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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But the Evanses weren’t giving up. Because George wouldn’t agree to a bride-price, Janet had to be returned to him. Janet later told me that she went home because she thought her father would eventually come around and let her marry Frankie, but the moment she arrived back at her house, in mid-November, her parents were waiting for her with the car running. They put her in the back seat and started driving north: George supposedly had found a family in the Midwest with a son who would be willing to marry her. According to the police, when George stopped in Oklahoma to get gas, Janet dashed out of the car, told the attendant she was being kidnapped, and begged for protection. The police arrived and decided to take Janet to a juvenile facility until the matter was resolved.
Now Janet was faced with a bigger problem. At the detention center she was put in a room with gadje girls and told she would have to sleep in one of the gadje beds. Janet became nearly hysterical: She couldn’t stay with gadje. As openmouthed gadje girls looked on in amazement, Janet busted a window, crawled through it, and fled into the night. She called Frankie collect, and he came to get her. The lovers were reunited.
At that point, according to Bucky, the leaders of the Kris ordered the two fathers to agree to the marriage. Nothing, one Gypsy elder said, was going to keep Janet and Frankie apart: They would simply elope again and start the whole process over.
Bucky said that a bride-price was agreed upon through the Kris and that he paid George. George, however, told me he received no payment; thus, there was no marriage. Regardless, Bucky rented a hotel ballroom in downtown Dallas for New Year’s Eve and invited 150 guests to celebrate the traditional Gypsy wedding of Frankie and Janet. He also hired private security guards to make sure the Evanses were kept out. Throughout the day, the hotel’s management received anonymous phone calls from men saying that the hotel would be bombed if the Mitchell party was allowed to take place. But the “wedding” went off without a hitch. (Because Gypsies refuse to take out civil marriage licenses, their weddings are not considered official marriages by the State of Texas.)
Janet wore a new dress of white lace; Frankie wore a tuxedo with a red sash, the Gypsy sign for health and happiness. As the ceremony began, a red veil was put on a long red stick, decorated with ribbons, and carried around the room by a group of unmarried girls. As everyone gathered in a circle around Janet, the stick was lowered, and the veil was removed and placed on her head. Then members of the Mitchell family escorted Janet across the ballroom, a sign that she had moved from one family to another.
Afterward Bucky walked around the ballroom carrying a large loaf of French bread, known as the dowry loaf. As their wedding presents to Frankie and Janet, Gypsy men pulled out their billfolds and stuffed money into the dowry loaf. Then everyone drank wine and hard liquor. A deejay played American pop music, and when it came time for Frank Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York,” Bucky got out on the floor and performed an old-fashioned Gypsy dance, putting his arms in the air, snapping his fingers, twisting his shoulders back and forth. Frankie was embarrassed, strangely enough: Of all the things about Gypsy life that might have struck him as bizarre, the only thing that seemed to bother him was his father’s dancing.
IN MARCH I MET GEORGE AND A GROUP of other Evanses at a Pappadeaux’s restaurant. They had brought their briefcases filled with papers, and their eyes were blazing. George told me that he knew Janet did not love Frankie and that she was being beaten and drugged at the Mitchell home. “She’s like Patty Hearst!” he said. “She has been brainwashed, and now she’ll do anything the Mitchells say. The Mitchells made her turn against the family. . . . My daughter is in the middle of everything, she is a confused child, and I can’t do anything about it.”
“If you believe so many horrible things are happening to Janet,” I asked, “why don’t you barge into the Mitchell house and save her?”
George impatiently shook his head, as if I still didn’t understand anything about the feud. He told me the Mitchells were just waiting for him to come to their house so they could have him arrested for trespassing. “If I call over there, they will try to have me arrested for harassment. I asked the Irving police to go with me to see my own daughter, and they said, ‘No, handle your problem in your own Gypsy courts.’”
It was clear the feud would never end. Since Janet and Frankie’s elopement, the Evanses had been trying to get gadje politicians to support them in their fight. A group of Evanses had traveled to Austin to warn state representatives about Bucky Mitchell. An Evans delegation appeared before the city councils of Fort Worth and Irving, where speakers read a statement describing the Mitchells as a “Gypsy gang” involved in “organized crime.” The council members, none of whom had any idea who the Evanses and the Mitchells were, tried to look concerned. “I promise you, things are about to happen—big things—that will bring Bucky Mitchell down,” George Evans told me. “A man who makes a pact with the devil cannot live a happy life.”
