Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  As we neared the town, both Jim Cobb and Beverly Oliver tried to speak to Johnny Brown Jones, who rode at the front of the truck bed. When they appealed to his memory of their years together in the Temple, he clipped off their sentimentality: “I got nuthin’ to say to you.”

  The truck soon rumbled past the cheery lights of houses at the outskirts of Port Kaituma. Inside some lighted windows and open doors entire families moved about, with children getting ready for bed or doing homework, parents sitting at tables. A dog yapped as the truck squeezed onto a side road, went a short distance, then stopped alongside a garden fence.

  Johnny Brown Jones jumped down, entered a building and returned a minute later with a black man in a white dress shirt, our host. “You can stay here,” Johnny said. “We’ll come and pick you up in the morning, eight thirty.” When the Temple truck groaned and rumbled away, the proprietor of Mike and Son’s Weekend and Disco—whom we knew only as Mike—gestured toward the white two-story house next to the ground-level little disco bar. “You can stay in my house.”

  From the dirt roadway, we filed up rickety wooden stairs. After pulling off our muddy footwear, we dumped our gear in an anteroom and stepped into a sparely furnished living room with immaculate dark hardwood floors that would serve as our bed. The women would sleep in a small bedroom behind a curtain.

  That settled, we gathered next door at the disco, where Mike’s teen-age son served up drinks from behind a kitchen counter to one side of the dance floor. The black-painted walls glowed and pulsed with phosphorescent figures—voluptuous nude women reminiscent of Tijuana black velvet paintings. The heat and heavy decibels from Bob Marley and the Wailers drove us onto the patio area, where the plant leaves were highlighted with Day-Glo paint.

  At low tables, we downed bottles of Banks beer, Pepsi and rum, drowning our tensions in laughing, razzing and story telling. Then Bob Flick, his safari shirt over his “God Rides a Harley” T-shirt, pulled up a chair and said to me privately, “You know Jim Cobb pretty well, don’t you?”

  “Just as a reporter,” I said.

  “Well, he may be in need of a friend.” He jerked his head in the direction of the road.

  I found Cobb alone, his arms hanging over the top of the whitewashed fence, staring into the darkness, letting his emotions pour out. Though I did not know it then, he had just suffered a flash of cognition: after talking warmly with his family, he knew they would not leave Jonestown with us.

  “Jim,” I said quietly. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” he murmured. His voice sounded fragile, ready to crack.

  “Well,” I said, touching his shoulder. “If you want to talk, or if there’s anything else, I’ll be over there. When you’re up to it, come over and have a drink with us.”

  “Thanks, Tim.”

  Around the tables the mood stayed light and relaxed. For the most part, we steered clear of conversation about Peoples Temple. “It sure seems quiet here,” I said. We were the only customers.

  “There’s a dance cross the town,” Mike, the owner, explained unruffled.

  “Do you know the Temple very well?” I asked.

  “They have been very good to me,” said the tall man. “They helped me haul some things. They are very friendly people. Sometimes they come here to dance, but they drink only Pepsi.” Mike was the first Guyanese I had met who spoke entirely favorably about the Temple.

  While I chatted with the innkeeper, Javers and Krause put their heads together with a young Afro-Guyanese who had wandered in. It took me a few moments to recognize the constable without his shotgun. Soon I joined them. The constable, ill at ease under the gaze of the innkeeper, whispered, “Meet me on the road.” The three of us reporters bade him good night, then drifted off, one by one, pretending to head for bed.

  Following the policeman up the road, along railroad tracks, over a tiny footbridge, up a grassy hillside, we entered an adobelike windowless building. A match was struck and a candle flickered to life, throwing yellowish light on a couple of tables, some chairs, a bench along one wall and a small safe plastered into the structure. It was the police station.

  In hushed voices, we resumed the conversation about the Temple. No one asked the constable’s name, fearing it might curtail our discussion. The constable was a slender man of about twenty-five, about six feet tall, who spoke with those Caribbean soft a’s and r’s. He acted as though he risked his position by informing on an organization which had the blessing of some powerful Guyanese.

