History Lesson 
The Whole Shootin' Match
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow grew up on the mean streets of West Dallas. She was a nice girl who wrote poetry and turned cartwheels. He was a jug-eared psychopath. Sixty-six years ago they went down in a hail of bullets in Gibsland, Louisiana.
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Singleton Boulevard, the main drag today, is a jumble of auto repair shops, junkyards, warehouses, cafes, service stations, and small framehouses with "Beware of the Dog" signs out front. The homes and businesses are owned mostly by Hispanics and blacks. The place looked much the same in the thirties, except the main drag was called Eagle Ford Road and the homes and businesses were owned by poor whites. In the decades between 1920 and 1940 the population of Dallas almost doubled as thousands of families were forced off their land by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. They settled in squatters' camps under the viaducts and along the river bottom, living in tents and cardboard lean-tos. Henry Barrow, an illiterate sharecropper, moved his wife, Cumie, and their seven children from the small town of Telico, southeast of Dallas, to a camp on Muncie Street, next to the West Dallas railroad track. Clyde was eleven at the time and never forgot the humiliation of his squatters' camp initiation. He enrolled in the sixth grade at Sidney Lanier Elementary School but quit after about a week, moved in with his older sister, Nell, and took a job at a candy company. Nell spoiled him. Her husband, a musician, taught Clyde to play the saxophone, which, along with guns, became a lifelong obsession. Soon he was supplementing his income by stealing bicycles and hubcaps. Meanwhile, Henry Barrow built a three-room house for his remaining family and hacked out a meager living picking up scrap metal in his horse cart and selling it. When his horse was killed by a car while crossing the Houston Street Viaduct, Henry sued and won a small sum. With the money, he moved his house to a vacant lot on Eagle Ford Road and converted the front room into a service station and store. The building that used to be the Barrows' home and their service station-store stands today at the corner of Singleton and Borger. In the thirties Eagle Ford Road (now Singleton) was a well-known escape route for Clyde and his gang. They called it the back door. After a holdup or during a police chase, Clyde would accelerate whatever car he happened to be stealing across the West Dallas Viaduct, down Eagle Ford Road, across the Trinity's west fork at the old ford, then negotiate the rutted dirt road to Irving and disappear into the vast isolation of North Texas and the Great Plains. Similarly, the Barrow gang used the back door to sneak back into West Dallas when Bonnie could no longer stand another day away from her beloved mother. Clyde maintained favor with the neighbors by distributing large sums of cash, buying not only goodwill but also silence. In one of Bonnie's poems the old neighborhood is celebrated as the Great Divide:
From Irving to West Dallas Viaduct
Is known as the Great Divide
Where the women are kin, And men are men,
And they won't "stool" on Bonnie and Clyde.
Around the corner from the old gas station sits a small frame duplex that was used in the thirties as a safe house for outlaws; on its front porch Clyde blew apart Tarrant County deputy Malcolm Davis, who was a member of a posse that surprised him one night. The home of Barrow gang members Raymond and Floyd Hamilton sits nearby. Up the hill on Fort Worth Avenue, in one corner of a picturesque pre-Civil War cemetery called Western Heights, is the Barrow family plot. Clyde is buried next to his older brother, Marvin "Buck" Barrow, who died after a shootout with the cops in Dexfield Park, Iowa, nine months before Clyde got it. Their joint headstone reads "Gone but Not Forgotten." The headstone is embedded in a foot of concrete to prevent trophy hunters from carrying it away. "Someone used to steal it every Texas-OU weekend," Phillips told us. "One time the police recovered it from the home of a prominent businessman who was using it as a coffee table to entertain his weekend guests."
Bonnie grew up a few miles to the west of the Devil's Back Porch, on the farm of her maternal grandmother, near a dismal company town named Cement City. She attended Eagle Ford elementary school, which stands abandoned on Chalk Hill Road, across from the site of the old cement plant. She was a bright and popular student, winning prizes in essay writing and spelling, a natural show-off who loved playacting and being the center of attention. Famously tenderhearted, she would break a pencil in two and give half to a classmate who couldn't afford one, but she could also be tough. When a boy upstaged her during a school play, Bonnie decked him on the spot. The audience broke into applause, inspiring Bonnie to execute a series of cartwheels and somersaults. Bonnie dreamed of a career as a singer, an actress, or a poet. If she hadn't quit Cement City High after her sophomore year, she might have made it, though chances are we wouldn't know her name today.
Bonnie fretted that people wouldn't understand her, and she was right. J. Edgar Hoover characterized her in his anti-crime books and films as a vulgar, scheming seductress. In the 1958 movie The Bonnie Parker Story, she was a brassy blonde who heaves a frying pan of sizzling grease at "Guy Darrow" in their first meeting. Soon, however, she succumbs to his promises of easy money and fast living. Even the Arthur Penn version paints her as something of a nihilistic tramp. The real Bonnie Parker wasn't interested in money and cheap thrills; she merely had the misfortune to love a man who was. Nor was she a killer. Although Penn's movie shows her as adept with a machine gun, she in fact did not like guns at all. John Neal Phillips' research has turned up just a single incident in which she fired a weapon. She shot herself in the foot while picking up one of Clyde's guns. It is true that she craved attention and respect. She spoke of "my public," but with a sense of humor and a self-deprecation that lets us know she knew this was a one-way trip.
