A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  The Temple’s arrival in rural Mendocino County, California, was impossible to miss. Word got around that an entire Indiana church relocated to town, and the local paper ran a flattering feature on the group headlined “Ukiah Welcomes New Citizens to Community.”

  But the welcome was not universally warm. Ukiah’s population numbered less than 10,000 and included few African Americans before the Temple moved in. Some black Temple members were turned away when they tried to rent apartments. During an outing to swim in Lake Mendocino, local bigots baited the group, calling them “niggers” and “nigger lovers.”

  The harassment made the Hoosiers leery of outsiders and protective of their black members. It also made them feel persecuted, and therefore special; they were fighting for their dream of racial harmony.

  Jones did his best to smooth the transition. With his education degree, he landed various teaching jobs to support his family, and spent his free time driving from one member’s home to the next, listening to their complaints, giving advice, reassuring them that their noble cause would eventually triumph. He held services in borrowed quarters or even on front lawns, keeping members loyal with his boundless concern and energy.

  Hyacinth’s faith in a better place only grew in Ukiah. She and Zippy found a two-bedroom apartment and became close to a white, middle-aged couple they’d known only superficially in Indianapolis. Mary and Alfred Tschetter would stop by the sisters’ home for supper, to watch television, or simply relax on the porch and catch the evening breeze. Hy and Zippy had never spent so much time in a companionable setting with white folks, and they marveled at the ease of it. After such an evening, Hy found herself forgetting about the color of her skin altogether until she looked in a mirror. Jones’s good works reverberated in each of his followers.

  After the harassment at Lake Mendocino, Temple members built a pool in Jones’s front yard at 7700 East Road in Redwood Valley so they could swim in peace. Youngsters learned the backstroke in it; the elderly stayed limber in it. The experience of working together to build the pool was so empowering that the group decided to build their own church as well, directly over the pool. They hired a construction company for the heavy labor, but members cheerfully pitched in to complete smaller jobs, such as installing windows and tile. Inside the simple redwood building, the space was equally divided between the pool and a large open area for meetings; members shared a pride of ownership as they attended services. They’d built a sanctuary of their own making.

  The bonds uniting them grew stronger as they became an ad hoc family, sharing encouragement and sustenance, pitching in to paint or remodel each other’s homes. As Jones promised, Hy and Zip were able to open a care home. They purchased a ranch house in Redwood Valley, ten miles north of Ukiah, and took in patients discharged from the local mental hospital as part of Governor Ronald Reagan’s deinstitutionalization drive. The state paid them $270 per month per patient, and Zip learned to drive so she could ferry their charges to medical appointments.

  In their spare time, they folded and stamped bulletins and letters soliciting donations for Jones’s ministry, and baked pastries to sell at a table in the church parking lot after services. Zip’s original cranberry sauce cake, a cranberry-and-nut cake smothered in pink icing, always sold out early, despite the six-dollar price tag. Across from their home was a pear orchard and, after the harvest, the owner let the sisters comb the trees for leftovers. They spent many pleasant afternoons peeling and slicing the fragrant white fruit at church canning parties, putting up hundreds of quarts of pears, peaches, corn, zucchini, and string beans culled from backyard gardens. The jarred preserves were distributed among church care homes and the community’s poor.

  The Temple was now the center of their lives.

  The group’s influence and numbers kept expanding. The editor of the Ukiah Journal, George Hunter, became a friend, as did county supervisor Al Barbero and Sheriff Reno Bartolomie, who noticed that local hoodlums seemed magically transformed after joining the Temple ranks. To reinforce this good will, Jones donated money to the sheriff’s department to buy much-needed equipment.

  Meanwhile, Jones’s message was quietly evolving. The more he studied the Bible, the more he noticed the number of errors, contradictions, and inconsistencies it contained. More alarming were the loathsome acts God condoned: slavery, mass murder, rape, and an astounding amount of violence. He began to doubt the authenticity of the Bible—and of God himself.