  The officer recounted his story of Leon Broussard, confirming many parts of Leon’s account, including the hole. “We went to the mission to investigate,” the officer said. “We found the hole where this man said people were held. It was several hundred meters behind the kitchen and to one side. It was deep, with a cover. I asked what it was, and they said it was for storing beans.” He smirked.

  Did he see anything suspicious? No, he said, but there were reports of guns there, and the Temple had acquired permits for several weapons, apparently semiautomatics.

  Then he spoke of the mysterious nighttime flights, of two or three times that the townspeople were frightened by flares fired to light up the local airstrip. But what, we asked, had led the constable to conclude that “accident” victims being flown out really had been beaten? “They said tractors fell on these people, things like that. They had broken arms and legs and hands.” He grimaced, then went to the safe, removed a ledger and pulled the candle near as he read the names of three people flown to Georgetown the previous Wednesday. One was eighty-four and was simply ill; one man had a broken leg, another a broken arm. The evidence was not conclusive and probably was colored by the constable’s contact with Leon Broussard.

  Abruptly the officer stopped talking and hushed us. A crunch of footsteps caused him to shut the ledger. Someone outside hailed, and the constable helloed back. “It’s the electrical plant engineer,” he whispered. We all assumed relaxed positions.

  In walked a black man with a silver hard hat. Regarding us cautiously, he dropped without invitation to a bench. The constable introduced us. “These chaps are here to visit Peoples Temple.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the engineer, seeming familiar with the mission.

  The talkative fellow first explained that he shut town power generators each night at about 2:00 A.M. to conserve energy, a national policy. Then talk turned to Jonestown. While blaming the Temple’s socialist politics for its troubles with the press, he scoffed at all the local rumors —about cannibalism and ghoulish tortures. We gathered that the jungle mission had become a subject of exaggerated local gossip.

  After the engineer excused himself to go shut down the power, the constable promised to try to arrange to visit the mission while we toured it, to help us find the hole and to provide protection in case of any confrontation. We thanked him and said good night.

  Back at the disco, our fellow journalists whooped it up, exchanging war stories and anecdotes. On the patio, Greg Robinson rocked back his chair, busting a gut, and Jim Cobb grinned. “Come on, Tim,” he called. “Have some rum.”

  Our group intact again, we drank and talked and laughed. I bought a tray of beers, causing Brown to crow, “My God, I don’t believe it. Reiterman bought a round.” Everyone laughed. In Georgetown, I had to write and file stories during the evening drinking sessions.

  A short time later, I turned in. Stepping over a sleeping form or two on the floor, I curled up on the wood, put my head on my pack and pulled a nylon poncho over myself for warmth.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Last Chance

  Around seven o’clock, the sound of someone showering awakened me. With the sun up, the morning air already had turned sweet and balmy; songbirds flitted among the coleus along the whitewashed fence. Javers and I encountered each other on the road outside, then we took a stroll along the same route used the night before. We soon discovered that we had walked with the constable just a few yards from a finger of the deep green river and fro
m the moored Temple fishing boat, the Cudjo. Someone stirred in the pilothouse, so we moved on, still comparing notes about last night’s events.

  For the first time, I realized why Kaituma was called a port. Train tracks from Matthews Ridge paralleled the river on a low cliff, so close to the water that boys had wedged a sturdy plank into the tracks for a diving board. On the other side of the tracks, several metal buildings with conveyor belts probably served as freight warehouses. It was easy to imagine small rivergoing boats and trains loading and unloading, and local laborers sweating on the docks. Though airplanes might have ferried American visitors and officials back and forth, the languid river and those rusty tracks were the lifelines of that drowsy town. These, and the dirt road to the Ridge, provided the most accessible escape routes for anyone trying to flee Jonestown.

