Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  A few minutes later, Marceline gathered us around her, took a deep breath and summarized our tour stops: the hospital, nursery, kitchen, library, wood shop, lumber mill, machine shop, the piggery, the chickery, fields, citrus orchards, living quarters.... It sounded as if the tour would consume the entire day—right up to the moment we would reboard the dump truck and rush to the airport to meet our return flight. Time for locating the pit in the ground, for questioning residents about their living conditions, for putting difficult questions to Jones would be soaked up.

  Don Harris asked Marceline to pare down the tour to a half-hour or so. When Mrs. Jones obliged us, I felt a twinge of guilt: my opportunity to see Jonestown—after over a year of trying—was being whittled down. However, the stakes had been raised. With evidence that fearful people wanted to leave, questions about programs and living conditions—even the hole—became secondary.

  With Marceline and other Temple aides leading the way, we took a short path to the nursery, the pride and joy of Mrs. Jones. This nursery, with flowers painted on its sign, rough-sawn wooden walls and a shiny metal roof had functioned as the first home for the thirty-three babies born in Jonestown. Inside, the nursery, named Cuffy Memorial after a Guyana national hero, reflected tender care, cleanliness and attention to detail, with colorful print coverings and rags braided into rugs. In the one room, the tour director showed us tiny cribs equipped with mesh to keep out snakes and insects. Pointing to an incubator, Marceline noted, “We haven’t had to use it, or the aspirator.” Introducing us to the nursing staff, she estimated that about three hundred children lived in Jonestown, a figure that always would stick in my mind.

  Outside, under a veranda on the left side of the building, several women knelt on pillows leafing through books for little children no older than eighteen months, giving them sensory stimulation. Looking closer, I thought it odd that one of the infants, Lew Jones’s son Chioke, was being introduced to a book about dinosaurs, with small print. Again, it caused me to wonder how much of the tour had been choreographed for our benefit. The props—the books, the boys playing baseball, some children taking dance classes under an awning nearby—were superfluous. The place was impressive enough without all that.

  Clearly, specific Temple aides had been attached to each of us. Marceline and Jack Beam led the way, while Johnny Brown Jones stood in reserve, making no pretenses of cordiality. When I shook his hand to introduce myself, he glared at me and said, “I’m not sure I should.” The rank and file seemed to respect—or perhaps fear—this young man who had so frightened Leon Broussard. In either case, they kept their distance and keyed to him. Some were shooed away with subtle body language or a flash of displeasure.

  For the most part, the common people remained just a collection of faces to me, seen only fleetingly moving down paths, or positioned as props along our tour route. There was not the slightest spontaneity of behavior—and the people seemed to grow even more tense during the tour because word was spreading: some brothers and sisters were deserting. At the pavilion, people had come forward asking for safe passage out.

  As the tour group traveled along a path away from the gathering storm of people and emotions in the pavilion, a Temple member whispered something to Marceline. Her expression tightened. Now she knew. Yet we all went ahead, as though nothing had changed, first past the Harriet Tubman Place, a barnlike building with “apartments” for singles, then to the Sojourner Truth Apartments, which Marceline said housed children with learning disabilities. As we entered, I noticed other reporters had drifted off to see what was happening. The tour disintegrated around me; I was left practically alone with Marceline, whose face had grown taut to the cracking point. As she introduced me to the staff members, who told of their work with two dozen troubled youngsters, my attention was fragmented—What was happening in the pavilion? Where was Greg? Where were the other reporters? In a few moments, I excused myself, trying not to be rude.

  On that long path with sickly plantings on one side and buildings on both sides, the bulk of the settlement unfolded like a military boot camp. But I turned my back on it. With Jack Beam spouting off about the agricultural enterprises and trying in vain to keep up, I headed toward the pavilion. On the way, I encountered Javers and Krause, who pointed out a wooden building with tightly shuttered windows. In contrast to the shower house, which sounded alive with chatter and splashing water, not a sound emanated from Jane Pitman Gardens. The concern among the other reporters was that some people wanting to leave might be locked inside. Seeing Javers and Krause heading for the front door, I double-timed around the back of the building. Johnny Brown Jones caught up with me. “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “I’d like to see what’s inside that building.”

