The worst aspect of the deterioration was the permanence of the sort of “siege and suicide” routine first used by Jones in September. By now this routine had even acquired its own name, White Night.
Initially, Jones had called the ordeals Omegas, but then had said, “It’s not the end, it’s the beginning,” and changed the name to Alphas. That did not stick either. He tried the term Black Night, but was concerned about the racial connotation. He settled on the term White Night, and soon these rituals were being held with astonishing regularity—about every two weeks.
During the first few White Nights he witnessed, Touchette still believed, more or less, in the correctness of Jim Jones’s concept. The place Father had built was worth protecting from invading enemies, fighting to the death if necessary.
“Alert, alert, alert,” Jones screamed over the loudspeaker, summoning everyone to the pavilion for a White Night. Jones would wait in the radio room until all were assembled. His security guards would surround the pavilion with guns and crossbows. Usually, the crisis began during the day and lasted far into the night.
Touchette served on security. But he had learned from his friend Stephan Jones that these drills were tools of manipulation and that Jones had orchestrated the gunfire during the six-day siege. Once Touchette realized that Jones had no intention of carrying them through to death, he sometimes returned to his room to read or sleep. During a two-day White Night, Jones said he wanted an escape route to the Venezuelan border or a camp built deep in the bush and stocked with food. Touchette jumped on his Caterpillar immediately and began clearing jungle. It was an easy way to escape the unpleasantness of the pavilion.
For nearly everyone else in Jonestown, White Nights were terrifyingly real. Jones would play their emotions like a symphony conductor, making his moods their moods, making them do and say what he wished. “I want to know how you feel,” he would say. People would stand up and spout: “I think it’s a good thing to die for what we believe in.” Even the malcontents knew that unless they demonstrated the appropriate responses, unless they clapped loudly enough for lurking “mercenaries” to hear them, they would be punished.
During a White Night in the spring of 1978, Jones’s rhetoric shifted suddenly from self-defense to self-destruction: “We’re going to drink poison and kill ourselves.” A large batch of fruit punch was brought forth, and people lined up. Martin Amos, Sharon’s little boy, pleaded with Jim Jones. But Jones insisted that Martin trust him—just as many years earlier Jones had insisted that Ronnie Baldwin stand in the rushing waters above Niagara Falls. And Martin drank, too.
A few people plopped over and were carried out, but the shoddy acting caused Tommy Bogue to snicker. Stephan Jones sat on the edge of the stage hating his father and grinding his teeth until he finally stood up, went over to his father, and whispered, “You’re putting people through unnecessary pain.” Jones stopped the ritual soon, saying it had been a loyalty test.
Sometimes new arrivals or a young macho guy would stand up during a White Night and oppose suicide, saying, “I think we should fight.” Jones would reply, “We’re going to kill you.” Despite such threats, the dissenters at least gave Jones a public reason for backing off.
When the White Nights ended, Jones gave everybody the next day off to sleep and recover, to let the tension run from their bodies. It was like hearing that your relatives’ plane had crashed, killing everyone, then learning they had missed the flight. People in Jonestown were not allowed to take living for granted.
Jonestown had degenerated physically as well as emotionally. Sloppiness was rampant. Buildings needed paint and fields were overgrown by weeds. Bureaucratic requirements became counterproductive, and needless paperwork consumed far too many hours. Too little time remained for the labor itself. Life became increasingly difficult for everyone.
Before Jones moved permanently to Jonestown, people had been able to take days off occasionally, even relax a bit or stroll to the “waterfall,” a shallow creek with rapids about a quarter-mile from the settlement. Now that too had changed. Sundays were free, but people had to catch up on their laundry or sewing, or study for the quizzes on the news Jones read day and night over the public address system. And if people wanted to visit the waterfall or the bush, they had to coax a security guard to go along, ostensibly to keep them on the trails and protect them from snakes, tigers or mercenaries.