  Jones spelled out his concerns in a self-published booklet titled “The Letter Killeth, but the Spirit Giveth LIFE,” a phrase plucked from 2 Corinthians 3:6: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Jones interpreted the verse this way: “The Bible kills, but love makes alive. People are not saved through the reading of the Bible.”

  The tract would become the cornerstone of his ministry, and was handed out to visiting worshippers to explain Jones’s creed. Later, he’d use stronger words: The Bible murders.

  The booklet, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation found in Jonestown after the massacre, represents important early evidence of Jones’s break with Christianity. He didn’t dismiss the Bible completely, but used it to legitimize his paranormal power: “There is a prophet in our day who unquestioningly proves that he is sent from God,” he wrote in “The Letter Killeth.” “He has all the gifts of the spirit as given in the Bible: Word of wisdom, word of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, working of miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, tongues and interpretation of tongues (See 1 Corinthians 12:8–10). We must have a prophet who is living the Christ life to direct us in this hour.”

  That prophet, of course, was Jim Jones. Some members of his congregation balked at this bold claim. Others saw a certain logic in it: You can twist almost any verse of the Bible to your meaning. Over the years, Jones would continue to chip away at his followers’ faith until they had nothing left to believe in but Jim Jones.

  Once the church’s growth peaked in Mendocino County, the Temple bought thirteen used Greyhound buses, and Jones took his show on the road in a much-hyped miracle crusade. The Temple public relations crew placed ads in newspapers across the country advertising “the greatest healing ministry through Christ on earth today.” Jones filled local auditoriums in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Brooklyn, New York. He’d astound locals with his healings and apparent clairvoyance, then invite them to come home with him: “I’ve got acres of fields of greens and potatoes and strawberries and pears and tomatoes, I’ve got grapes, I’ve got the harvest on a hundred hills,” he’d boast. “Take me up on my offer and come to California … come out there in those beautiful fields of Eden. See what we’re doing out there for freedom. And I’ll tell you, you won’t want to come back.”

  The raven-haired preacher vowed to care for them, deeply, individually. All they had to do was get on the bus.

  Many did. Usually these new proselytes were park-bench winos, prostitutes, junkies, and impoverished single mothers—those who most needed the protective overcoat of a church. “The dregs of fascist USA,” Jones called them.

  In bucolic Redwood Valley, Temple members put a roof over their heads and food in their mouths. They cured heroin addicts, sitting with them around the clock until their tremors and vomiting subsided. They helped single mothers pay for schoolbooks and clothes. They brought destitute seniors to doctors for checkups. They offered the newcomers a place in their home, a cup of warmth, a listening ear. Jones’s ministry was based on kindness. In return, the new acolytes pledged him their unswerving loyalty.

  Some locals resented the large influx of urban outsiders, most of whom were black. Malicious rumors spread about strange goings-on at the church and in the growing number of Temple communes around town. By 1970, however, it became clear that Peoples Temple, and Jones’s ambition, had outgrown Redwood Valley, and Jones started holding services in a high school audit
orium in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. The move was a huge jump for a man who’d started out as a sidewalk screecher in a minor Indiana town.

  And so, one Sunday morning about a year later, as churchgoers streamed into Benjamin Franklin Junior High, a wayward teenager named Stanley Clayton joined them, eager to hear the preacher that had set the black community abuzz. Dressed in a Sears wide-lapel three-piece suit and accompanied by his foster mother, the seventeen-year-old had arrived on a Temple bus that regularly transported worshippers from the East Bay to San Francisco. As he wove through the crowd looking for a seat, he was surprised to see so many people in jeans and T-shirts. Where he came from, folks “suited down” for church.

  The service began with a rousing performance by the Temple’s integrated choir, the women dressed in light blue robes, the men in matching blue shirts and black pants. Blacks and whites, side by side, singing gospel standards. This was as much a revelation to Stanley Clayton on that day as it had been to Hy and Zippy fifteen years earlier. It was that first exposure to the Temple, that first insight into how the world could and should be, that would sustain Stanley for years to come.