  “There are seniors in there, and they don’t want to be disturbed. They’re afraid of you. In the States, they’ve had burglars, the police and everyone else break down their doors. They want their privacy.”

  “I’d like to hear that from them. The shuttered windows make us wonder.” The air was hot by now.

  We stood eye to eye for a moment, then he said, “All right....” At the back door, he knocked and called, “This is John. Don’t be afraid. Open up.”

  The door unlatched and swung inward several inches. A shriveled black woman in a cotton print housecoat peered out, her leathery mouth in a frown, her eyes cowed.

  “There are reporters here and they want to come in and look around,” Johnny Brown said. “I told him you want your privacy.”

  “We don’t want our pictures taken,” she said, probably taking his cue. “You can’t come in.”

  “No one will take any pictures of anyone if they don’t want it,” I assured her. “Would you ask the others if they’re willing to talk to me?”

  The question only terrified her further. She looked to Johnny, and he nodded permission. She stepped behind the door for no more than thirty seconds, peeked out and said, “We need our privacy. All of us is getting dressed. We don’t have our clothes on. Nobody wants to be interviewed.”

  “See?” Johnny said, as the door shut and latched.

  On the path out front, I saw Garry and Lane and explained my concern. When Garry insisted the women had a right to privacy, I proposed, “How’bout you and Mark going in there and asking each and every one whether they would agree to speak with me?”

  While the attorneys mounted the porch decorated with potted plants, I waited outside with Johnny Brown Jones. “We have nothing to hide,” he said, and I replied, “You can understand why I want to be sure.” He glared. “No, I can’t.”

  Garry emerged to say the women “unequivocally” did not want news media in there and did not want to talk to the press. Accepting the answer for the moment, I headed for the pavilion where Javers, Krause and Harris continued to press for access to the same dorm, apparently unaware of my efforts. A refusal would indicate secrecy and cast a pall of suspicion over the entire visit, so Lane was trapped. To clear the air, he finally admitted, “You know the problem? It’s crowded. It’s to be expected. Jonestown went from eighty to twelve hundred people.” He said the Temple had feared the reporters would misinterpret the crowding. While I joined in the request to see the dorm and the attorneys tried to convince Temple aides to open it up, a man arrived with a platter of hot grilled cheese sandwiches. With the coffee eating away at my empty stomach, I welcomed the sandwich, and Garry took one too; Lane declined.

  Finally, the lawyers announced that we could see Jane Pitman Gardens. We found the barracks as crowded and stifling as a prisoner of war camp. Under the metal roof and behind locked shutters rose two tiers of bunk beds. In the rafters, just a foot or so above the top bunks, sleeping bags, suitcases and boxes of belongings were stacked on planks. Harsh light rushed inside with us as the elderly residents, fully dressed, filed out, squinting like moles, scattering.

  “The plan calls for one hundred more cottages,” commented one of our young escorts. “We’ll move people out as we b
uild cottages.”

  Despite the touches of individuality—clothing on nails, small throw rugs, embroidered pillows, colorful quilts—the dormitory for elderly women appeared seriously overcrowded. “The place is very neat and clean,” I commented. “How many people live in here?” My escort shrugged.

  Though a head count was impossible, the numbers on the bunks, which were lined up head to foot in several rows just a few feet apart, went at least into the sixties. Whether such crowding was inhumane or adequate would hinge to a great extent on the attitudes and self-determination of the residents. But I asked myself why the elderly—those who were to be revered and afforded dignity—were herded together in what seemed to be the least desirable housing in the settlement.

  “Thank you for letting us see your house,” I said to a woman near the door. “I’m sorry to have disturbed your privacy.” She nodded yet held her tongue like the others.

  As a last resort, I asked my escort, Prokes, to invite someone to speak with me. Stopping a bony and very short black woman of about seventy, he said, “This man would like to ask a few questions. He’s a reporter.”