Sometimes her jokes backfired, as when she struck the famous pose with a cigar in her mouth, a pistol in her hand, and a foot cocked on the bumper of a car. These and other photographs were abandoned when the Barrow gang hastily retreated from two apartments they had rented in Joplin, Missouri, in the course of a bloody shootout with the police. After the photograph was published in nearly every newspaper across the country, Bonnie was forever branded as "the cigar-smoking moll." She jumped at every opportunity to set the record straight, assuring a lawman the gang had taken hostage that she was a nice girl and that nice girls didn't smoke cigars.
The final stop on our tour was Bonnie's grave at Crown Hill Cemetery, on Webb Chapel Road north of Love Field. Her headstone is also sunk in concrete. Though none of their names appear there, three people that Bonnie loved dearly share her resting place: her mother, Emma, and her favorite niece and nephew, who died as children. They rest on top of Bonnie, as though sheltered through eternity in her arms. Apparently we were not the only visitors to the grave site that day. Two bunches of fresh flowers rested on the headstone, and nearby were the remains of four or five other bouquets from previous days. People who come here are moved by emotions they can't always identify. They feel a need to say something but words fail. Instead they leave flowers, coins, notes, poetry, even, on one occasion, a deck of playing cards.
Bonnie and Clyde met at a portentous moment in American history. The stock market had just crashed, and banks were closing at an alarming rate. Unemployment was soaring; soon 13 million people would be out of work. Texas and the Midwest were additionally devastated by the worst drought of the century. Bootlegging was one of the few job opportunities available to the working class. After the repeal of Prohibition, robbing banks became a handy alternative. In 1933 the country recorded 50,000 robberies, 12,000 murders, and 3,000 kidnappings. A new breed of gangster was emerging—heavily armed and mobile. Bonnie didn't realize at their first meeting that Clyde was already wanted for robberies in Sherman, Denton, and Waco. All she saw was an attractive man who seemed to like her. She immediately took him home to meet her mother. Clyde was sleeping on Emma Parker's sofa when the cops came in and hauled him away. Bonnie screamed, cried, and beat her hands on the wall, begging the police not to take him. "I thought she was going crazy," Mrs. Parker remembered. While Clyde was awaiting trial, Bonnie visited him in jail and wrote long, passionate letters: "I know you are good and I know you can make good. . . .This outside world is a swell place, and we are young and should be happy like other boys and girls instead of being like we are."
Her first criminal act was a textbook example of love conquering fear and good judgment. She smuggled a .32 revolver, belted between her breasts, into the Waco jail. Clyde used it to escape. He was arrested a short time later and served two years at the infamous Eastham Prison Farm, 25 miles north of Huntsville. Her second attempt at crime was a disaster played as high comedy. It came a few weeks after Clyde's parole, when she accompanied him and Ralph Fults in a botched attempt to rob a hardware store in Kaufman. Soon they were involved in a shootout with a night watchman and fleeing from an armed posse—by mule, by stolen car, and finally on foot. Abandoned by her lover in a drainage ditch, Bonnie spent a night in a one-room dirt-floor jail in the tiny town of Kemp. From there she was transferred to a cell in Kaufman, where she began writing her first poem, "The Story of Suicide Sal." After her release, Bonnie mostly stayed home with her mother or with Clyde's family, while he was out making a living and acquiring a reputation.
Clyde soon escalated from robber to killer. In August 1932 he and Raymond Hamilton had just robbed a packing company in Dallas and were sitting in a stolen car at an outdoor dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma, when a nosy sheriff walked up to ask questions. Barrow's response was to pull his gun and shoot the sheriff, then shoot and kill one of his deputies. Barrow and Hamilton escaped in a volley of gunfire, wrecking their car and stealing several other cars on their way back to Dallas. Bonnie and her grandmother were sitting on their front porch when a member of the gang came with the bad news. Clyde had to make a run for it, and he wanted Bonnie to join him. She did not hesitate. From that night until the day they died, they were never apart for more than a few hours.
Between the summer of 1932 and the spring of 1934, they covered hundreds of thousands of miles, moving up and down the Midwest, robbing, killing, running from the law. Bonnie missed her mother terribly and was prone to crying jags. Clyde developed a system to get messages to their families and arrange clandestine reunions. When Emma Parker telephoned Cumie Barrow and said, "We're having red beans for supper," it was a signal that the kids were headed home. Clyde was manic behind the wheel, wrecking almost as many cars as he stole, but he developed special skills—such as skidding 180-degree turns—that made pursuing lawmen look foolish. He stole nothing except Ford V-8s, the gold standard of fast autos back then. The V-8 could hit 70 miles per hour in second gear and scream past 90 in third. With police officers stuck in four- or six-cylinder Plymouths or Chevrolets, it was no contest.
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