  If you could sum up the seventeen-year-old Stanley with one word it would be rage. With his dark-as-ebony skin, he drew attention wherever he went, usually of the unwelcome sort. Despite the “black is beautiful” ethos of the day, for Stanley, a white complexion was the standard for all things good—intelligence, attractiveness, power—and he was acutely aware of his place at the opposite end of the color spectrum. His skin was so dark that even other African American kids teased him. “Smudge,” they called him, or “Bosco,” after the chocolate syrup.

  Stanley seemed doomed to a life of hard luck from the moment his mother, an alcoholic who had seven kids with seven different fathers, pushed him into the world. The family lived in the slums of West Oakland, where they subsisted on welfare and the mother’s meager factory wages. Any extra money went to replenishing her booze cabinet, not the refrigerator. While Stanley’s little brother cried from hunger, Stanley, when he was old enough, helped himself to the neighborhood grocery store, pushing around a shopping cart while slyly eating a package of bologna. He went to school in rags, and spent evenings closed in a back bedroom with his siblings, watching television and trying to avoid drunken strangers in the hall. His home was a renowned party pad, and after too many bottles of Night Train wine, with its 17.5 percent alcohol content, fights invariably broke out. The boyfriends beat up his mother, and if he or his siblings tried to intervene, the boyfriends beat them as well.

  The rage spilled over. When he was nine, he hit a girl in his class for calling him “darkie,” and was sent to juvenile hall. It was the first entry in what would become an extensive rap sheet of crimes committed in his fury of have-notness.

  By the time he started middle school, he was running a black market in coffee and cigarettes. He’d steal the merchandise from local stores, then sell it to his neighbors. It kept him in food and clothes until he tried to rob a shop in an upscale Berkeley neighborhood. The suspicious owner saw him slip a can of Folgers beneath his jacket, and locked the front door before calling the police. When Stanley found he was trapped inside, he went nuts. He kicked the door and hit the woman, and when the officers arrived, he swung at them, too. A court convicted him of assault and battery as well as petty theft, and sentenced him to a year at the California Youth Authority prison in Stockton. He was twelve years old.

  There were thousands of kids like Stanley Clayton in the East Bay. In Oakland, there was a hair-trigger relationship between the large, destitute black population and the predominantly white police force. Shoot first, ask questions later, seemed to be the Oakland PD’s motto. The Black Panther Party was born from this brutal atmosphere, pledging to defend the community from police violence. And it happened that Stanley’s foster mom was the aunt of Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panthers.

  Whenever the dashing, eloquent Newton stopped by Miss Jessie’s for a visit, Stanley hung at his elbow, absorbing his every word. The gospel of the Panther leader was radically different from Miss Jessie’s. Rather than abiding injustice in hopes of some distant heavenly reward, Brother Newton called on black men to arm themselves against racist oppression. When Stanley was released from the youth authority, he came home to find Newton and his comrades tailing squad cars with loaded shotguns, policing the police. Black is powerful was the message Newton broadcast to the brothers on the block.

  Peoples Temple seemed a happy medium between Newton’s militancy and Miss Jessie’s pray-about-it passivity. On that first Sunday, Stanley was wooed by the choir, wowed by Jones’s healings, and won over by his call to create a brotherhood based on equality and respect.

  Being surrounded by that huge, musical, magical, integrated fellowship was like being engulfed in a giant embrace. It was everything Stanley longed for. He felt caught up in greatness, freed.

  “I want to be part of this,” he told his foster mother.

  A few months later, after he turned eighteen, he moved to Ukiah to be closer to Jim Jones.

  CHAPTER 4

  “DAD”

  Some people link Jones’s self-aggrandizement to a trip he took in the mid-1950s to meet Father Divine. He was just your average “holy ghost man,” they say, until he went to Philadelphia and met a black preacher who claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

  Father Divine’s charisma and message of racial and gender equality drew thousands of followers. He controlled virtually every aspect of their lives, requiring them to remain celibate, live communally, and sign their wages and property over to him. They hung his photograph on the walls of their homes and called him Father.