  On the porch, with her back against the wall, she looked up at me, eyes like eggs, lips drawn thin. In answer to my questions, she said that she hailed from Los Angeles and had resided in Jane Pitman Gardens for her entire two years in Jonestown. She said she liked the accommodations just fine and intended neither to leave nor to seek better quarters. Even after I asked Prokes to move out of earshot, she maintained, “I’m happy as can be.”

  When Prokes rejoined us, he said, “She’s one of our chief gardeners. She worked on this beautiful garden here.” Not a negative syllable escaped the woman’s mouth, yet her voice was bereft of enthusiasm. She actually leaned away, hoping to leave, consumed by anxiety either because of me or because of the aides hovering around us.

  For me, the masquerade ended there. We had seen what we were not supposed to see, enough to write negative reports if we were as biased and antagonistic as Jones believed. And we had dashed the illusion of trust by insisting on seeing the dorm.

  When I returned to the pavilion, I was unsure how many people were defecting and how much the Temple knew. However, I could tell from the expressions on the Concerned Relatives that none of their people would be riding out with us. Anthony Katsaris, on a bench with his sister, looked absolutely wrung out emotionally. For two days, his sister had kept him at arm’s length. The previous night, he had lured her away from the pavilion by asking her to show him to the bathroom. All he wanted was to talk with his sister alone, at least so he could be sure she really wanted to stay. When she refused, he had grabbed her arm—and she had called for a guard to protect her against her own brother. When NBC had interviewed them that night, he tried to hold her hand; she was cold; he blinked back tears. “Maria accused me of using words out of my father’s mouth,” he said.

  When I introduced myself to Maria early Saturday afternoon and asked whether she was enjoying the reunion, she said grudgingly, “There’s never been any problem with my brother visiting. But I have no intention of seeing my father until he drops that lawsuit. The suit’s based on the fact that he says he didn’t molest me; he knows he’s lying.” With a pained expression, Anthony listened to his sister castigate their father.

  In the sunny sheltered spot between the pavilion and the school, flanked by plantain trees, Ryan posed with Carol Houston Boyd, her nieces and their mother, Phyllis Houston, as though the future seemed rosy. Spreading magnanimous arms, Ryan framed the entire group, and they all smiled as I took photos for Carol and myself. When the camera fell, so did the corners of their mouths. I remembered Ryan’s voice booming in his Georgetown hotel room, “Sure, plenty of work has been done at Jonestown, but I want to find out how much of that work was done by Patricia and Judy Houston.”

  When I introduced myself, the girls smiled courteously, a little mindful of their mother’s dour expression. The girls, one year apart, in their mid-teens, appeared well fed and healthy. In their rubber zori sandals, they looked like average California girls entering their high school years.

  “How long have you been down here?” I asked their mother, a tall, well proportioned brunette.

  “About two weeks,” Phyllis said. “I had some vacation time and thought I’d come down. I’m an insurance risk inspector.”

  “Have you been here before?”

  “It’s my first time down,” she said. “But we have constant communications by radio and letter.”

  Her answers confirmed Sammy Houston’s suspicions that she had come to Jonestown solely because the Temple had heard that the Houston family would be represented on the Ryan trip.

  The girls responded very cautiously to my questions. They stuck to safe subjects and canned answers, with no spontaneity. They gave little spiels about their routines—school, sports, drill team, work. “Nothing is wrong with the States,” volunteered Judy, who hoped to become a veterinarian someday. “I just prefer it here.”

  Nearby, Beverly Oliver and her two sons, handsome and sturdy young men named Bruce and William, reclined on a bench together. Mrs. Oliver, her skin a creamy coffee color, radiated a thin, confident, knowing smile. Her boys had warned her earlier not to say anything negative against the Temple during the visit. Her boys tried to protect her; they loved her and perhaps even wanted to leave soon. They were still her boys, not Jim Jones’s. For their NBC interview, however, Bruce and Billy recited the party line.

  Jim Cobb, who had taken movies and still photos of his attractive family, listened as his mother and siblings told Don Harris about the wonders of Jonestown—the beauty of the birds, the compassionate work done by the free clinic. “We have nothing against the States,” said Mrs. Cobb, echoing the Houston girls almost word for word.

