Do you like an #alternated #history book? Check out this jailhouse 'interview' with Clyde (Bonnie 'n' Clyde) @cowboyvamp

A jailhouse interview with Clyde Barrow

from a book called

Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road

by

Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall

Interview recorded by Royce Jenkins, a reporter for the Texas Lubbock Dispatch

My name is Clyde Barrow and I am a thief, a murderer and a product of wealth inequality. 

You may know me from the shenanigans I got caught up in with the love of my life, Bonnie Parker. Most folks think Bonnie and Clyde got cut down in a hail of bullets outside of Sailes, Louisiana in 1934, and most folks figured we got what was coming to us — neither is exactly true. 

I ain’t proud of the things we done, but I’m not exactly ashamed either. I wish no one had died, that’s for certain, but when the system is stacked against you from the get go, things are going to turn out bad. I always say, you kick a dog long enough, one day, you’re gonna get bit.

In my day, it was the Great Depression that lit the fuse. Right before that was what they called the Gilded Age, with the Robber Barons — the captains of industry — rigging all the laws, so them and their pals could carve off bigger and bigger slices of the pie until the whole thing came crashing down like an outhouse in a tornado. 

You think it was the rich that suffered? If you know your history, you know that ain’t true. It was the poor folks who live hand-to-mouth who paid the price. Me and my family, our neighbors, we was the ones standing in soup lines and living under bridges, with no jobs and no hope. 

As a result of that, I grew up dirt poor in Cement City, a little hellhole outside of Dallas, Texas. There wasn’t but two ways to make it out of Cement City: dead or in prison.

I tried to play it square, tried to get a job, but there wasn’t no jobs to be had and what there was didn’t pay enough scratch to get by. Sound familiar?

Rooting around in the dirt for a dying wage, like a hog under an acorn tree, well that wasn’t for me. No sir. I figured if the fat cats could take what they wanted, I could too. Only problem was, when some no-account like me steals a broken-down car or a truck full of turkeys, well them old boys running America, well, they just couldn’t have that. 

Right away I ended up in jail — and they made me work for free inside prison. The bosses, them at owned the prisons, actually profited by keeping me locked up. The prisons today are full of young men and women who try to get by selling weed, but they sure ain’t overcrowded with the Wall Street sharks that caused the latest Great Recession and stole hundreds of millions in the process. 

Ain’t we learned nothing from history? Can’t hardly believe were running through the same thing today. The robber barons damn near ruined this country, and they’re about to do it again.

Me and Bonnie helped out in 1934 by keeping old FDR safe from an assassin so he could put in the New Deal, giving the working man a voice with unions, regulating Wall Street and so on. But money has its own gravity, and now the super-rich are pulling the government levers behind the scenes to make it even harder for the working class, even though they tell us to our faces that they ain’t.

In this day and age, wealth inequality is even worse than at the height of the robber barons in the 1930s. Right now, in America, the top ten percent of the country controls damn near 80 percent of the wealth. And it gets worse the richer they are. What do they need all that money for?

They’re spending billions trying to convince us about some trickle-down nonsense. Saying if they get taxed less and if they don’t have no regulations and if the government doesn’t invest in public programs it will all be magically better for the working man! That’s a load of manure. It wasn’t true in 1929 and it sure as hell ain’t true now. That’s like saying the working class might get a few more scraps falling from the rich folks’ dinner table if they just pile up even more mountains of food on their fancy plates. It’s all a damn lie.

Got to be blind to not see that we’re speeding head first into something even worse than the Great Depression. Don’t know why rich people can’t just do the right thing. Recognize that profits are for everyone working to make them, not just to be hoarded by the ones lucky enough to own the capital. There’s more than enough money to go around, still leaving plenty for the rich to have their yachts and jets.

I ain’t suggesting people pick up guns and start robbing and running, like me and Bonnie. That won’t get you nowhere but in jail or dead in a ditch. But I am suggesting folks wise up to the real criminals who keep bleeding the working class, squeezing the disenfranchised and lining their pockets, all from the tops of their gilded towers. 

Me and Bonnie may have been murderers and thieves, but we knew what we were doing was wrong. I ain’t so sure about this new crop of Robber Barons. That scares me more than looking down the barrel of a Tommy gun. 

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter 

Introducing...
Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road

In an alternate timeline, legendary lovers Bonnie and Clyde are given one last shot at redemption. Thrust into a Depression-era fight against greed they didn’t ask for, but now must win in order to save themselves and their families, will the notorious duo overcome their criminal pasts and put their “skills” to use fighting for justice for the working class?

Amazon

The story begins in 1984 when reporter Royce Jenkins gets a tip to meet an old woman at a Texas cemetery. Cradling an antique rifle and standing over a freshly dug grave, the old woman claims to be Bonnie Parker. Turns out, she says, it wasn’t Bonnie and Clyde who were ambushed fifty years earlier. Instead, the outlaws were kidnapped, forced into a covert life and given a deadly mission—save President Roosevelt from an assassination plot financed by wealthy industrialists determined to sink the New Deal.

Cutting back and forth between the modern era where the shocked reporter investigates the potential scoop-of-the-century, and the desperate undercover exploits of Bonnie and Clyde in 1934, Resurrection Road is a page-turning sleep-wrecker.

Bonnie and Clyde. Saving American democracy, one bank robbery at a time.