Jeff Guinn Read online

  Henry wouldn’t quit. He kept working the land and supplemented his evaporating income with a part-time job at a brickyard in Telico. This might have made the most marginal survival possible, but it caused another problem.

  Although Henry had to be away from his fields when he was baking bricks in town, the Barrows’ rented land still required just as much labor—constant planting and weeding and picking. Ideally, Cumie could have taken up the slack with the assistance of her entire brood, with the greatest responsibility falling on the oldest. But those children had already begun leaving the farm for the city.

  These weren’t unexpected desertions. Jack and Artie and Nell had seen the never-ending pressure and poverty their parents endured. For young people like them, farming now seemed like a near-suicidal choice. Cities promised a better living, and, better still with their bijous and nightclubs and shops and restaurants, fun, something that seemed permanently absent now from impoverished country life.

  Jack left first, marrying a girl named Drusilla. They moved north to Dallas, where Jack set up a small mechanic’s shop in the back of their house. He had a knack for repairing any kind of machinery or motor. All the Barrow boys did. Drusilla used another part of the house to operate a small beauty parlor. More and more lah-de-dah city women wanted stylish hairdos and manicured nails. Drusilla was smart enough to take advantage of that, and soon afterward Artie and Nell decided they would do the same. They moved to the city, too, and trained as beauticians. Nell settled in Dallas like Jack and found work in a hotel beauty shop. Artie lived in Dallas awhile—Nell would brag that her sister was Dallas’s first woman barber—then moved north to the Texas town of Denison, where she married a newspaperman and opened her own beautician’s shop. And when Jack got his mechanic’s business going, Buck left home, too. He promised he would go to work for his brother and learn the trade. Cumie probably had her suspicions, but she couldn’t stop him. It was arranged for Buck to temporarily move in with Cumie’s sister, a widow named Belle, who had a place in Dallas. Beyond that, all his mother could do was pray.

  She and Henry were left with rented acres that couldn’t provide a living and three remaining children—Bud, Flop, and Marie—who still had to be fed and clothed. It may have seemed things couldn’t get worse, but another unpleasant surprise followed. In 1920, just as cotton prices fell to their lowest, some Ellis County farmers discovered boll weevils devastating their already nearly unsellable crops. There were also reports of cotton root rot, a soil-generated disease.

  Henry and Cumie Barrow were not quitters. In three decades of marriage they’d labored hard and honestly, doing their best to live as good Christians and never expecting or asking for help from anyone but themselves. When things hadn’t worked out in one place, they’d moved on to another. But the many years of honorable effort only emphasized one more reason why their farming dreams were about to end.

  Cumie and Henry were in their forties. Four of their seven children had already left the farm for the city, and there was no reason to doubt the remaining three would go as soon as they were old enough. In their declining years, which usually came upon undernourished, overworked country folk sooner rather than later, Henry and Cumie would be physically unable to tend land all by themselves, even if through some miracle cotton prices shot up again and the boll weevils took their devastating presence elsewhere. A means had to be found to support themselves in their old age, and it couldn’t be discovered out in the country. It wasn’t the fate Henry and Cumie had wanted, but they had no other options left. Just as they’d done several times before, they would load the wagon, hitch up the old white horse, and move along. This time, though, they’d go to the city, where a hardworking man like Henry had a better chance, maybe his only remaining chance, to provide for his family. Their goal now was survival. They had to last long enough in the city for Henry to get himself started in some small business.

