerful voice. I turned to find a tall but not imposing man in his early fifties (Gypsies never tell how old they are). He was wearing a blue polo shirt, gray slacks, and expensive black leather loafers. “What?” Bucky Mitchell asked with a chuckle. “Did you think I would be in peasant clothes, dancing around a campfire?” “I thought you would look more . . . dangerous,” I said.
He roared with laughter and sat down across the table from me. He seemed as normal as a Rotarian. He told me he was an avid golfer who kept his clubs in the trunk of his Cadillac. He liked watching CNN and old movies. I kept thinking that he was the kind of man I had known all my life.
Then the phone rang. Bucky picked it up, listened in silence for a few seconds, and suddenly launched into one of the most animated conversations I had ever heard. It was carried on entirely in Romany, the Gypsy language. As he bellowed into the phone, he stood up and stalked around the kitchen table like an angry black poodle. In mid-sentence, he slammed down the receiver.
“Sorry, a little Gypsy business,” he said with a shrug.
“A problem with the Evanses?” I asked.
Bucky nodded and then slowly tilted back his head, narrowed his eyes, and gave me the kind of imperious look that theater directors try to coax out of actors hired to play embattled Shakespearean kings. It was a breathtaking transformation. The pleasant fellow I had just met in the polo shirt was suddenly the infamous Rom Baró. “They are trying to destroy me,” he said softly. “But I promise you, my knees will never bow to them. They might try to cut my throat, but I will never bow!”
It was as though I had stepped through a looking glass into a world positively removed from time, filled with characters as comical and uproarious—and as entirely unpredictable—as the Gypsies of lore. When I first saw George Evans, he reminded me of one of those stately old Eastern Europeans who sips coffee in dark cafes. A heavy-featured, formidable man who also is probably in his early fifties, he wears wide-lapelled suits and wide-brimmed hats, and he carries a sturdy black cane decorated with antique gold coins and bracelets.
George is devoted to Gypsy culture: He raised money to create a colorful Gypsy flag—“Until me, there was no flag in the world for Gypsies,” he boasted—and he briefly operated a small local Gypsy museum. And he too is suspicious of the gadje. He never let me come to his house, and he once berated me over the phone when he learned I had visited one of his fortune-telling parlors at a shopping center in Dallas (“Did you ask my permission? No. You are trying to hurt me and my business! You want to hurt the Gypsies!”). It took weeks to negotiate an interview with him; he told me it was part of the Gypsy code that the gadje know nothing about their life. “The more you know, the more you can try to hurt us,” he said. But the knowledge that the Mitchells might get more media coverage than the Evanses finally wore him down. One evening he told me to meet him in the parking lot of a Denny’s next to a highway. When I arrived, he got in my car and ordered me to drive. For ten miles, he had me go down one highway and back up another. Occasionally, he would look behind us to see if we were being followed. Then, after fifteen minutes of aimless cruising, he directed me to Cafe Pacific, the hangout of the society types who live in the ritzy Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas. George chuckled as we got out of the car. Presumably he considered it a great victory that a gadjo (singular for gadje) was going to buy him dinner at such a restaurant.
We were seated at a table next to the proper and soft-spoken Dallas real estate baron Henry S. Miller, Jr., and his wife, Juanita. Within minutes, George’s voice was growing louder, and he began swinging his arms the way all Gypsies swing their arms when they talk. “Bucky Mitchell is mentally crazed for power,” he declared. “He wants to be the Gypsy Al Capone! He knows that if the Evanses bow down to him, all other Gypsies will—and he will think he is the king!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mr. Miller’s perfectly bald head turn a shade of red. A couple of tables away, two elderly ladies’ eyebrows had risen like window shades. Surely, everyone in the place was wondering how such a person could have infiltrated their world.
ALTHOUGH THE GYPSY RACE, OR THE ROM, as they call themselves, probably originated in northern India, legend has it that they are the cursed descendants of Cain, condemned to wander forever without a homeland. In the thirteenth century they migrated to Europe, traveling in gaudily painted horse and wagon caravans—the first dark-skinned people on the continent. But their vagabond lifestyle terrified most Europeans. The Bishop of Paris proclaimed in 1427 that anyone caught having his or her palm read by a Gypsy woman would be excommunicated. In medieval Romania Gypsies were enslaved and bought and sold for the price of a pig, and in England Queen Elizabeth I ordered them all expelled. In countries like Prussia and Sweden Gypsies were hanged on the grounds that their itinerant lifestyle was illegal. Faced with severe penalties just for being Gypsies, they had no choice but to keep moving.
Like other immigrants, Gypsies came to the U.S. in the nineteenth century to find a better life. They traveled from town to town, where the more industrious men tried to make money by trading horses or repairing copper pots and the women knocked on farmhouse doors to see if housewives wished to have their fortunes told. But most Americans considered Gypsies thieves. No news traveled faster through the small towns of Texas in the early years of the twentieth century than the warning, “The Gypsies are coming!” Storekeepers would lock their doors. Parents, believing the rumors that Gypsies were kidnappers, hid their children in their attics.
But as opposed to immigrant groups who eventually assimilated into America’s cultural mainstream, the Gypsies refused to adapt to the ways of the gadje. Bucky Mitchell and George Evans were part of a generation of American Gypsies raised the traditional way: on the road, traveling in a caravan. Their respective grandparents, who came to America together in the early 1900’s, abandoned their European names and took the common American names of “Mitchell” and “Evans.” (Gypsies always have a Gypsy name that they keep secret from the gadje and a gadje name suited for whatever country they happen to be in.) Both George’s and Bucky’s parents traveled throughout the East and then, in the forties, joined separate traveling carnivals, where the fathers ran midway games and the mothers read palms. When the carnivals shut down for the winter, the Mitchells and the Evanses traveled on their own, often meeting up at the small Mathews Trailer Park at the edge of Fort Worth. The trailer park was mostly known as a haven for the Evans family, whose leader, Joe Evans, was at the time one of the few Gypsies in Texas who could competently read and write English. Unlike the illiterate Gypsies, he did not fear the police. In fact, King Joe, as he was known, became famous among American Gypsies in the fifties when he hired an attorney to file a lawsuit that kept the city’s police from harassing Gypsies and illegally shutting down fortune-telling parlors.
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