Jonestown institutions also broke down under the strains of overcrowding and an increasingly irrational leader. Even the Jonestown school suffered—as the notebook of fourteen-year-old DeeDee Lawrence reveals. The workbook provides a glimpse of the instructional topics—the preceding night’s news and Jim Jones’s paranoid visions of apocalypse, revolution, traitors and enemies. Her spelling lesson was especially revealing:1. Tim Stoen has hire mercenaires to come over here and destroy us.
2. Guyana has an alience with the Soviet Union.
3. Yemen has offered sancturary to the Red Brigade.
4. Albania is a non-aliegn country.
5. Dad wants us to use stradgy when we are in a crises.
6. We are jungle Guerillas.
In another section of the workbook, DeeDee offered her own fantasies of how she would like the news of the day to develop:
The Red Brigade has kidnaped Carter, the Rockefellers and Moboto. They said if they don’t let some political prisoners go that they would exsicute them.
China droped a bomb in the middle of the USA.
Jonestown has the most gold, copper and silver in the world. Ever goes to them for money.
The highly touted medical program did not instill confidence in everyone. If it were a choice between doing without treatment or seeing Dr. Larry Schacht, Mike Touchette would do without. He once had the misfortune of seeing Schacht trying to suture a friend’s smashed finger; the doctor’s hand was shaking so much he looked as if he had Parkinson’s disease. Even Schacht’s two nurses, Joyce Parks and Judy Ijames, complained. They said he would throw fits, ranting about inconsequential things. In retaliation, Schacht brought them up during a catharsis session for not cooperating.
Schacht could be reasonable at times, but the former drug abuser lived on a hair trigger, under great stress. Jones sexually compromised him, calling for him whenever he desired a male lover. His work allowed him little sleep. Any time Jones had an “attack,” day or night, Schacht was summoned immediately. His loyalty to Jones came before his medical ethics.
Although Schacht’s medical textbook knowledge was adequate, his clinical experience could not match that of some of his technical assistants. One of these was Dale Parks, the inhalation therapist.
Parks’s family had followed Jones since the mid-fifties in Indiana, when his grandmother Edith Parks, the spiritualist, joined. Dale had become disenchanted with Jones in California; however, Marceline Jones pleaded with him to give Jonestown a chance—and said he could leave whenever he wanted. His family—parents, grandmother, sisters, and a sister’s boy friend—soon discovered Jonestown was not the Promised Land. But it was too late. Like everyone else, they had been stripped of their valuables, passports and other identification. They made the best of a bad situation. While avoiding overt signs of disloyalty, they waited for an opportunity to leave.
Although few other families made escape plans, many people chafed under the restrictive rules and practices. Sex guidelines were a major irritant. As in the States, Jones gave contradictory sexual instructions. There was no sexual freedom. The true homosexuals were not allowed to practice it, without fear of being ridiculed or confronted on the floor. Unmarried or unsanctioned couples slept together at their peril, and married couples never could be intimate with any degree of privacy in their crowded cottages.
In the case of one couple reported for having sex, the woman was married to someone else and had three children. “If you’re so hot,” Jones leered, to laughter from the crowd, “let’s all see how good it is.” He brought the couple to the front and told them to disrobe.
Someone ran to get a red light and a mattress. The couple stripped to their underwear but were too embarrassed to do anything. Jones was in a good mood and laughingly let them off the hook.
A Relationships Committee was established to set ground rules for sex and marriage. If a couple wanted a union, they needed committee approval. During a three-month trial period no physical contact—not even kissing—was permitted. Next, they were allowed a physical relationship for a six-month trial period. If the relationship survived, they were considered married. Pregnancy automatically meant a permanent relationship. People came to the committee for contraceptives, dispensed according to established rules. But, as expected in any large community, people had affairs on the sly.
Some Jonestown residents resented the constant presence of security guards who reported all signs of lackluster attitudes. Day and night, sentries with binoculars manned a searchlight tower. Other security guards roved the settlement looking for cutups, loafers and slackers. Anyone loitering could be issued a warning. Anyone not smiling or clapping enthusiastically during a meeting could be warned. Three warnings a month meant work on the Public Service Unit (PSU) or the “Learning Crew,” which did nasty jobs such as cutting grass by hand, or cleaning the outhouses or ditch digging in the mud.