  They weren’t sure what kind of business that might be, but there was never any doubt which city they’d go to. It wasn’t far away, and Jack, Artie, Nell, and Buck were already there. In desperate times like these, the comfort of being near their children meant more to Henry and Cumie than ever. So in 1922 they took twelve-year-old Bud, nine-year-old Flop, and four-year-old Marie and moved thirty miles north to Dallas.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Devil’s Back Porch

  Dallas was a fine place to live in 1922, and not by accident. From its founding in 1841 on the east bank of the Trinity River, civic leaders planned for orderly, controlled growth. Each of its rivals for supremacy among major Texas cities—Houston with its haphazard sprawl, Austin with its rowdy state legislature and university, San Antonio with its messy cultural and architectural ties to Mexico—exhibited the flaws of spontaneity. There was nothing spontaneous about Dallas. Its economic heart was progressive industry, evolving from sawmills to cotton gins to manufacturing. Major rail lines intersected in Dallas, making it the state hub of travel and trade. Downtown Dallas had its first skyscraper in 1907, and was the home of one of the nation’s twelve Federal Reserve Banks. Banking was Dallas’s religion, and capitalism was its creed.

  Problems were solved cooperatively by the wealthy leaders who knew best, always with a constant view to the future. A series of floods plagued the city, and in 1908 the Trinity swelled until five residents died, four thousand were left homeless, and property damage reached $2.5 million. Dallas businessmen banded together, raised money, and hired renowned St. Louis landscape architect George Kessler, who proposed grassy levees to divert the river and hold back floodwater, and bridges to safely and attractively link the city to the outside world. The levees and bridges were promptly built, and Kessler was summoned back a few years later to upgrade his original plan to include parks and playgrounds, and better, wider streets.

  Dallas leaders’ vision encompassed more than economic prosperity. They wanted a vibrant, sophisticated city as well as a rich one. Those with the price of admission could attend performances by the Dallas opera or symphony. A dozen different theaters presented the hit films of the day. On Dallas’s south side, Fair Park spread over more than a hundred acres, with movie theaters, some of the first rental cars in the country available for pleasant drives along the park’s shady lanes, and even a skating rink. Every fall, the State Fair of Texas took over the park and treated Dallas residents to carnival rides, livestock exhibits, and the latest entertainments. Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley performed there. Once on “Colored People’s Day,” Booker T. Washington took the stage and gave a rousing speech.

  Dallas had immense pride in its plethora of downtown shops and hotels, in Southern Methodist University with its graceful campus, and, perhaps most of all, in the quality of people choosing to live within its carefully controlled boundaries. The goal of its leaders, many believed, was to build a city that rivaled San Francisco or even Athens or Paris as a cultural mecca. They did not want Dallas thought of as just another “Texas” town. It must reflect modern, forward-looking attitudes. Cowboy imagery in any form was anathema to them.

  Population growth had, for decades, been much on the minds of Dallas power brokers. To remain a truly dynamic city, recognized as such across the nation, Dallas needed a constant influx of new residents—investors to keep its economy stimulated, taxpayers to fund its ongoing civic improvements, philanthropists to underwrite artistic endeavors, and affluent consumers to keep afloat the sort of high-end shops, nightclubs, and restaurants that Dallas wanted to boast. In 1905, businessmen formed the 150,000 Club, with the goal of doubling the city’s population to that figure by 1910. They missed by about fifty thousand, and began incorporating a few of the more acceptable suburbs. The chamber of commerce stepped up its efforts to publicize Dallas’s charms to the right sort of potential residents. One chamber publication claimed that the Dallas businessman “conducts his large enterprise in impressive, modern office buildings, goes home to his attractive residence, with a landscaped lawn that enhances the beauty of a wide
, tree lined street; takes his exercise on the sweeping, sporty golf courses, the hard, smooth tennis courts, or the sandy beaches that his own public spirit has created; pays his homage to God and educates his children in magnificent churches and schools that are second to none in beauty and facilities.”

  And, gradually, it worked. By 1910 Dallas had doubled in area to about eighteen square miles. It built a magnificent zoo, downtown municipal buildings, new railroad terminals, and the Houston Street Viaduct, described as “the longest concrete bridge in the world.” The city acquired expansive White Rock Lake Park, and the “sandy beaches” described in chamber of commerce puffery became reality. Dallas’s population topped 150,000 in 1920, and kept climbing. There was opportunity for young arrivals like Jack, Artie, and Nell Barrow, whose skills in mechanics and hairdressing were needed. They were welcome in Dallas because they could, in their very minor, supporting-role ways, help move things forward by making life a little easier, a little more comfortable, for the people who really counted.

