W. D. Jones - Youth

Youth

James and Tookie Jones were sharecroppers in Henderson County, Texas with six children, five sons and a daughter. W.D. was their second youngest child. After postwar cotton prices collapsed they gave up trying to farm, and around 1921-22, in the same wave that brought the Barrow family and hundreds of other poor families from the country to the unwelcoming city, the Joneses settled in the industrial slum of West Dallas, in the 1920s a maze of tent cities and shacks without running water, gas or electricity, set on dirt streets amid smokestacks, oil refineries, "plants, quarries, lagoons, tank farms and burrow pits" on the Trinity River floodplain. It was while his family was living in the squatters' camp under the Oak Cliff Viaduct that W.D., then about five, first met Clyde Barrow, then age 11 or 12.

When W.D. was six years old his entire family was stricken by what was probably Spanish flu, which lingered after the 1918 pandemic in pockets of the United States where unhealthy conditions prevailed. His father and sister died in the same hour, his oldest brother two nights later, all of pneumonia (frequently the coup de grâce delivered by that strain of flu). Tookie Jones and four of her sons survived.

Jones grew up illiterate. Before or after the illness that devastated his family he got partly through the first grade; he recalled that he left school to sell newspapers. He had been friends with LC Barrow, the youngest son of his mother's friend Cumie, since their families' first days in West Dallas. The Joneses and the Barrows were close: when Buck Barrow was to stand trial in San Antonio for car theft, Tookie and her two youngest boys accompanied the Barrows and their two youngest children as they traveled by horse and wagon, 300 miles south, to attend. Both boys had big brothers named Clyde; W.D.'s brother Clyde drove his wife and Buck Barrow's girlfriend Blanche across the country to Tennessee in the summer of 1930 to see Buck while he was on the lam. The Barrows, too, had been hit by disease in the West Dallas camp: Clyde, his father and his younger sister Marie were hospitalized by something so severe that years later Clyde was rejected by the Navy due to its lingering effects.