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"Come out with me now in the moonlight
Come out with me here alone…"
The Prisoner’s Song
--N. Massey
Back in the Waco County lock-up, and miserable, Clyde was
hastened before a court. If the series of thefts that originally
counted against him -- those committed before the jailbreak
-- would have been treated lightly, his escape at gunpoint and
subsequent flight had sealed his doom. Convicted, a judge punished
him with a 14-year sentence at hard labor and committed him to the
dreaded Eastham Prison Farm Number 2 in Huntsville, Dante’s
Inferno on the Texas plains.
Eastham was a hell hole. John Neal Phillips’ Running With
Bonnie and Clyde relates how guards would draw straws to see who
among them would have the pleasure of beating such and such a
prisoner. From the start, Eastham sent out a message to its new
arrivals -- that Eastham "would be a place so vile as to make
any veteran of its confines dread the consequences should he ever
break the law of Eastham." Any misdemeanor resulted in
sweltering solitary confinement and usually a beating. Work
consisted of cotton-picking and loading from sunrise to sunset under
grueling conditions and under the eyes of scorning sentries.
Homosexuality was high, especially among the "lifers".
This last practice, more than any other, horrified Clyde who was
more than once approached.
His one bright spot was letter day. Because prisoners were
permitted to receive correspondence only from blood family members
or a spouse, Clyde had indicated Bonnie Parker as his wife in the
official status papers that prisoners were required to complete upon
admittance. Her communiqués emphasized her adoration and continued
to encourage him with her prayers and hopes for an early release.
Heartbroken Cummie pleaded with members of the judicial system to
reconsider her wayward son’s severe sentence. One sympathetic
judge, R. I. Munroe, promised to do all he could. Weeks passed, and
the Barrows were given good news: Considering the Barrows' financial
circumstances, coupled with the need for an extra hand to help them
tend their property, Clyde would, considering his good conduct, be
paroled in two years!
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Bonnie and Clyde,
clowning around (AP) |
Unaware that such had prevailed, Clyde determined to do something
that might speed up the parole process by tugging at the sympathies
of the courts. He convinced a fellow prisoner on work detail to
"let the ax slip," cutting off two toes. The ruse worked;
Governor Sterling signed Clyde’s parole on Feb. 8, 1932. Clyde
walked out of Eastham a week later -- on crutches but smiling.
Clyde began seeing Bonnie immediately and their love affair
intensified. But, even in his happiness, he couldn’t shake his
bitterness. Both he and Bonnie interpreted that treatment as just
another example of the government beating the downtrodden into
further submission. While courting Bonnie, he assembled a new gang
of disciples -- thieves and former Eastham prisoners Ray Hamilton
and Ralph Fults -- to take what was due to them...money, if nothing
else. Determined never again to lose sight of her beloved, Bonnie
went along with them on their first nightly cavort, the robbery of a
hardware store in Kauffman, Texas. It was the beginning of a crime
spree, and to her it sounded like fun, adventures, and more than all
else, romance.
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