  Just several yards away, in the shade of the pavilion, all eyes turned in one direction. Jim Jones had emerged, once again in his red short-sleeved shirt, khaki pants and black military-type shoes. With his face ashen, his dry lips plastered together, his frame wilting in the damp heat, he avoided the sun like an amphibian whose skin would dry and split in direct light. He looked ill—and this day he had a good reason. He had been told a short time earlier that some of the “children” of Jonestown had opted to leave with Ryan. A group of about eight people—including his aides, his attorneys, Ryan and Embassy official Dick Dwyer—clustered around him. No one smiled. Pride and reputations, politics and propaganda, people’s loves and lives were at stake.

  Ryan, though clearly pleased, refrained from openly gloating. The tall congressman almost dwarfed Jones as they conferred, standing, then sitting at a far corner of the pavilion. Ryan did most of the talking, though the remarks were not audible from my range. Both he and the attorneys, I would learn later, tried to comfort Jones, to assure him that a few departures would not besmirch the beauty of the settlement.

  In small knots, Temple members whispered worried asides to each other, sometimes blatantly hiding their mouths with their hands. Certainly, legal aide Harriet Tropp, propagandist and professor Dick Tropp, longtime follower Jack Beam, public relations man Mike Prokes, former security chief Jim McElvane, portly staffer Patty Cartmell and mistress Carolyn Layton knew by then that traitors had stepped forward. And several dozen others, with their haunches on tables or benches, with their eyes strafing us, had read the crisis through the face of Jim Jones.

  The cautious optimism from the previous night’s successes—Ryan’s positive statement, the polished entertainment, the basketball victory—faded into the past like a cloud over the horizon. A group of people whose names I did not know had decided to leave with us. In addition to the first two—a black teen-ager named Monica Bagby and a white curly-haired man named Vern Gosney—two families had come forward. To make matters worse for the Temple, they were large families who had followed Jones for many years—and who secretly had been plotting their escape.

  Over the next hour or so, Jones huddled repeatedly with both families, to te
st their resolve, to question them quietly, to try to mediate their problems. Reporters were ordered to keep our distance, but the expressions told the story. Jones eased onto a bench with the matriarch of the Parks family, wizened white-haired Edith Parks, speaking intently with her and her relatives—Gerald, a balding man in a striped tank top; his wife Patricia, who strongly resembled Marceline Jones; their son Dale, who looked twenty-eight going on forty; teen-ager Brenda, and Tracy, a pink-faced preteen blonde bewildered by it all.

  During the tense minutes of conversation, the Parks family remained the most visible, though Jim and Marceline Jones devoted much time trying to dissuade the Bogues and Harold Cordell, who was with Jim Bogue’s estranged wife Edith. “We’re gonna go back,” Edith Bogue told Jones with great difficulty. “I’ve got my whole family back there.... It’s not that I don’t think what you’re doing here is wonderful, cuz I do.”

  In a low, resigned voice, Jones told the Bogue family, privately, “There’s always a place, just know there’s always a place for you. Always a place.” He managed a slight smile, as he fell back to his secondary position of accommodation. He did not want them to leave feeling threatened; that would make them more likely to talk. And, if he already had made his momentous decision, he certainly did not wish to tip them by being hostile. “Even some of those who have lied [against the Temple after defecting] have come back,” he added. “So many people have lied.”

  Disappointment was a mild word for Jones’s facial contortions. In his emotion and pain, he sucked in his cheeks then inflated them, then licked his dry lips, repeating the actions again and again. This once-eloquent man appeared lost for words, his lips seemingly cemented together even as he spoke. The once-charismatic minister could not muster the animation to turn around followers who had believed in him and loved him. No doubt, the presence of outsiders constrained Jones: he could not harangue over loudspeakers, summon up hostile peer pressure or threaten with his security detail. He could rely only on the bond, the personal bond between Jim Jones the man and these important members; he could only try to stimulate guilt in them for leaving a good cause and good people.