  In spite of our long conversations with Jones, in spite of the revelations and suspicions of the constable, the critical question remained: Were the settlers free to come and go? If they willingly subjected themselves to Temple discipline, rules and diet, willingly surrendered their material possessions to live in the jungle and work in the blistering sun and mosquito-infested forests, that was their right. It was conceivable to me that some people would find a pioneering alternative lifestyle and extended family extremely attractive. But it seemed unlikely that virtually all wished to stay, as Jones had claimed.

  At that time, Javers and I had no inkling that anyone wanted to accept safe passage out with the Ryan party. And frankly I doubted that anyone would choose that time to leave, because most likely the relatives of the Concerned Relatives had been briefed and coached and because we were insulated from the rank and file.

  But on the way back to the disco, Javers shared his belief that Don Harris had learned something of importance or had planned something significant. Steve Sung, he said, had made a slip and had begun to tell Javers something. Whatever it was, I wanted to know in advance because we soon would reenter Jonestown and might not be free to talk there.

  “Why not make a deal with Don?” I suggested. “We can bargain with what we learned last night.”

  On the disco patio, Harris agreed to trade. Smiling his tallest whitest smile and taking a confident drag on his cigarette, he knelt down, pulled off a boot and removed a piece of paper. “I was slipped this last night.” The paper said, “Vernon Gosney and Monica Bagby. Please help us get out of Jonestown.”

  Though neither name meant anything to me, my spine tingled. Not only did some people want to leave, but also they feared coming forward openly. Coupled with our information about the hole, the message tended to confirm our worst suspicions.

  The Temple truck had not showed up at eight thirty as scheduled. As ten o’clock neared, we really worried about the delay. Corporal Rudder, looking a little sleepy, padded toward us from the direction of the police station. Harris took him aside and explained that some people wanted to leave Jonestown with us. In essence, Harris was asking for protection. Rudder nodded solemnly as the reporter spoke; sweat glistened on his forehead and worry saucered his eyes. His simple life was being complicated. Pressured, he seemed willing to help. Though he was supposed to travel to Matthews Ridge that day, he said he would try to come to Jonestown instead, to oversee matters.

  After we rounded up some coffee and Pepsi and drank it leisurely in the sun, I wandered down the road.

  “Have you seen a dump truck this morning?” I asked a woman in a print dress. She pointed toward the river moorings. As I turned the corner, the parked Temple truck came into view; seeing me, a few people started peering under the hood and engine. “What’s the matter?” I called.

  “Steering problems,” one of them called. “We’ll be right there.”

  In a few minutes, we piled aboard. On the way out of town, as Corporal Rudder waved at us, I focused hard on his round face and thought I saw a sign of confirmation. We passed the town’s communications center with its shortwave radio antenna and low roofline, then were swallowed by the bush.

  As we exited the main road, the Temple greeting sign loomed on a lodgepole framework. The tallest of us ducked. Again, a few people stood guard at the sentry shack. Ahead, the road narrowed and the truck strayed near the rutted edges.

  Standing and clinging to the wooden side slats, I asked Carol Boyd, “How are you doing?”

  “Okay,” she said. Then she told me the first night in Jonestown really had been frustrating for her, as well as for all the Concerned Relatives. As she dined with her nieces and their mother, they all had smiled for Greg Robinson’s camera. But she had not been allowed a minute alone with the girls, and they had mouthed the same meaningless praise of Jonestown that went into their letters.

  As the settlement road turned slushier, the truck shimmied and the six drive wheels whirred and sideslipped. On a long downgrade, the right wheels foundered into a roadside trench and carried us straight into a brown, three-foot-deep moatlike wash, tipping violently, throwing us around. The driver backed up, then took another run at the muddy wash, but we bogged down again. Had the driver deliberately steered us into the morass, as a stall?

  As we prepared for a third run, along came a red farm tractor, its tall rear wheels throwing mud clods as it squirmed through the wet spot. “The steering,” shouted one of the Temple members when we demanded to know the problem. Because the tractor was equipped with a crescent wrench and steering fluid, I wondered whether the breakdown was prearranged.

