Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  It was a remarkable performance. Yet Jim Jones could not convert fundamentalist Christian midwestern capitalists into communists overnight. Apparently unable to convince enough Indianapolis blacks to devote themselves entirely, and communally, to Peoples Temple, he looked elsewhere for recruits. He had been watching the Cuban revolutionary struggle with great interest since Fidel Castro’s overthrow of Batista in January 1959. Reasoning that many black Cubans probably were eager to escape economic chaos and austerity following the revolution, he seized on an idea: he could speed up his plan to build a communal organization in the United States by recruiting Cuban blacks to live in Indiana.

  Arriving in Cuba in early 1960, Jones first staked out the Havana Hilton in search of a translator. Looking like a camera-toting tourist, he called out a friendly hello to a black man. The man, Carlos Foster, was a Cuban of Jamaican descent and was receptive to Jones’s overtures. Jones introduced himself as an evangelical minister and part-time nightclub singer; he offered Foster $24 a day and promised to send him and his family to the United States if he would help with the recruitment plan. Foster wanted to join his fiancée in the United States, so agreed to act as a sort of executive confidant for Jones.

  Jones took the Cuban to a hotel room and spent a week, from 7:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M., briefing him, talking endlessly, even sending out for meals through room service. The plan was to bring forty Cuban black families to America, to work on communal farms financed by his Indiana congregation. (This same idea—of displaced agricultural laborers in an ideal interracial environment—would emerge, years later, as Jonestown.)

  After the briefings, Jones and Foster went into the slum areas of Havana and interviewed dozens of families. Once they had collected the names and addresses of fifteen that were receptive to the plan, Jones headed home, but before leaving Cuba, he told Foster to carry on until he had gathered names of an additional twenty-five families.

  Back in the States, Jones revealed little of his plan, depicting his stay more as tourism than church business. He showed off photos of Cuba, taken in February 1960, which depicted new educational and medical facilities built by the Castro government and a sugarcane mill. One picture—a gruesome shot of the mangled body of a pilot in some plane wreckage—indicated that Jones witnessed the pirate bombings of the cane fields. Jones told his friends that he had met with some Cuban leaders, though the bearded man in fatigues standing beside Jones in a snapshot was too short to be Castro.

  Four months later, Jones sponsored Carlos Foster’s trip to Indianapolis: alone, without the families. The black Cuban mostly stayed indoors at the Jones home because Jones had cautioned him that white middle-class neighbors might lynch him if he left the house alone. Jones’s plan—which would have cost far more than Peoples Temple could afford —was not actively pursued. Meanwhile, Foster felt like a virtual prisoner; Jones would not allow him to find a job, although he compelled him to take part in church services. Winberg thought that Jones’s Cuban friend had no interest at all in the Temple, and he was right. After two months, Foster left to see his fiancée in New York, and Jones never heard from him again.

  In the meantime, Jones had been encouraging members of his congregation to adopt children, especially young orphans in war-ravaged Korea. The Joneses themselves set the example. In October of 1958, they traveled to California to bring home two orphans. Everyone in the Jones household fell in love instantly with four-year-old Stephanie, her beautiful face and black bangs; and they gave extra affection to Chioke, a two-year-old renamed Lew Eric, who needed medical attention for malnutrition.

  The children were both a blessing and a curse for Marceline. They made it easier for her to accept Jim’s preoccupation with his work and the couple’s lack of privacy; finally, she had little ones to love. But they—and the child in her womb—also would bring tremendous obligations and would make it much more difficult to ever leave her husband. Jim still tried to dominate her, and when they argued, his temper sometimes turned physical. Once, in fact, he kicked her in the stomach, making her fear for her unborn child.

  Tragedy struck the Joneses not long after the adoptions. On May 11, 1959, Stephanie wanted to go to Cincinnati for her father’s church exchange service at Rev. Wilson’s Elmwood Temple. This one time Marceline, in her eighth month of pregnancy, stayed at home. During the service in Cincinnati, Mable Stewart asked for a song. Jones later would recall leading the chorus:

  “On up the road

  Far in the distance

  I saw a light shining in the night....

