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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By the late fifties, as many as fifty trailers were pulling into the Mathews Trailer Park for the winter. They were a passionate, raucous group—gathering around fires at night to roast entire lambs, drink cheap wine, and sing ancient Gypsy songs—and they took great delight in deceiving the gadje. (Gypsies felt no compunction about lying to the gadje; when they stole from them, they said it was their way of getting revenge for all the years of persecution.) While some men found legitimate work buying and selling scrap metal or repairing furnaces, others pulled off classic Gypsy scams. They’d bring a Gypsy child into a jewelry store, have him swallow jewelry while they were talking to the clerk, and later remove the jewelry from the child’s feces. They’d tell homeowners, usually elderly ones, that they were repairmen who could seal roofs and repair driveways; after the money changed hands, they’d spray aluminum paint or cheap motor oil over the roof or driveway and then be long gone by the time it washed off.
But the majority of Gypsy money came from the fortune-tellers. To draw customers, the fortune-tellers hid the fact that they were Gypsies; the signs outside their storefront parlors sometimes read “Indian Reader” to suggest that they were of American Indian origin, or they gave themselves religious titles (“Sister” or “Reverend Sister”) to appeal to the devout Christian gadje. The fortune-tellers’ goal was to convince their customers that their lives were plagued by a curse—and that only the fortune-tellers had the power to remove it.
Most customers came to the parlors out of curiosity. Others thought these Gypsy women, with their belief in mulé, did have some ability to foretell the secrets of the future. And every now and then there were clients who were so emotionally unbalanced or desperately unhappy that they would do just about anything for a little peace. The fortune-teller could sense the desperation the moment such a client arrived. Sometimes, all she’d have to do is study the client’s palm, sigh, and say, “I see something bad in your hand. Your money—it is cursed.” Or she would attempt what the Gypsies called the bujo—the big swindle. The fortune-teller would give her client an egg to put on her stomach for a period of time, then crack it open. A master of sleight of hand, she would slip a felt spider in the yolk to show the client that an evil spirit had entered her life. Upon seeing it, the fortune-teller would go into a frenzy, chanting, “There is evil in your body! Your life and your money are cursed!” It was astonishing how many gadje would give their “cursed” money to a fortune-teller to be put in a bag and burned or buried or flushed down a commode—unaware that the fortune-teller had switched the bag and was really disposing of a bag filled with paper.
The dictatorial King Joe lorded over the entire fortune-telling community. He made every Gypsy family in Fort Worth pay him a tax of about $100 a month. In addition to his Rolls-Royce, he owned ten fortune-telling parlors, and his home was filled with crystal chandeliers and Louis XIV—era furnishings. If a Gypsy didn’t follow his orders or tried to avoid paying his tax, King Joe had a simple way of getting rid of him. He would go to the police station and file a complaint alleging the Gypsy had robbed him. When the Gypsy heard the police were after him, he had little choice but to pack up his trailer and leave the state. The prospect of jail terrified a Gypsy: He would be separated from his own people and forced to eat and sleep with the gadje in a gadje jail and even be forced to wear gadje prison clothes. And once he got out, no Gypsies would associate with him for weeks or even months because they considered him mahrime.
Although Bucky’s mother, Florence, was King Joe’s older sister, it was no secret that the Mitchells were considered to have less status than the Evanses. “Since he was a little boy, Bucky felt he had to prove his toughness to the Evanses,” said George Evans, who is a nephew of King Joe’s. After getting through the sixth grade—in that era, quite an accomplishment for a Gypsy—Bucky developed a reputation around Fort Worth as a pool shark, and he didn’t hesitate to speak his mind at regular meetings of the Kris, the Gypsy court composed of King Joe and other community elders.
