A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  Not only were they not allowed to leave, they were not allowed to question. Jones grew furious if anyone challenged him, especially in public.

  “We won’t allow any dissidence,” he stated on July 25, 1976. “We’re interested in instilling respect and reverence for the center of this movement.”

  It was harder to quit the church after you went communal. Jones promised members lifetime care in exchange for their complete financial commitment. Members sold everything they had—homes, stocks, and jewelry—and gave the proceeds to the church before moving into a Temple apartment so they had nothing to fall back on if they left.

  Still, some did dare leave, and they were endlessly harassed for doing so. Jones’s aides cut words and letters from magazines and assembled them into threatening missives, then smeared the pages with poison oak. Temple attorney Tim Stoen reviewed threats to make sure they were vague enough not to break any laws: “We know where you live,” read one. “We’re watching you all the time, we know where you work, we know your home number, we know your trashy life, honkey. You drive your dead mama’s car. Keep your ass clean and your mouth clamped up. No pigs.” Jones’s staff would leave the notes on defectors’ porches in the middle of the night. They also called in threats from pay phones in outlying San Francisco neighborhoods, wearing gloves and terminating the conversation quickly so the call couldn’t be traced. Other intimidation tactics included publishing a newspaper obituary in the defector’s name or renting a hearse and letting it idle in front of the person’s house.

  Over the years, Jones’s warnings became more dire: Leave and you will die. The day before Edith Roller begged on her lunch hour, Jones announced that a member who joined another church had fallen ill and died for doing so. Another woman who left had “just given herself the death sentence,” he said on another occasion. On yet another, he claimed to see the ghost of a defector who’d been killed in a work accident sitting in the pews. “You cannot escape this movement!” he warned his congregation.

  David Wise took his chance anyway. As an associate pastor in Los Angeles, he was privy to Jones’s smoke and mirrors. The last straw came when Jones asked him to install security bars over the windows of the pastor’s quarters in the LA Temple, then publicly chastised him for doing so, saying they were a fire hazard. He quit the post, but Temple henchmen found him and drove him to the San Francisco church for a confrontation with Jones. He managed to escape from the building, and was waiting for the bus when Jones’s security men caught up to him again. When he refused to come with them to talk to Jones from a pay phone, they left and returned with a large group of backups. Wise slipped by them wearing a long-haired wig and a poncho. He went into hiding for twenty-five years.

  The defection that angered Jones the most, however, was that of eight college students in 1973. The “Gang of Eight,” as they came to be called, represented the Temple’s best and brightest. In a letter they wrote explaining their decision to leave, they pointed out Jones’ double standards: Jones had sex with his staff while everyone else was supposed to remain celibate and rechannel their sexual energy into the cause. Jones advocated racial equality, yet the church leadership was almost exclusively white. Jones claimed to be mounting a socialist revolution, yet, they alleged, 99.5 percent of the members knew nothing about socialism.

  Their searing criticism infuriated Jones. No one had dared be so blunt with him before. And these weren’t average members, but included the children of families who’d followed him from Indiana. And although they promised not to badmouth Peoples Temple, Jones worried that their defection would trigger others to follow suit.

  Not long after the “Gang of Eight” left, Jones proposed a radical idea to his planning commission. Black Panther leader Huey Newton had recently published a memoir called Revolutionary Suicide, and Jones asked the commission if they’d be willing to kill themselves to keep the Temple from being discredited.

  This was something completely different from Newton’s conceit, which he explained in his book’s introduction: “Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we move against these forces, even at the risk of death.” Newton didn’t have far to look for examples of this coinage. The Oakland police gunned down an unarmed Panther member, Bobby Hutton, seventeen, on April 6, 1968, two days after Martin Luther King was killed. Police threw tear gas into the house where Hutton was staying, and when the teen emerged with his hands lifted in surrender, they shot him twelve times. Newton considered Hutton’s death a “revolutionary suicide” because he was killed while he was involved in a movement to overthrow the white racist establishment.