  But Henry Barrow had no such potential. Arriving by archaic horse and wagon in 1922, broke and desperate with a wife and small children, illiterate and without any discernible skills that might contribute to the community, Henry was the sort of interloper Dallas leaders didn’t want cluttering up the civic path to further progress. He and his farm-fleeing ilk were seen as comprising another flood spilling into town, this one consisting of destitute families rather than overspill from the Trinity River. But its effects, they feared, would be every bit as devastating.

  It was understood that Dallas, like every major city, needed poorly educated laborers to work for low pay in menial jobs, from sweeping streets to working on the line in factories. But there were only so many of those jobs, and it was important that the less-desirables applying to fill them didn’t too far exceed the number of low-end jobs available. Refugees of the East Texas farm crisis didn’t care whether they were welcome or not. The slightest chance for employment in Dallas was better than the even more minuscule odds of survival back in the country. It took Dallas eighty years to reach its population goal of 150,000 in 1920. The next 100,000 arrived within five or six, and most of them weren’t the kind of residents that Dallas wanted.

  At first, civic leaders tried to stem the tide by indirect means. As early as July 1920, there were meetings about “stemming the tide of immigration from farm to city.” It was suggested that tenant farmers be taught how to make their rented acres more productive, but that missed the point. The tenants couldn’t sell the crops they were already raising. Forums were held to allow disgruntled farmers the opportunity of explaining what they would need to stay in the country and not invade Dallas. “Better crop prices” was something city leaders couldn’t deliver. Then came meetings to identify empty buildings that could be used to provide temporary shelter to the unwelcome influx, but these raggedy bumpkins showed no intention of passing through and inflicting themselves on less elite communities. They wanted to stay in Dallas.

  And there Dallas differed again from other Texas cities. Like all the rest—Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, Fort Worth just thirty-five miles to the west—Dallas was soon overrun. But unlike the others, Dallas did not gradually assimilate the newcomers. It had a special place for them instead.

  The bridges and levees of Dallas had been built to protect and beautify the area east of the Trinity. The west side of the river, the floodplain there, was unincorporated semimarsh where impoverished newcomers could squat for as long as they liked, out of sight and mind of nice people. Two adjacent communities sprang up: Cement City, named for the plants whose manufacturing operations supplied jobs, albeit low-paying, backbreaking ones, along with pollution; and West Dallas, associated with no industry at all, an appalling collection of ramshackle shanties and tent camps set up along the west bank of the Trinity. Every city had its slums, but in all of Texas, West Dallas was recognized as the worst. Its fetid air and swarming bugs, open sewers and garbage-strewn blocks bisected by narrow dirt streets contributed to dozens of deaths annually from tuberculosis and pneumonia. Even a few drops of rain turned those dirt streets to mud: West Dallas was known as “The Bog” because it often was. In 1922, nobody knew exactly how many people were there, or cared, so long as they weren’t across the river in Dallas ruining its carefully crafted image. In 1948, when a social service agency in the city finally got around to the first formal survey of West Dallas, its estimated population was 24,150.

  Dallas had tough vagrancy laws in place to keep out the riffraff. Jack, Artie, and Nell had no extra room for their parents and three young children, let alone an old horse and older wagon. Henry and Cumie couldn’t find a pleasant spot inside the city limits to set up camp without inviting arrest. So they went to West Dallas, and joined hundreds of other impoverished families in a campground a few dozen yards from the river and near the railroad tracks. It was the most primitive of places. There was one well, where everyone drew marginally potable water, and a few outhouses. Many families lived in tents. Henry and Cumie Barrow had no tent. They slept with the kids under their wagon, the horse tethered alongside them.