  Then I knew....”

  As they often did when Jim Jones was in the pulpit, services ran late at Elmwood Temple. Afterward the Temple contingent divided up into various cars. Stephanie hopped into Mrs. Stewart’s car. The other passengers were a ten-year-old boy and four adult church workers. On a wide open stretch of U.S. 421, Mrs. Stewart appeared to pull out to pass a station wagon with only 100 feet of passing space. A high-speed, head-on collision wiped out six lives, including Stephanie’s.

  Jim Jones raced to the scene. “It’s a little hard to understand these things,” he told the Associated Press in a tremulous voice. “Those people were like my flesh and blood.”

  Of Stephanie, he said, “She was an exceptional child. Already she could speak perfect English. At least we have the consolation of knowing she received more love in those few months than in her entire life before.”

  But he pulled his emotions together enough to say that he would go on with his regular Sunday evening radio sermon and to reveal that he had had a premonition about the Saturday night tragedy.

  “For some strange reason, I told them that some of our people will never be back. I don’t know what made me say it.”

  Earlier, Jim Jones apparently had tampered with his in-laws’ car. Years later, he would say that he made his prophecies come true—and he would prophesy malfunctions in the cars of members of his congregation. And, over the years, he would anguish again and again in public over the deaths of the six. The cause of the collision remained a mystery.

  As Marceline grieved the loss, her mind strayed to a statement Stephanie made one day while having her hair brushed: “I wish [my friend] Oboki had a mother and dad like I have.” The day Stephanie was buried, Mother’s Day, the Joneses called the orphanage in Seoul to ask if there was a girl named Oboki. A cable soon confirmed that there was, and that she and Stephanie had been fast friends. Immediately, the family set up plans for adopting the child.

  Meanwhile, Marceline’s pregnancy came to term, and she was driven to the hospital. Her mother and Jim kept the watch, anxious and excited, typical expectant grandmother and father. The baby finally arrived on June 1, 1959, in a difficult breach birth. It was a boy of seven pounds, with Jim’s dark hair and Marceline’s fine facial features. They named him Stephan Gandhi Jones after the Indian leader. Though Jim was proud, no one could have been prouder than the mother: as the pink-faced baby was placed in Marceline’s arms for the first time, she saw in her mind the image of a tall, handsome American Indian warrior, throwing a spear.

  Before the Jones household’s elation over the birth had faded, six-year-old Oboki, renamed Suzanne, arrived from the Korean orphanage. Then the Joneses decided to take an even bigger humanitarian step by adopting a black infant. Marceline’s mother thought the move might well lead to trouble, not just from outsiders but from jealousy between the black child and Stephan, who was about the same age. “For Stephan’s sake,” Mrs. Baldwin asked her daughter, “I wonder if you should adopt this black boy.”

  “Mother,” came the reply, “I am doing it for Stephan’s sake, so he won’t grow up with prejudices.”

  Within several months, the Jones family had adopted a black baby and accorded him the honor of his new father’s name—James Warren Jones, Jr. The song that Marceline began to sing at services captured her own love for the child and the tenor of the Temple:

  “Black Baby, black baby, as you grow up

  I want you to drink
from the plenty cup

  I want you to speak up clear and loud

  I want you to stand tall and proud

  My little black baby....”

  While Jones made his family a living example of integration, he sought to exploit his “rainbow family” for his own purposes. In the summer of 1959, shortly after Stephen was born and before Marceline had fully recovered, Jones announced another trip to Philadelphia to see Father Divine. Neither Marceline nor her mother, who went along to care for the baby, believed in Divine’s pretensions to divinity; they went because Jim wanted company. Marceline appeared unhappy and weak; her mother diagnosed it as postbirth depression, but Marceline conceivably might have been disturbed by her husband’s fascination with the evangelist or by larger problems.