  But Jones twisted Newton’s idea into something else entirely. He asked the commission members what they thought about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge together. Such an extravagant act would generate news coverage for their cause, he explained. After a brief silence, Jack Beam, who had followed Jones from Indiana with his wife and children, leaped out of his chair. “Go ahead and kill yourself if you want, but leave the rest of us out of this!” he shouted. Emboldened by Beam’s defiance, several others also told Jones they had no desire to kill themselves, cause or no cause.

  But Jones wouldn’t let go of the notion.

  At a planning commission meeting held on New Year’s Day, 1976, he treated the thirty-odd members present to a glass of wine. The Temple forbade alcohol consumption, but Jones said the wine was a token of his love, and passed out small cups of a purple liquid. He waited until everyone had drained their cup before stating that drink was actually poison. They would all be dead within an hour, he added. Some members thought he was just being theatrical, and sat stoically, waiting to see what Jones would say next. Patty Cartmell, a rotund Hoosier who assisted Jones with his healings, tried to run out, and was restrained by guards.

  “Are there any other traitors in here who want to try to get to a doctor?” Jones asked the astonished group.

  After a tense forty-five minutes passed, Jones admitted the drill was “only a test.”

  “I had my staff watching each of your faces to determine if you were indeed ready to die,” Jones said. “I know now which of you can be trusted and which of you cannot.” He chided Cartmell for clinging to life, insisting that it was a privilege to die for your beliefs. The drill forced them to do some deep thinking about their level of dedication, he explained.

  Afterward, some of those present felt proud at being included in the hazing ritual, which Jones told them to keep secret. A few learned the hazing wasn’t over yet: After the meeting, Jones called several aides aside to tell them he really was thinking about killing off the planning commission. Several commission members had defected, and he feared more would follow. By his reasoning, it was better for them to die than to “spread lies” about him. He was debating two options, he said: loading the entire commission onto Temple buses and driving them off the Golden Gate Bridge, or loading them onto a plane and having someone shoot the pilot.

  He, of course, would live. He’d need to explain to the world why they had chosen to commit suicide. Although he hadn’t yet decided on the reason he’d give for such a startling act, his list of possibilities included: to protest racism, to protest capitalism, or to protest people who bad-mouthed the Temple.

  He pursued the suicide-by-plane idea and sent one of his regular paramours, a long-nosed twenty-one-year-old named Maria Katsaris, to flight school in Redwood Valley.

  Jones told the congregation that the Temple needed pilots to ferry people and supplies to the agricultural mission in Guyana, but four people knew the true reason for her lessons: Jones, Katsaris, Carolyn Layton, and another top associate named Teri Buford. After Maria got her private pilot’s license in July 1975, Guy Young went for a ride with her one bright, crisp morning, completely unaware of the dark undertones of the flight. Maria claimed th
at she was putting in hours toward her commercial pilot’s license. Soon after, however, she abruptly dropped out of the flight school, telling her roommate that she didn’t enjoy flying.

  At that point, Jones had a grander plan in the works: Jonestown. He told members he was going to create a new society in the middle of the virgin jungle, a utopia that would be free of sexism, racism, elitism, and all other evil -isms. He referred to it as “the promised land” or “freedom land.” He purchased a remote tract of land in Guyana and sent pioneers down to start clearing it in 1974. Over the next few years, they gave regular updates to the excited congregation over a ham-radio set, and their letters were eagerly passed around. They described the mission’s water as “better than any water you ever tasted,” the weather as “never too cold or too hot,” and said they lived in a continual state of bliss where “women deliver babies with no pain whatsoever.” All this was untrue, of course: Jones commanded the settlers to only relay upbeat news about the mission; he wanted to lure as many of his followers to Guyana as possible.

  He had no desire to see his followers flourish in South America. He was already fantasizing about their deaths.