  They were very hungry, with little money for food. When there was something to fix, Cumie cooked out in the open on an old-fashioned camp stove. The older children undoubtedly tried to help, but mostly the Barrows had to depend on the Salvation Army. Every day, its wagon would appear at the camp, and representatives would distribute sandwiches of “West Dallas Round Steak”—thin discs of bologna between slices of stale bread. Sometimes even bologna was scarce, and plain bread had to do. On holidays, children were given oranges. The oranges were the only Christmas gifts the Barrow kids received.

  During the week, many of the adults in camp would go out looking for work, usually in Dallas’s factories-cum-sweatshops, or else in manufacturing plants in Cement City or on the other side of the river. They walked to these places; the Dallas factories were five or six miles away, but West Dallas job seekers couldn’t afford the bus. Downtown Dallas itself was less than a mile away across the viaduct. Its skyscrapers gleamed in vivid contrast to Cement City’s smokestacks, which spewed thick, foul smoke. The lucky few from the wrong side of the river who found jobs invariably didn’t make enough to escape West Dallas for the inviting environs of the so-near city. Once you arrived in West Dallas, you usually stayed.

  Henry Barrow didn’t have the luxury of thinking long-term. His family needed income, fast. Other fathers living in the campground made the rounds of the factories and begged for jobs, but Henry’s preference for working in the open air and answering to no boss other than himself remained. Besides his own work ethic, he had two other assets. So each morning he hitched up the horse and took his wagon over the bridge into Dallas, where he spent the day picking up scrap metal of any kind and hauling it to nearby foundries, which for pennies on the hundred pounds bought the scrap to be melted down. It was a hard way to make a meager living. Dallas city streets were now intended for cars, not horses. The Texas summer sun was scorching, and in winter Dallas endured “northers” blowing unimpeded all the way down from Canada. Nice Dallas businesses didn’t like a ragamuffin junk man picking through their trash, and every time Henry did hit a big haul, he had to load everything into the wagon and unload it at the foundries all by himself. On slow days, he guided the old white horse up and down residential streets, looking for discarded cast iron skillets and similar bits of metal household effluvia. Other people’s trash had become the Barrow family’s livelihood.

  But almost every day Henry came back to the camp with a little money. The growing children needed clothes, and the family diet couldn’t consist entirely of Salvation Army sandwiches. The Barrows acquired a tent, which made for slightly more comfortable sleeping quarters than underneath their wagon. Cumie spent only what she absolutely had to. Anything left over, even if only a few pennies, went for wood, shingles, and nails. In the few daylight hours when he wasn’t “rag picking,” the pounding of Henry’s hammer rever
berated through the camp. He was building a house, really just a cramped shed, but at least something to offer more protection from the rain and wind. It took a long time, but gradually the frame of a structure appeared, then walls and a roof added on literally inch by inch. At some point, no one recalls exactly when, the Barrows moved into their boxy house right there on the campground, sheltered by a roof when almost everyone else had only tent canvas above their heads.

  While Henry sold scrap metal and bought wood, Cumie spent her days watching over Flop and Marie. Bud was splitting time between the camp and Uncle Frank’s farm in Corsicana. Mostly, he was in the country. It was a better place for him than West Dallas. The campground was congenial. Everyone there was in the same desperate straits, and Cumie even made a new best friend named Tookie Jones, a widow who had three sons almost exactly the same ages as her own three youngest. But there was no denying that West Dallas was essentially a lawless place. Many families, some thought most, supplemented the little they could earn honestly with shadier income. People in the camp generally didn’t steal from each other—they had so little, what was the point? But across the river, other families’ chickens, knickknacks, and even cars were considered fair game. Victims on the east side of the Trinity gave West Dallas another nickname: “The Devil’s Back Porch.” Because it was outside the official city limits, West Dallas was supposedly beyond the jurisdiction of the Dallas police department, but the city cops prowled the campground anyway, accusing and arresting whomever they pleased. “Suspicion,” in those days, was sufficient in the eyes of the courts for the police to take in anyone for questioning. The Dallas County sheriff’s department, which did have the technical authority to act in West Dallas, also made its share of arrests. Its deputies seemed to assume, not without cause, that almost every West Dallas family included thieves.