  In Philadelphia, the Temple contingent was accorded the finest hospitality Father Divine could offer, accommodations in one of his downtown hotels. In the care of his docile followers, they toured the spectacular Woodmont mansion, its opulent rooms and the pastoral grounds. They attended great feasts called Holy Communion, with several kinds of salads, bread, roasts, vegetables, even several desserts. Father Divine presided from the head of the table with beautiful Mother Divine; his taped sermons ran during the meals. Afterward, the men and women left the banquet halls by separate exits.

  The Jones party met privately with Father and Mother Divine. Never one for subtlety, Jones broached an important subject for the first time; he conveyed his readiness to assume the leadership of the Peace Mission movement if Divine should decide to lay down his body. Divine, said to be immortal, did not take the invitation seriously. On the other hand, Mother Divine, his designated successor, did not appreciate Jones’s intrusions. Her mistrust only deepened when Marceline confided stories of Jones’s earlier atheism.

  It was on another such visit that Mrs. Wilson learned of one of Jim Jones’s fears. While the minister stood on the balcony of one of the Peace Mission hotels, looking out over Philadelphia, Mrs. Wilson—who had a playful streak—did an impetuous thing; she touched Jones as though she were going to shove him. He panicked, fearfully backing away from her. Mrs. Wilson tried to apologize. But Jim shouted, “You really wanted to do that! You did!” He accused her of trying to murder him. Then, probably to explain his own overreaction, he confessed a fear of heights—the same explanation he had used in college to secure the lower bunk.

  Between visits to Father Divine, Jones curried his favor through letters and phone calls. He introduced Divine’s hymns to Peoples Temple and told his aides he intended to take over the evangelist’s movement upon his death. In his grandiose view, he saw nothing illogical in assuming that Father Divine would bequeath the fruits of over four decades of evangelizing to his Indiana pen pal.

  Jones tried every imaginable shortcut to the building of a large integrated congregation—the trip to Cuba, his visits to Divine, even a pitch to the Black Muslims. Jones was willing to work with anyone willing to work with him—and to swipe people along the way. When he traveled to Chicago to ask the Honorable Elijah Muhammad for cooperation, he was not allowed inside the Muslim mosque because he was white. Jones protested that he had given his own name to an adopted black son, but the Muslims remained unimpressed.

  SIX

  The Crusader Collapses

  Integrationist white preachers were scarce in the Midwest during the early civil rights movement. But Jones was by no means alone. One other, thirty-two-year-old Ross Case, integrated his churches, intended to adopt a child of black or mixed blood and thought it intolerable that the Sunday morning church service was the most segregated hour in America. Racial tolerance and religion had gone hand in hand for Case since he was a boy in Independence, Missouri, where he felt a strong calling to the ministry and a strong aversion to the bigotry there. Then, as a college-educated young minister in the Christian church, Disciples of Christ, Case and his wife Luella combined their marriage and his ministry with a commitment to racial equality.

  In August 1959, while attending a two-week spiritual camp in southern Indiana, the Cases became friendly with a young black woman who told them about a truly interracial church in Indianapolis. The following Sunday the couple drove to Indianapolis to see for themselves. They walked in on a lawn party in the backyard of the Jones house on Broadway. Everyone was milling about, socializing, nibbling food from a table, drinking punch—except for a cheeky raven-haired young man in a chair. This presiding figure wrote checks and carried on two or three conversations with people around him. Instantly Case was impressed with the agile mind and commanding presence of Jim Jones—yet he could not know that the same energetic personality, while promoting his own deification, was racing toward a nervous breakdown.

  The meeting with Jones and his three assistants—Archie Ijames, Jack Beam and Russell Winberg—made Case ecstatic. The Temple leaders endorsed his efforts to integrate his own church in Mason City, Illinois. Here at last he had found an entire staff that shared his integrationist sentiments.

  There were other areas of compatibility, too. Though Case’s denomination rejected Pentecostalism at this time, he had begun to believe in the Pentecostal experience, the power of the Holy Spirit to work miracles on earth. Communalism also posed no problem: the Cases had investigated an integrated religious commune in Americus, Georgia, and found it attractive. Further, Case was comforted by the apparent biblical orientation of the Temple ministers, who cited scriptural passages to support their integrationist views.