  Would his people die for him if he asked them to? The question of how far he could push his followers had long fascinated Jones. After the massacre, a man who attended Jones’s church in Indianapolis would tell the FBI an eerie story that paralleled Jonestown’s final hours. During a routine meeting, Jones halted the proceeding to ask those present if they would lie down on the floor if he asked them to do so. There was a quizzical pause, and then a few people said, yes, they would. Jones asked them to do so. Some slid from their seats faster than others, but soon the entire group was stretched out on the ground. Jones remained seated, silently considering the bodies at his feet. After several seconds, he stated that he was no better than they were and slipped to the floor to lie among them.

  Did Jones harbor a death wish for himself and his flock? If you paid close attention to his message, which Edith Roller did, a foreboding subtext starkly emerges:

  “I love socialism,” Jones told his congregation on September 6, 1975, “and I’d be willing to die to bring it about, but if I did, I’d take a thousand with me.”

  In February 1976, he stated: “The last orgasm I’d like to have is death, if I could take you all with me.”

  “A good socialist does not fear death,” he said several months later. “It would be the greatest reward he could receive.”

  Edith didn’t have a chance to discover this dark thread herself. She turned in her journal pages as quickly as she typed them up, and Jones interspersed his chilling statements among thousands of other words he uttered, about racial injustice, about peace, about feeding the hungry, where they were harder to find, and hear.

  Reading through her journal in its entirety, however, it is clear that he was already scheming to kill his followers long before he cloistered them in Guayana. He made his most direct reference to his ghastly plan on May 9, 1976: “The day is coming when I’m going to issue an order that will shock you.”

  CHAPTER 7

  EXODUS

  After several years of resistance, Edith finally buckled and moved into a Temple commune. Her new apartment was located in the seedy Tender loin district, at 1029 Geary Street, apartment 47, a mile from the church.

  Her heart sank when she walked into it for the first time. Whereas her Haight apartment overlooked lush backyard gardens, the windows of her commune faced a narrow light well that separated her building from the shabby hotel next door. Across the street, Frenchy’s Adult Superstore and a massage parlor advertised their services in garish neon. The neighborhood bars churned out drunks whose fistfights woke her up, and prostitutes teetered by on platform heels at noon.

  She’d tried to negotiate the terms of her move. Not quite comprehending the nature of group living, she asked Temple secretaries if she could live in a commune alone, and when they told her that was impossible, she asked not to be paired with a chatty senior. They disregarded her request, moving her in with a talkative seventy-one-year-old black woman named Christine Bates, whom everyone simply called “Bates.”

  More unpleasant surprises were in the offing: The building’s long, dark hallways reeked of urine, and cockroaches lurked beneath the furniture. And then there was the food. Edith was mindful of eating healthy fare; her diet consisted of fresh produce, whole grains, and tofu. The first meal she was served as a communard consisted of macaroni salad, a hot dog, and pudding. She noted her disappointment in her journal. On another day, residents were given bologna sandwiches for both lunch and dinner. Her complaints were met with shrugged shoulders. The budget was tight, she was told; others were grateful just to have a roof over their heads. There was no time for her petit bourgeois concerns.

  She knew better than to press the issue: During her first month in the commune, Jones mentioned several instances of members who were harmed for disobeying him. One woman had a stroke because she questioned Jones’s actions. Another was in a coma for refusing to move into a commune. And a man was killed a few hours after he defected.

  Edith experienced a slew of stress-related problems after the move. One morning, a colleague noticed half her face was drooping; her doctor diagnosed Bell’s Palsy. The paralysis disappeared after a few days, but was followed by an irritating twitch below her left eye. Next came a painful bout of hemorrhoids. In her distress, she looked at a photo of Jones that she kept on her living room table and called out his name; her discomfort receded, but flared up a few days later.

  Edith missed her solitary evening strolls through Golden Gate Park, which stretched over forty-five emerald blocks through the west side of the city to end at the Pacific Ocean. Now, as she spent evenings typing up her handwritten notes at the kitchen table, Bates wanted to talk. The relationship quickly soured. When Bates interrupted her, Edith turned up the opera show on the radio, or simply ignored her. In retaliation, Bates took to slamming doors while Edith was asleep..

