My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (35 page)

W. D. Jones, Houston, Texas, 1969. (Photograph by Kent Biffle, Phillips Collection)

One day in May 1984, Blanche turned on the television and saw someone she had not heard from in half a century. Ralph Fults was being interviewed by a local Dallas station on the fiftieth anniversary of the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde. “I thought he was dead,” Blanche said. “I thought they hanged him over in Mississippi. The last time I saw Ralph was in the Kaufman County jail after he and Bonnie got caught near Kemp. Clyde took me down there to tell them he had a plan to bust them out of jail. I hadn’t seen him since.”
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Blanche recalled thinking as she watched Fults on the television, “That’s not Ralph Fults! He was this tall, good-looking, twenty-something-year-old fellow—not an old man. And then I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I guess we’re all a lot older now.’” She also remembered that Fults “was very handsome, but that kid, W. D. Jones, was the best-looking one of all!”
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Blanche got Fults’s number and phoned him. She found out he was working on a book about Bonnie, Clyde, Buck, Raymond, and all the others. She paid him a visit, driving up to his home in Mesquite in “The Bomb” to reminisce and share thoughts. She found that he had never received a death sentence in Mississippi for the bank robbery he and Raymond Hamilton had staged. It had been erroneously reported that way. He had received
instead two fifty-year terms, but was pardoned during World War II. He married, raised a family, and managed to stay out of trouble. He was a grandfather who had spent a great deal of his post-prison time speaking free of charge to any church or civic group that wanted him about the wholly unglamorous, very real world of juvenile delinquency and adult criminal behavior—and how to avoid such a life. His book, he told her, would address the same issues.

Back at her trailer, Blanche dug out her own memoir. She knew that among her many other skills, her friend Esther had once worked for a publisher. And in her new capacity as special assistant to the Dallas district clerk she had access to one of the very first computer word processors, the type that filled up half a room and used 8-inch floppy disks. “Do you think you could do something with this?” Blanche asked her. Esther thought she could and took the manuscript with the idea of first transferring it to disk. Nevertheless, something made Esther forget completely about the manuscript for another fifteen years.

A short time after turning her manuscript over to Esther, Blanche got up from her chair and suddenly fell to the floor of her trailer. Her right leg had snapped. In the hospital it was determined she was in the early stages of some brittle bone disease and that her leg required surgery and a long period of convalescence to heal properly. After the surgery, Esther and Rhea Leen moved Blanche temporarily into a subsidized assisted-care facility in Oak Cliff, just across the river from downtown Dallas. It was then easy for both women, especially Esther who worked close by, to share the task of helping Blanche during her recovery. Rhea Leen and Esther alternated days and nights, visiting Blanche, making sure her needs were being met, bringing her what she wanted (including a large television set they both carried up several flights of stairs to Blanche’s room). The experience marked the first time Rhea Leen and Esther met. Thereafter their meetings were brief, usually one passing the other as their respective shifts, so to speak, changed.

Others visited Blanche in Oak Cliff as well. Writer Kent Biffle and his wife, Suzanne brought her a few cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes. Biffle recalled her obvious pain as she lay in traction with raw flesh exposed around a pin inserted in her leg. Nevertheless, he said she was always jovial and up for a visit.
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Eventually she was able to go back to her trailer. Knowing she was going to be confined to a wheelchair for some time, Moon constructed a ramp outside the door and Esther and Rhea Leen rearranged Blanche’s trailer to make it easier for her to move around in it. However, when they brought
her home she was obviously displeased, not with the ramp, but with the rearrangement of her trailer. She was not unpleasant about it, but she made it clear she wanted everything back the way it was. To her memory that was the only time Esther ever saw Blanche angry, and even that did not last long.

Blanche spent her days wheeling around, putting food outside her trailer for any wild animal that might wander by, her “critters” she called them, and making clothes for her doll collection. Esther and Rhea Leen saw the critters and dolls as substitutes for the children Blanche could never have.

Blanche’s health never improved. She was soon diagnosed with cancer and spent the next four years in and out of hospitals, undergoing debilitating surgery, radiation treatments, and chemotherapy. Slowly she deteriorated. Her final days were spent in intensive care in Tyler, Texas. It was while she was there that her ninety-three-year-old mother paid her a visit. How she found out where her daughter was, no one knew, but Blanche was not pleased. Even when it was clear that she had terminal cancer, she wanted nothing to do with her mother, refusing Esther’s offer to contact her. Described as an ill-tempered, hard-looking, and extremely overweight woman who kept sacks of money tied in various places under her dress, Lillian stayed at the hospital for only a short time, apparently sensing she was not wanted.
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She went to her daughter’s funeral though.