  After his first visit to Philadelphia, Jones wrote that he felt revulsion upon hearing Divine’s followers call him Father, and nauseated by their leader worship.

  But envy lurked below his aversion: Over the years, Jones would copy most of Divine’s ideas and techniques. He’d even call his Guyanese agricultural project The Promised Land, the name Divine used for his communal farm in upstate New York. Jones’s self-proclaimed “miracle crusade” would stop at Divine’s Peace Mission repeatedly over the next decades as he tried, sometimes successfully, to steal sheep from his rival’s flock.

  In the spring of 1973, Jones began a sermon in San Francisco with these words: “For some unexplained set of reasons, I happen to be selected to be God.” He described the miracles he’d supposedly performed around the world, and even claimed he could raise the dead. “You may not believe, but I’ll tell you, there was never a miracle done in the world,’less I did it. I am God the Messiah,” he said. He paused dramatically and stepped away from the pulpit to throw a Bible to the ground, then surveyed his shocked audience. “See that? I’m still alive,” he gloated. Several newcomers walked out in protest. Others waited uneasily for Jones to finish formulating what would become his predominant message: God had done nothing to help humanity; Jim Jones had done everything.

  At first, he merely extolled the Golden Rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you, by emphasizing traditional church outreach: bringing casseroles to shut-ins, helping frazzled new mothers, organizing field trips for urban youth. He combined the Apostle Paul’s mandate for Christians to pool their resources and Karl Marx’s directive “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and called it apostolic socialism, or divine socialism.

  During services, he championed his new religion by reading from newspapers. The world seemed to be imploding in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his message struck a nerve. The headlines were saturated with death: Vietnam, nuclear war, murdered civil rights leaders and student protestors. Americans of every stripe were angry, insecure, afraid. Gone was the Leave It to Beaver complacency. The establishment fissured along with its enabler—mainstream religion—and people turned to alternative sources for guidance—including gurus, spiritualism, astrology, and self-help groups.

  The
time was ripe for Jim Jones. As he stood before his growing congregation in his baby-blue robe and slicked-back hair, he felt the crowd’s adoring gaze radiating over him. As he spoke, they punctuated his sentences with “Hallelujah!” and “Yes, Lord!” It was more love and respect than he’d ever known. When he claimed to be their savior, many believed it. He’d saved them from the street, fed, clothed, sheltered, and empowered them. They worshipped him for it. He dangled hope in front of the despondent, and built a ministry around it.

  They used to call him Jimba. Now they called him Father.

  Despite his desire to convert people to divine socialism, most visitors still came to the Temple for the spectacle of Jones’s healings. In Guyana, he’d tell top aides that he learned to perform miracles by studying itinerant preachers at tent revivals as a young man. His motivation was primarily financial; “I thought that there must be a way that you could do this for good, that you can get the crowd, get some money, and do some good with it,” he said.

  When he started doing his own so-called miracles, he initially did the grunge work himself, jotting down details of overheard conversations to use in discernments. “There’s a woman here tonight who is sick with worry about her little girl …” he’d tell the crowd. Or “There is a man here whose right leg is lame due to a farming accident …” It was easy to fool people into thinking he was a clairvoyant. He was so secretive about the fraud that his own wife believed it. Later, he recruited a few confidants to perpetuate the deceit. Known as Jones’s staff, some disguised themselves as invalids who rose from their wheelchairs and walked. Others dug through trash bins collecting personal data for his supposed revelations. They were crafty and brazen. One would pretend to be a pregnant woman and knock on a target’s front door, desperate to use the bathroom. Inside, she’d take an inventory of the residence, including the photos on the living room wall, the drugs in the medicine cabinet, even the preferred brand of cat food, and pass the information along to Jones.