A few days later, when I passed on George’s comments to Bucky, he laughed, but then he grew solemn and knocked rapidly on the table with his fist while making a kissing sound with his mouth. (If the devil is mentioned in their presence, Gypsies often make particular noises to keep him away.) “I feel pity for that family,” he said. “They still wish they were the kings. Their day is over.”
As Bucky and I talked, Janet and Frankie walked into the kitchen to eat Whataburger hamburgers. (It is traditional in Gypsy culture for the youngest son to stay with his parents to take care of them as they age.) Janet rolled her eyes at the mention of the feud: To her, it was a silly thing the men did to pass the time while the women made money telling fortunes. Frankie, of course, was already in the thick of it. He had just learned that one of Janet’s brothers had filed a complaint with the police saying that Frankie had thrown a hairbrush at him at a nightclub. “These Evanses are crazier than ever,” Frankie said. He glanced at Janet. “Some of them are.”
When I brought up the subject of their romance, Frankie and Janet got flustered and excused themselves from the room. “Normal teenagers,” Bucky said with a laugh and a wave of his hand. And that, I thought, was that: the end of the most passionate chapter in the history of the Mitchell-Evans feud.
But as I should have learned long before, nothing in Gypsy life, and especially in this Gypsy feud, is ever predictable. In the first week of May George called me at home to announce triumphantly, “She’s back home! She is with us! What did I tell you? These Mitchells could not keep her kidnapped forever!”
I quickly called Bucky, who sighed and said that Frankie and Janet had gotten in a spat a few days earlier and that Janet had stormed out of the house and driven back to her parents. “These fights happen all the time with young headstrong Gypsy couples. She’ll be back in a few days.” In fact, added Joey, Frankie and Janet were already talking again on the phone. “Janet is telling Frankie she’ll come back if he’ll pay her more attention. You have to remember, they’ve only been together three months. They’re just kids. This kind of Gypsy fighting is no big deal.”
Still, the Gypsy community was buzzing with rumors about what would happen next. Some Gypsies said George would again try to take her away and marry her off to another Gypsy boy. Others said it was too late: Janet would not be valuable on the Gypsy marriage market because she had been attached for so long to Frankie. Although George wouldn’t let me interview Janet, he declared that anything she had told me in earlier interviews about her alleged marriage was inaccurate because she had been “under the drugged influence of the Mitchells.” In a rare concession, however, George did admit that he wasn’t sure how long Janet would stay at his home. “I don’t know. She might go back over there. Her mind has been so corrupted by them.”
Perhaps, I thought, she had returned for a while to her old home simply because she just missed her parents, especially her mother, who had taught her everything about the old Gypsy ways. I remembered how Janet had once told me that after she had come back from Houston with Frankie, her mother wouldn’t speak to her. “She thinks I’ve gone crazy,” Janet had said, and she blinked a few times to keep her composure—a beautiful girl trapped in a feud that she would never understand. “They’re like pawns, she and Frankie,” said Bobby Mitchell, the Gypsy who has walked away from Gypsy life. “It’s tough enough being a young Gypsy couple in this world, and when you’re being pulled by your families in all directions, it’s hard to stay together.”
In my two years with the Gypsies I struggled to understand their ancient passions and bewilderingly primitive taboos. There were many times when I thought they were not all that different from the rest of us. After several visits to the Mitchells, they began to let me sit in different chairs around the house, and on one of my last visits, the dignified Patsy had even offered me a pinch of johai, a greenish bread that the Gypsies eat on special occasions to ward off evil spirits. “May you have good luck in your life,” she said in her old-world accent. “Good luck and many children.”
But as I got ready to leave, I had no illusion that I would ever really know their world. Bucky had gotten on the phone and was arguing to someone in Romany—no doubt another fight over the Evanses—and Patsy had disappeared into the back of the house. By the time I closed the Mitchell’s front door behind me, I could hear the whir of Patsy’s vacuum cleaner going over the very spots where I had stepped.
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