Still, few people expected Bucky to stage a sort of Gypsy version of the Boston Tea Party. In the early seventies Bucky bought a home in Fort Worth and set up a fortune-telling parlor in the front of the house for his wife, Patsy. When King Joe, who was by then in his seventies, came calling for his tax, Bucky stood in his doorway and shouted, “Your taxing days are over!” He declared that King Joe had no right to tax Gypsies because he was no longer doing anything for them. A furious King Joe promptly filed a criminal complaint alleging that Bucky and his brother Johnny had driven up to his house in a gold Lincoln Continental Mark IV and robbed him of $150. But when the police came to arrest Bucky, he said he was nowhere near Joe’s house on the night in question and was willing to take a lie detector test to prove it. In a stunning turnaround, the police then arrested King Joe for filing a false charge.
The news rocketed through the Gypsy community of Texas and beyond: Bucky Mitchell had humiliated the great Evans clan. He made things worse when he moved his family to Dallas, saying that he was going to build a better fiefdom than King Joe’s. The Evanses said that Bucky just wanted his own territory so that he too could charge a $100 tax.
The feud was on, though a mob war it was not. Because Gypsies don’t believe in murder—they think the ghost of a dead person will return to earth to haunt his killers—a Gypsy feud consists more of grandiose posturing and shouting than it does substantive crime. There were a few fistfights between the Mitchells and the Evanses, some rather lame shoving matches at Gypsy parties, and a car chase in which two heavyset Gypsies rammed each other’s cars throughout the night, shouting curses in Romany out their windows. But for all the antagonism that existed between the Mitchells and the Evanses, no one ever was seriously injured—unless you believe one Jumbo Evans, who claimed that a Mitchell temporarily blinded him after hitting him with a roll of quarters. (Unfortunately for Jumbo, the cops decided that he hadn’t been able to see all that well in the first place.)
As far as the police could tell, the whole Mitchell-Evans feud was little more than a series of attempts by members of one family to file criminal charges, which were almost always false, against members of the other family. After paying fat legal fees to stay out of jail, the second family would then file its own false charges to get back at the first family. Initially, the charges were not even all that interesting: One member of the Evans clan told the police that Bucky Mitchell had pointed a pistol at him at a Gypsy meeting; Bucky, in turn, signed a sworn statement that an Evans had taken a shot at him while he was driving through town in his new pickup. But as more family members from around the state were drawn into the feud, the charges became more creative. Freddie Evans, a young Evans leader who lives in Houston, told the police that he had been kidnapped, tied up, and thrown in a van and that his wife was called and told to leave gold coins and a gold watch and other jewelry in her mailbox as ransom; when the kidnappers got the valuables, they tossed Freddie out of the van. Freddie said that even though his kidnappers wore fake mustaches and eyebrows, he was later able to recognize one of them as a Mitchell.
As the years passed, the feud never lost its fervor. The two families even began fighting with each other at funerals. Ceremonies for the dead, known as pomanos, are sacred in Gypsy culture. An empty table is elaborately set and filled with food so that the dead person’s spirit can eat, and Gypsies clean the clothes of the deceased to make him feel at peace. (If there is no forest nearby, they take the clothes of the dead to a dry cleaner and never pick them up, satisfied in the knowledge that they’re pressed and on hangers and circling endlessly on a mechanical rack.) In 1985 the Gypsies gathered at a Fort Worth funeral home to pay their respects to Rose Evans, a 78-year-old Evans matriarch. Her daughter, also named Rose, arrived with her husband, Steve Mitchell, whom she had married before the feud ignited. Sensing there would be trouble, Steve brought along four armed security guards—but a brawl broke out anyway among the 150 mourners. According to an account in the Dallas Times Herald, “chairs, fists and rocks were thrown as the Mitchells fled in their Silver Spur Rolls-Royce.” During the fight, the casket was knocked over, causing poor Rose Evans to roll onto the floor. The Evanses filed “abuse of corpse” charges against Steve Mitchell, claiming that he had snatched a $3,000 diamond bracelet off Rose’s wrist. At a Fort Worth hearing in which bailiffs escorted both families in and out of the courtroom separately, Steve was ordered to pay a $500 fine.
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