For younger children, punishment could be especially terrifying. At first Jones would threaten to turn disobedient children loose in the bush to see how long they could survive there by themselves. Those who continued to act up were blindfolded then lowered by rope into a well. Adults, on Jones’s orders, would hide in nearby bushes or even in the bottom of the well, making noises and pretending to be monsters.
In evening meetings, Jones would read a list of the people given warnings that day. They could contest the issue—but not very effectively, because their accusers never were identified. Then Jones would decide the appropriate punishment or would have a catharsis session to “correct” the counterrevolutionary attitude or behavior.
“I have people out there among you,” Jones would warn from his thronelike chair. “Nobody knows who they are, but they are my spies.” Stephan Jones knew there were no secret superspies, but he also knew his father’s bluff was effective. It guaranteed that people would be afraid to talk to one another. Jones tried to divide even his own sons, from the community and each other.
Tim, Jimmy and Stephan Jones and Johnny Cobb were seen by most people as heads of security, as bodyguards stationed around Jones’s house. Stephan carried a gun during the six-day siege, and during subsequent White Nights. He kept a gun at his bunk and used it for target practice or when his father sent him off into the bush looking for enemies. Jones said publicly that his son could plug a quarter at two thousand yards with a rifle, which was absurd, yet good for Stephan’s ego. But soon Jones was not merely deploying his bodyguards and security guards against imaginary outside enemies—he began to use them as intimidators.
Once when Tommy Bogue and another boy ran off, a Temple search squad caught them near the railroad tracks to Matthews Ridge, then put the boys in leg irons. Back in Jonestown, their heads were shaved and they were forced under armed guard to cut logs into small pieces until Stephan Jones got his mother to intervene.
The most extreme punishment, the sensory isolation box, was the idea of chief schoolteacher Tom Grubbs. The four-foot-tall plywood shipping crate, measuring about six by ten, was first placed on top of a nearby hill, but the prisoner could hear sounds from the settlement. Then the box was placed in a ditch.
The first victim was Jeff Carey, twenty-seven, an early Jonestown settler from Flint, Michigan. Jones did not trust Carey, an inveterate note-passer who kept trying to make himself look good. Carey once came back from Georgetown and said Lew Jones was borrowing lots of money to take out white women—an untrue accusation against Jones’s own son. To “cure” him, Jones ordered Carey into the box. It was not total sensory deprivation: Carey could hear the news over the loudspeaker, could see enough light to know whether it was day or night. But he could not stand, and was brought only water and mashed-up, unappetizing food. After a week, he was released. He unlimbered his stiff, cramped body, and then told Grubbs during a public meeting that the box was “great,” that he had been transformed by the experience. It was exactly what he was expected to say.
to Other victims included Michaeline Brady, a thirty-five-year-old white woman from Long Beach who was having severe emotional problems and would walk around the camp staring straight ahead. Barbara Walker, a twenty-five-year-old black woman who would sometimes lash out unexpectedly at people, was drugged, then put in the box.
On one of her trips down to Jonestown, Marceline Jones discovered the existence of the box and insisted that people placed inside have their vital signs checked by nurses every couple of hours. That was as far as she went—or felt she could go—toward opposing it.
December 1977 was not a good month for Jim Jones. His first trauma was the loss of his mother, Lynetta Jones, who had arrived in Jonestown before the six-day siege.
Knowing her love of nature and wild animals, Jones had arranged for her to take the boat voyage and river trip from Georgetown. But the Caribbean waters were rough, and she was up all night vomiting. The trip seemingly had weakened her beyond recovery.
Lynetta Jones never had the strength to venture out of her Jonestown cabin. It frustrated her in particular to be so close to wild animals yet unable to walk into the bush to see them. Still, she remained her lucid and plucky self. Once, when Stephan carried her to the porch for fresh air, she overheard Jones say he had shot a bush turkey nearby with a pistol, at two hundred yards. Laughing, she called over her daughter-in-law. “That man didn’t shoot any turkey,” she told Marceline. “I didn’t see anything flying out there.... Anyone knows you can’t shoot anything with a pistol from two hundred yards. That boy!”