  In any case, we went on our way within ten minutes. As the large Jonestown clearing spread before us, I snapped a photo of Greg Robinson in full camera regalia and safari shirt, and of Bob Flick in his white stevedore’s hat with a “Bell” motorcycle helmet patch. The aluminum roofs of Jonestown lay across the background, today as gray as the thickening clouds. A young woman of twenty or so smiled and waved enthusiastically as she hiked toward the settlement on the raised road shoulder. In pants and sandals and sunblouse, she floated happily along, a quarter mile from the compound. I could not help thinking that she could have escaped, if she had wanted, just by ducking into the jungle and working her way along the edge of the roadside cassava. Soon we would learn that she was planning exactly that—with us. Her name was Juanita Bogue.

  As the truck sloshed to a halt, Marceline Jones appeared below us with her characteristic thin smile, seeming more rested and buoyant than the night before. It seemed doubtful that she knew of any defectors. “We’ll serve you breakfast, then we’ll show you around,” Marceline said in a den-motherly welcome. But the invitation dangled there awkwardly, out of place like the many keys hung around her neck on a chain. Too much time had been wasted already. Though Krause wanted to eat, I said, speaking for Greg and me, “I think we’ll pass. We’re behind schedule.” Don Harris said more diplomatically, “We have a great deal to do today and want to see as much as we can. But coffee sounds great.” He pulled back the sleeve of his powder-blue denim jacket to see his watch. “Shall we start, say, at ten forty-five?”

  After Marceline accepted the adjustment gracefully, we meandered toward the pavilion. Along the way, I stopped Greg and gestured toward two boys with baseball gloves tossing a ball around, awkwardly and unenthusiastically. I had guessed, correctly, that they were props.

  To the other side of the path, away from the playground, Mr. Muggs reigned as camp mascot from his tall cage of wooden poles. Once bottle-fed, diapered and pampered by Joyce Touchette, Muggs had since matured into a hairy, hulking adult. Though he looked pensive and innocent this morning, I had heard nearly as much about his antics as those of the more notorious Temple members—his escape and raid on Port Kaituma natives, his spitting, his attempt to urinate on the Guyana Supreme Court marshal. And some former members had alleged that Jones used to threaten to throw interlopers to the cantankerous chimp.

  Between the kitchen area and pavilion, two macaws of blue, orange and yellow preened on their perches and nibbled fruit. The magnificent mascots seemed to proclaim like so many feathered road signs:
welcome to the tropics.

  Jones was nowhere to be seen, but that was because he had stayed awake until at least 3:00 A.M. talking with Garry. The attorney would say later that he had given Jones an ultimatum: “Lane goes or I go.” And if Garry went, most likely Garry’s friend Carlton Goodlett would withdraw his important support too. Another self-generated problem was heaped on Jim Jones’s back.

  Though not speaking to each other this day, the two attorneys still would not let each other out of sight. Ryan, the relatives and the rest of us milled and talked in the shade of the pavilion while Temple aides moved with purpose. Several dozen children gathered around the stage, staring raptly at a television videotape showing of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. So incongruous was this jungle television scene that I took photos.

  Soon our coffee arrived. When I caught Don Harris alone, I asked about the defectors.

  “There could well be more, so we’d better stick close to the pavilion,” Harris replied.

  “The tour’s about to start,” I noted. “I’d like to look around after coming so far. And Greg has to get pictures.”

  “Try not to stray too far,” he said in a very quiet voice. “I’ll whistle when something happens.” He sent his crew off to film the mission.

  A moment later, I passed the word to Greg: if the number of defections increased, we would need to converge quickly on the pavilion to serve as a deterrent to possible harassment, as well as to record any defections. Then Jack Beam eased over to me and struck up a conversation beneath a sign on one post: LOVE ONE ANOTHER. Beam—always described by defectors as a villainous henchman—impressed me as a jovial sort. He looked like a weekend golfer with his cheeky smile, a crushable hat and potbelly. He proudly described the lumber mill operation, and when I complimented him on the handmade furniture, he introduced the carpentry instructor. As though prearranged, someone marched out to us with a thick photo album illustrating the slow development of the sawmill.