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.
SHE WAS A STARKLY BEAUTIFUL TEENAGER, with soulful dark eyes and long, thick hair as black as the pelt of a panther. Her name was Janet Evans, and in the late afternoon she would slip out of her parents’ house, a small brick home with signs outside that read “ESP” and “Psychic,” and drive to the Galleria shopping mall in North Dallas, where a stocky, easygoing teenage boy named Frankie Mitchell was waiting for her.
He too had slipped out of his parents’ home, which had an eleven- by fourteen-inch picture of Jesus near the front door and a rectangular “Reader-Advisor” sign in the front yard. Before backing out of the driveway, he would put his red pickup into drive and ease forward a few feet. It was bad luck, he had been taught, to go backward in an automobile before moving forward. And when it came to Janet, Frankie was going to need all the luck he could get.
Together they looked like any other young couple at the mall, strolling past the shops, stopping to eat at Bennigan’s, sometimes slipping into the back of a movie theater. Janet favored sweatshirts from places like Planet Hollywood, Keds, and long denim skirts; Frankie wore NBA team T-shirts, jeans, and black basketball shoes. They never touched, not even to hold hands. But Frankie would lean toward Janet and say that they were destined to be together. After all, they had been born on the same day: August 1, 1979.
“Our parents—they will understand someday,” Frankie would tell Janet.
“Not my parents,” she would reply. When she was with Frankie, she would pour a few drops of her soft drink on the ground, a practice she had been told would pacify the spirits of her dead ancestors. Her mother called them mulé (“ghosts”), and like so many other women in her family, Janet was said to have the gift: She could tell when the mulé were moving. It was clear, said those who knew her, that Janet was on her way to becoming a drabarní, a great fortune-teller who could earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
It was the autumn of 1996, and a stranger would never have guessed that Janet and Frankie, such All-American—looking teenagers, were the youngest children of two of the most prominent Gypsy families in Texas. According to one expert on American Gypsy life, the Evanses and Mitchells were the Gypsy equivalent of the Hatfields and McCoys. For decades they had been facing off at Gypsy weddings, parties, and funerals, flailing their arms operatically and hurling obscenities and choice Gypsy phrases at one another (“You will weep as I have wept!”). Members of one family regularly had trooped into police stations to file assault, armed robbery, or kidnapping charges against members of the other. The Evanses alleged that the Mitchells were trying to burn down their fortune-telling parlors; the Mitchells retorted that they couldn’t drive around town without worrying about one of the Evanses trying to run them off the road. Dark rumors circulated that each family’s elderly matriarchs were at work in the back rooms of their little houses, conjuring up “omens” that would be sent the rival family’s way. Most people are amazed to learn that Gypsies still exist. Once regarded as the wild outcasts of society, Gypsies were a visible part of the American landscape in the first half of the century, crisscrossing the country in their ramshackle car-and-trailer caravans, camping outside towns, and speaking to one another in a language known to no one else. They practiced ancient rituals designed to appease the ghosts and spirits they said were hovering over their lives. They wouldn’t comb their hair on Fridays, which they called the Devil’s Day, and made sure to leave the clothes of their dead—neatly folded—in the nicest spot in the forest. They wore coral shells to protect themselves from what they called the Evil Eye, and they refused to go near bodies of water after dark, believing the waters to be inhabited by the spirits of the drowned. American sociologists who studied them were convinced that they would never survive: Gypsies were too backward for a technologically advanced country, too ignorant. They needed to go to school, give up their myths, and learn to work in American businesses.
Today Gypsies seem capable of blending into almost every facet of twentieth-century life. They speak perfect English, live in the suburbs, shop at nice stores, travel on commercial airlines. But at their core, they haven’t changed at all. In the midst of modern life, they exist mostly in an insulated shadow society, one replete with self-imposed codes of conduct, laws regarding marriage and divorce, and strict rules designed to keep their race separated from the gadje (the Gypsy word for “non-Gypsies”); there are even Gypsy courts. What’s more, although few Gypsies make it past the seventh grade and some cannot tell time, they’ve built an astonishingly lucrative underground economy based entirely on the age-old Gypsy tradition of fortune-telling. Once the province of Gypsy women in small carnival tents or shabby storefront parlors, the new Gypsy fortune-telling includes Gypsy-owned psychic hotline telephone services, and the top Gypsy fortune-tellers now advertise in high-profile tabloids like the National Enquirer and the Globe. “It’s not unusual these days for a good fortune-teller from one of the established families to make half a million dollars a year,” says Roy House, a former Houston police sergeant who is still considered one of the nation’s top authorities on Gypsy crime. “Many of the women make $50,000 to $100,000 even if they are not good at it.”