  Like all Temple communards, Edith was given a monthly allowance of eight dollars. To afford what were now indulgences, like an ice cream cone, a cheap steak dinner, or a bottle of Emeraude perfume, she asked her sisters for money. One sent twenty-five dollars, the other, in what Edith took as a reproach, sent two one-dollar bills. Despite everything, Edith was still a firm believer in Jim Jones and his cause. Given her writing skills, she was often summoned to the church office to type public-relations materials, including op-eds and letters to the editor supporting the Temple, and she felt valued for her efforts.

  Hyacinth Thrash and Zipporah Edwards lived one floor below Edith, in apartment 38. They shared their two-bedroom unit with the Mercers, a blind couple in their seventies who were living in Philadelphia when they heard Jones speak on a local radio station and boarded a bus to California to find him. Hy and Zip were as divided on their decision to move into a commune as they’d been on their decision to move out West. Hy didn’t want to leave Redwood Valley; she enjoyed the peaceful vibe of the countryside and taking care of the women who lived in their care home. Several times she started to tell Jones she didn’t want to move to San Francisco, but cut herself short. Noting her hesitation, Jones told her he’d bought some land in Redwood Valley for communal senior housing. The sisters would be attended by on-site medical staff as they aged; they wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. Hy was swayed by his argument: The sisters had no children to look after them; their nieces and nephews lived far away and had families of their own. She certainly didn’t want to spend her last days in a nursing home. Temple attorney Tim Stoen drew up the paperwork deeding their care home to the Temple and by the time she learned the commune was actually located in San Francisco, not Redwood Valley, it was too late to back out.

  The deception was the last of many discouraging turns Hy had witnessed Jones take over the years. She had many quibbles with his ministry, chief among them his disrespect for the scriptures. It wasn’t until she moved to San Francisco t
hat Hyacinth heard Jones talk of throwing away the Bible. He said he didn’t believe the stories she cherished of the virgin birth, Christ’s resurrection, or Noah’s ark. Hyacinth was shocked to hear this. She believed God was all-powerful, capable of anything.

  She was also upset that Jones hadn’t healed her leg. She began visiting an acupuncturist, and the sessions improved her gait, but Jones made her cancel them. Evidently, he didn’t want her to think anyone else could help her. And yet, Sunday after Sunday, as he performed miracles on complete strangers, he passed her over. She sat near the front of the sanctuary with her cane resting against the pew, waiting for him to call out her name, but he never did, and every Sunday she limped out of the church trying to mask her hurt feelings.

  Other things bothered her. Most of the congregation was now black, but the leadership remained white. A little schism opened inside her, a secret rebellion. When Jones told members that they should consider the Temple their sole family and to throw away photos of deceased relatives, she refused. She loved her parents too much to forget them. When Jones ordered everyone to pamphlet to raise money, Zip stood on a street corner jingling a donation cup but Hy excused herself; it hurt to put all her weight on her good leg for long periods. Jones tried to pressure her by showing her a photograph of a crippled girl begging from a car, but she stood firm.

  “Hyacinth will never make a revolutionary,” he told her sister.

  Zipporah was completely sold on Jones, to the point that Hy felt she couldn’t discuss her misgivings with her anymore. Zip praised Jim, and Jim praised Zip. On the cross-country bus trips, Zip rode on Jones’s bus, while Hy stayed behind to care for their boarders. One of Zip’s jobs was to screen potential members to see if they’d be a good fit for the Temple. After returning home from a miracle crusade, she bubbled with adulation for Jones’s supposed powers, and chided Hy when she said she missed their family in Indiana. Hy learned to bite her tongue. Once, when she questioned Jones’s fairness on a matter, Zippy threatened to tell him, and Hy felt her blood run cold. She recalled one of her papa’s favorite sayings: “Trust no live thing and walk careful’round the dead.” She wondered what her father would say of Jim Jones. She’d forfeited two homes, twenty years’ worth of tithes, and now her Social Security income to him. She lived in a commune full of people who believed he was God. She felt increasingly alone.