My Life with Bonnie and Clyde by Blanche Caldwell Barrow, John Neal Phillips Page A

stop any placehe felt like. He wanted to know how I would get home. I told him not to worry, that I could take care of myself. I said I didn’t need anyone to take care of me like I was a two-year-old baby.

    Buck and Blanche in Tennessee. “We drove through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee. ...” (Photograph by Clyde Jones, courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)
    “But, honey, you can’t go home,” he said. “The cops will get you.”

    Blanche Barrow in Mobile, Alabama. “... then south to Alabama.” (Photograph by Buck Barrow. Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)
    “I don’t care if they do,” I said, even though I knew I was lying. I did care. I never wanted them to get me. The thought of going to prison seemed just as bad as being killed. I really feared prison, even though I had never been inside of one except to visit Buck or Clyde. Still I had a horror of ever going to prison.
    Buck kept pleading with me not to leave. Then he said he would not let me go, that he couldn’t live without me. “What would I have to live for?” he asked. He was sobering up a bit and becoming reasonable. I didn’t get out. Soon our argument ended as it usually did, with each of us crying and saying how sorry we were for hurting the other.
    That night we rented a nice double cabin north of Brunswick, Georgia. 4 We decided to stay there a few days if everything seemed okay. Bonnie and Clyde drove to another place on the beach to look around after we had eaten and taken our baths. Buck and I didn’t want to go. Buck wanted to work on some of his guns, so we just stayed at the cabin.
    Bonnie and Clyde were not gone long. Soon after they returned, Clyde went to the station to get something but stopped a few feet away, in the shadow of another little building of some kind. He had noticed two highway patrolmen parked under the station’s awning. They were sitting in their car talking to the owner. Clyde caught part of the conversation, but not enough to know if the patrolmen were checking up on us. He felt sure they were, though.
    Clyde came back to the cabins and told us what he’d seen. He thought we should leave, but added that he sure hated to leave those good beds without even getting to sleep in them. But he told us to get ready to leave anyway. Then he went to the woman he had rented the cabins from. He told her we had rented an apartment in town and that he wanted his money back. She agreed.
    When Clyde got back with money we were ready to leave. The patrolmen were still at the station. We drove out toward Brunswick. Then, as soon as we were out of sight, we turned around and passed by the station. The patrolmen were still there. They pulled out and started chasing us, but we soon lost them. 5
    We drove almost all night. Bonnie and I drove for a couple of hours while Buck and Clyde slept. Then we drove off the road into a forest of pine trees and slept until about ten o’clock. After that, it was the same old story, afraid to stop anyplace. We kept driving, stopping only to sleep in the car. We drove through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, then south to Alabama, 6 and west through Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. I think we traveled most every highway in each of those states!
    Clyde wanted to go back to Dallas and get W. D. but Buck tried to talk him out of getting the kid again. Buck told Clyde that he was going to get killed fooling around with W. D. because if he ever got caught he would tell everything he knew and put Clyde on the spot. Buck said W. D. was too much of a kid to stand up under the punishment of a police grilling. He would talk to clear himself of anything if he had too. He might even talk about everything Clyde had ever done. But Clyde would not listen. He told Buck that he felt better with W. D. than with him.
    “If I were you,” Clyde said, “I wouldn’t say anything about not trusting someone after you thought those two strangers were such good sports and you let them