But fifty years of cigarette smoking had taken its toll, and Lynetta Jones’s emphysema worsened. Finally she had a stroke. She could not talk or move her eyes or get enough air, and several days later she died. Her death devastated Jones. He loved his mother. She always had stood by him. When she left him, he lost one of the few small constraints on his power and sickness.
To a lesser extent, Jones was upset by news from San Francisco that Chris Lewis had been murdered in the Bayview-Hunters Point district of San Francisco. The local papers ran stories, quoting police as speculating that the killing may have been drug-related, or revenge from one of Lewis’s many enemies. The trail of blood to his body indicated that two gunmen had chased him on foot, then executed him, without bothering to take the $1,000 in his pocket. The church was worried it would be blamed for the shooting because Lewis had been persona non grata since leaving Guyana. As usual, Jones took the offensive, claiming that Lewis had been murdered by anti-Temple conspirators.
Jones was in a foul mood already the December night he was passed a note about a suicide attempt by Tom Partak. The thirty-two-year-old Vietnam veteran was one of a handful of Jonestown residents who had been asking to go home. In meetings, he always took the bait when Jones asked in his sympathetic voice whether anyone was homesick. Partak missed his mother terribly. After several months of being reprimanded regularly for wanting to leave, he had become suicidal. And now he had tried to kill himself with a cutlass.
On this night, Jones was in no mood for fun and games. The tape recorder was running.
“You should have been black,” Jones told Partak, his voice oozing contempt. “You wouldn’t worry about suicide if you were a nigger like us. Where you come off with all this whiteness? You like pain?”
“No, Dad.”
“Don’t you think the cutlass causes pain?”
Partak hesitated. His voice was halting and his tone uncertain, fearful, on edge. “I thought, sort of, the mental pain I go through every day.”
“You think you’ll stop pain by one act of killing yourself?”
“I just wanted to get out of, uh, the particular situation,” Partak replied
, hesitantly.
“You think the situation’s that bad, huh? How many places in the world are worse than this? I could show you places in Chicago where boys are castrated every day. Nobody’s bothering you, molesting you, castrating you. You have food, shelter, you’re not cold. You people amaze me with your total inability to think. You’ve been conditioned to go back, programmed like a robot. Ever consider the blessings of this place, you idiots?”
The words came so fast that few could catch them, let alone an inarticulate fellow who was already terrified. As usual, Jones identified a real problem—the robot conditioning—but deflected the blame from its real source, himself. Frighteningly, this refractive logic worked.
“I’m, uh, grateful,” Partak stammered, “for people finding happiness and contentment here, Dad. I’m happy that’s the case. I’m sorry it hasn’t worked for me.”
That last line sent Jones into an uncontrollable rage.
“Do you know why, sir, it doesn’t work for you?” He was screaming now, mixing unadulterated fury with the old cadence of the Pentecostal preacher. “You’re an elitist! You’re a fucking miserable capitalist. You should be shot. I suggest that. SHOT! Through the hips, so you can lay. LAY! AND SUFFER! You’re a bigot. A spoiled child of the middle class. A petit bourgeoisie. Yet I love you enough to live for you.” There was applause.
“What you said is true, Dad.”
“Through the hips,” Jones continued, now menacing again, “so you can lay. So you can feel pain. You don’t give a goddamn about anybody.” He paused for a moment before shouting at the top of his voice: “It’s a good thing I’m a loving savior.”
More applause.
“You better respond. We’ll get you out of your goddamn fucking shell and your bourgeois attitudes and your emotional insanity. We’re not privileged. We’re niggers. We don’t have the privilege to go insane and be on expensive tranquilizers and have some stupid shrink stand over us and tell us why we want to fuck our mothers. You thought you had an easy out. You thought you wouldn’t have to suffer. You been playing with our mercy. TALK!!!”
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