Blanche Caldwell Barrow Frasure died on Christmas Eve, 1988. She was buried on a cold, damp winter’s day at Grove Hill Cemetery on Samuell Drive in Dallas, the same place LC Barrow had been buried. Artie and Nell were also buried there. Moreover, in a little more than four years Ralph Fults would join them, followed a few weeks later by Jean. In 1999, Marie Barrow, the last principal of the inner circle of Bonnie and Clyde, was also buried at Grove Hill.

Across town, on the hill above West Dallas and just a few feet from Fort Worth Avenue, Clyde, Buck, Jack, Henry, and Cumie Barrow all lie together. Still farther away, near Love Field, Bonnie, her mother, and two nephews lie in three of four Parker plots purchased by Billie Jean in 1945. Only one of the plots, Bonnie’s, is marked.

After Blanche’s funeral, Esther, executor of the meager estate, and Rhea Leen began cleaning out the trailer and neighboring shed. They found coffee cans filled with used nails that Blanche had straightened and stored away for future use, shelves filled with rusted canned goods with no labels, a freezer full of meat and other items that were so old they were, as Rhea Leen put it, “beyond freezer burn. They were freezer dead!”

Blanche and ukelele in prison. On special occasions, such as visitor days, the inmates were not obliged to wear the prison uniform. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

Both Rhea Leen and Esther understood what they saw, however. It was the influence of the Great Depression, recycling, thriftiness, stocking up to the point of hoarding for fear of being without. Rhea Leen remembered tough times with Jean, before Moon came along. She remembered coming home from school before Jean got off work to a cold, empty house, and finding only one can of soup in the cupboard, heating the soup and eating only half of it, saving the rest for her aunt. Esther remembered being shunned by other children when her father took a job as a janitor because his savings had been wiped out in the crash of 1929 and there were no other jobs. He always distrusted banks thereafter, refusing to do business with them, preferring to bury his money in the yard. He was not alone.

Blanche never forgot the impact of the Great Depression in her life, and she never forgot those who shared her life then, no matter how difficult and painful the memories, and no matter how much those around her, or even she herself, tried to suppress those memories. Four years before her death she said, “I talk of these incidents [with Bonnie and Clyde] as if I were not a part of any of it, like a character in a book I once read. It’s the only way I keep from going crazy. Maybe we were all pretty young then, but we knew what we were doing. Clyde never held a gun to my head. I was there because I wanted to be! What’s that they say in the movies? ‘The show must go on!’ Well, life goes on.”
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Blanche and Buck Barrow, 1931. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

At some point in the process of cleaning the trailer, Rhea Leen looked at Blanche’s big recliner chair and remembered seeing her sitting there just before she entered the hospital for the last time. Her feet were resting on a wooden stool made for her by Clyde Barrow while he was in prison. On a TV tray in front of her was an intricately hand-tooled wooden jewelry box, also made by Barrow. Her name was carved on the lid. She had removed all her jewelry and spread it out before her—all of it. She was looking at the pieces carefully and trying them on, as if for the last time.

Blanche had lived most of her life in the shadow of four months in 1933. In addition, the pain of mortality was with her constantly, always pinching her back to reality. Nevertheless, in the end the only things that really seemed to matter were her friends, her critters, her dolls, and a few bits of paste and metal, those and the memories they carried with them.

Rhea Leen and Esther returned to the task of sifting through Blanche’s life, examining boxes of receipts dating back decades, canceled checks and bank statements, rusty nails and canned goods—and one other thing, a poem:

Sometimes

Across the fields of yesterday
She sometimes comes to me
A little girl just back from play
the girl I used to be
And yet she smiles so wistfully
once she has crept within
I wonder if she hopes to see
the woman I might have been—

—Blanche Barrow, 1933

Blanche, 1932. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

Appendix A

Reproduction of Two Pages from the Original Manuscript

The passage on the following two pages replicates two pages from the original manuscript, as Blanche Barrow composed it and before the editor “regularized” it. For comparison, see pages 24–27 of this book.