Of the one to two million Gypsies thought to reside in the United States, perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 are in Texas. Until the seventies, the Evanses were considered the most powerful Gypsy clan in Texas, led by their legendary Rolls-Royce-driving “king,” Joe Evans of Fort Worth. But that was before a young Gypsy named Bucky Mitchell, renowned for his unrestrained speeches at Gypsy meetings, challenged Joe’s reign and established his own fiefdom in Dallas. Since then the Evanses have despised the Mitchells—and no one wants revenge more than the Evanses’ leader in Dallas, George Evans, a proud, garrulous character who wears forties-gangster-style hats and struts around Gypsy meetings like a bullfighter entering an arena.
Bucky and George live only twelve miles apart in the Dallas suburbs, but they have not spoken for years. George openly says that Bucky has made a pact with o Beng (“the devil”) to gain more power. Bucky, in turn, believes George is plotting to have him thrown in jail to destroy his reputation as Dallas’ Rom Baró, or “big man”—the Gypsy leader other Gypsies turn to for advice and protection from the gadje.
It just so happens that George’s youngest daughter is Janet. Bucky’s youngest son is Frankie. “You know our fathers will never let us get married,” Janet would tell Frankie during their dates at the mall last year.
“They’ll understand,” Frankie would reply. “I know they will.”
But Janet could feel the mulé. The mulé, she sensed, knew that trouble was looming.
IN EARLY 1995, LONG BEFORE I KNEW ANYTHING about Janet and Frankie, I set out to enter the world of the Mitchells and Evanses in an effort to understand the Gypsy culture. For months, the endeavor seemed hopeless. Whenever I called their homes, I was told by whoever answered that the person I was looking for was out of town. When I’d call back days later, I was told the same thing. Occasionally, I’d drive to Bucky Mitchell’s one-story home in Irving. It was peculiarly humble: The beige walls needed a paint job, and one of the window screens was torn. On the tiny front porch was the picture of Jesus, with a caption underneath that read “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” The few times I knocked, however, no one answered. When I’d call a few minutes later, a woman with a thick old-world accent would answer the phone and tell me that Bucky was out of town; then she would abruptly hang up. “It’s doubtful they’ll ever tell you anything,” one police officer had warned me. “Gypsies don’t even like people to know they are Gypsies anymore.”
But late that spring, when I heard that the feud was heating up again, I dialed Bucky’s number one more time. The woman put me on hold, and after a few minutes, she told me to be at his house the next day. Apparently, like the good politician he was, Bucky had decided to use the news media to get at his enemies.
At four the following afternoon, I stepped onto the Mitchells’ porch. Before I could knock, the front door opened to reveal Bucky’s wife, Patsy, a plump middle-aged woman in a plain dress. For several seconds she stood silently as her dark eyes studied my face. “When you rang our doorbell those other times, I was in the back room,” she finally said, “but I didn’t have to look to know who you were.”
“You knew who I was?” I asked. I’d been told that Mrs. Mitchell, though now mostly retired, had been a great drabarní in her day. Her customers knew her as Mrs. White. Her business cards and ads had read “Psychic, Crystal and Card Reader … Let Me Help You Obtain Peace of Mind, In Love, Marriage and Business … All Readings are Private and Confidential … Interpret Your Dreams. Call Your Enemies by Name.” Standing in the doorway, I wondered whether this woman really had some sort of psychic ability.
“Okay, perhaps I did not know your name,” she replied, “but I knew you were one of the gadje.” In a dignified manner, her back ramrod straight, she led me into her living room. “Gypsies never knock before walking into another Gypsy’s house. Only the gadje do.”
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