  Jones and his assistants wanted Case to join Peoples Temple immediately. Case indicated that after he fulfilled his prior commitments in Mason City, he would welcome an opportunity to join the Temple team. And before he left, Temple leaders sought his advice about a matter currently under discussion in the church: whether Case’s denomination, the Disciples of Christ, would accept the Temple as an affiliate. “You might try it,” came the reply.

  While Case returned to Mason City, the Temple made its application to Disciples of Christ and was accepted into the denomination in 1960, before Jones was ordained as a minister. The denomination leadership respected the Temple, believing its programs for the downtrodden exemplified Christianity in action. Jones himself was unique among ministers —an attractive character with quiet charisma and entrepreneurial instincts. A. Dale Fiers, who would become president of Disciples of Christ in 1964, had grasped Jones’s potential while listening to him on the Temple’s Sunday night radio show. He told colleagues at the time, “Here is a man who can accomplish great good. But he also has the kind of power and gifts that could go off the deep end.”

  Jones first had become interested in Disciples of Christ when Ijames showed him newspaper articles indicating that the Indianapolis-based Disciples of Christ would tolerate all political views—and that the denomination respected local autonomy, asking only that a congregation have baptism and take communion every Sunday. Jones immediately pressed for the alliance, telling his congregation, “If you take my advice, you will [join] too, because it will be for your protection.” Benefits of affiliation would show themselves over the years. Chief among them was the mantle of legitimacy afforded by membership in a 1.5 million- to 2 million-member denomination, and, on the material side, an umbrella tax exemption. Membership would also provide a curtain over the Temple’s political drift.

  Ross Case finally teamed up with Jones in August of 1961. In the previous year, in periodic phone conversations from Mason City, Case had discovered that Pastor Jones was inclined to make theological blunders. For instance, Jones had got himself in hot water with his aides and the congregation by denying the virgin birth—and had to reverse himself. Case thought, rather naively, that he, as an ordained college-educated minister well versed in the Bible, could provide Jones with guidance. However, in his several months on the pulpit platform with Jones, Case would find that the pastor’s troubles did not always originate with honest mistakes. Meantime, Case was excited to take a post with an organization now aligned with his own denomination an
d headed by a preacher who had become a minor public figure in Indianapolis.

  In 1960, conservative Democratic Mayor Charles Boswell had made available $7,000 to fund the city Human Rights Commission directorship. Advertising the job mostly by word of mouth, the selection committee heard from few applicants in the next eighteen months—in fact, only one. In the job interview at City Hall, the committee—a rabbi, a black judge and a priest—appraised Jim Jones without doing a background check. They were not aware of his healings, although they had seen his name on the religious page of the newspaper and knew him as an advocate of the poor and blacks. Jones came across as an articulate and humane “eager beaver” social worker, though he put off the priest a little by flaunting his fundamentalist Protestantism.

  The committee recommended their only candidate to the mayor, who made the appointment because the post had to be filled. The mayor instructed Jones to keep a low profile, to proceed diplomatically and to avoid inflaming the racial climate—or antagonizing the business community.

  Almost immediately Jones garnered more press coverage than Mayor Boswell had hoped. In his craving for publicity, Jones exploited his public appointment and used it to feed both his career and his social goals, as well as to document the myths about his personal history. Shortly after his February 1961 appointment, an article described the twenty-nine-year-old Jones “as Hoosier as punkin pie,” from a “lily-white town where Negroes were not allowed to remain after sundown.” No doubt Jones had provided the old canard about redneck towns. Jones also supplied a personal anecdote: “He once walked out of a Bloomington barber shop with his hair half cut because a Negro patron was refused service. Incidentally it was a Negro shop.” Two weeks later, Jones was back in print. A local paper reported, no doubt courtesy of Jones, that the human rights director had persuaded three local restaurants to stop discriminating against blacks; the paper printed as fact Jones’s claim that he arranged for dozens of his friends to eat at the newly integrated restaurants to offset any loss of bigoted clientele.