A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  The Burnham government offered the Temple 3,800 acres along its Venezuelan border, and in February 1976, the Temple signed a twenty-five-year lease at 25 cents per acre, roughly one thousand dollars per year to rent its earthly paradise. Burnham was eager to use the settlement as a model to convince his countrymen that farm cooperatives could be sustainable and profitable, and encouraged the group to hire locals who’d lost their jobs after the closure of a neighboring manganese mine.

  But the government also had a slightly sinister reason for directing Jones to its rainy northwestern corner. Guyana and Venezuela were embroiled in a long-simmering territorial dispute, with Venezuela claiming more than half of Guyana’s territory. A few years earlier, Venezuelan militants attacked a Guyanese border town, leaving six people dead. By placing a large community of Americans along its border, Guyanese officials hoped to deter future incursions, and intimated that the settlers could use any means necessary to protect themselves.

  Jones appointed a loyal Indiana family, the Touchettes, to run the pioneering effort. Unlike most Temple families, Jones hadn’t split up the Touchettes. Charlie and Joyce arrived in Guyana on the same boat as Jim Bogue, and oversaw the project’s development with the help of their sons Albert and Mike, both in their early twenties. The settlers lived in a Port Kaituma boardinghouse and drove seven miles down a potholed road to the site each morning. They were afire with missionary zeal, determined to make their paradise a reality. One amateur agronomist insisted on collecting all the pits and seeds from every piece of produce the pioneers ate, and cultivated plants in jars. Others memorized pages of agricultural texts.

  The task of razing the soaring jungle, with its massive hardwood trees and tangled undergrowth, was immense. The settlers hired a crew of local Amerindians, who, armed only with axes and cutlasses, cleared fifty acres of bush in three weeks.

  After the pioneers spent a year laboring mostly by hand, a government ferry arrived in Port Kaituma in July 1975 bearing a much-anticipated shipment of a DC6 Caterpillar bulldozer, and shortly afterward, a backhoe. The enterprise then kicked into high gear, as the settlers widened the entrance to the property and razed more land. As the settlement grew, stretching out between giant walls of jungle, the pioneers started marking off spaces for the cottages and dormitories that would eventually house one thousand people.

  Unlike other members, Jim Bogue’s reasons for joining Peoples Temple were not lofty. A father’s heartbreak drove him to Jim Jones.

  In the summer of 1962, he took his family on a camping trip to a beach in Northern California. As dusk fell on the first night, Jim gathered his three oldest kids, his daughters Teena, Juanita, and Marilee, to watch the fishermen catch night smelt. Tommy, a few months shy of one, and his brother Jonathon, two, stayed behind with their mother, Edith.

  Bogue and his daughters watched men haul nets of the eel-like fish from the thundering surf until the cold Pacific wind drove them back to the tent. It was only then that Jonathon’s absence was noted. The toddler had simply wandered off, perhaps trying to catch up to his dad and big sisters. Edith assumed her husband had the boy, and he assumed the same of her. The beach was dark, the waves surging with the rising tide. Word of the missing child raced down the beach, and strangers ran over the sand shouting Jonathon’s name, their flashlights raking the night. A few hours later, his tiny body washed ashore a few miles south of the campsite.

  The devastating loss propelled Jim Bogue on a spiritual quest.

  He’d been raised Mormon, but left the sect when he left his parents’ home. He had no interest in pacing the streets for two years on the obligatory mission; he liked his smokes and beer. But Jonathon’s death made him long for the same sense of cosmic order he’d had as a boy. He wanted to know what happened to the souls of children, and if there was any way he could see his beloved son again. He visited a clairvoyant, consulted a Buddhist priest, and devoured books on parapsychology, ESP, and paranormal activity.

  He couldn’t discuss his pursuit with Edith. Each of them blamed the other for their son’s death, and this precluded all discussion of the tragedy. They’d had problems communicating long before Jonathon died. Edith was a quiet woman whom Jim found difficult to read, even after fourteen years of marriage and five children.

  The pair had met when he was twenty-two, and she was fifteen. He owned a gas station in Fairfield, California, and she walked past it on her way to high school. In those days, he thought she was “as cute as a bug’s ear.” He was awkward with women, and was therefore surprised when she returned his smile. When their sidewalk flirtation became physical, Edith’s mother drove them to Reno to get married. Edith bore her first child at seventeen. But she never settled into the marriage, and continued to flirt, and more, with other men. Jim heard about her escapades from his in-laws, and sometimes from the men themselves. He tried to excuse her behavior; she was just a child when they met, and he figured she felt robbed of her youth. He hoped she’d ease into domesticity, but the affairs continued. After Jonathon died, they retreated into separate corners to grieve and the chasm between them widened.

  In the middle of Bogue’s questing, he moved his family to Ukiah, California, to be closer to his parents. It was there that he heard about a preacher, just up the road, who claimed to be a seer.

  And so, on a Sunday in February 1968, he drove his family thirteen minutes up Highway 101, past miles of denuded grape trellises, to Redwood Valley to see if Jim Jones had the answers to his questions. As he entered the building where Jones was holding services, Bogue noticed that the crowd’s adoration for the preacher was almost palpable. He watched closely as Jones called out private details about the people in the pews, and ordered a wheelchair-bound woman to rise and walk, then dance, up the aisles. He did indeed seem to possess some kind of extraordinary power. When Reverend Jones laid his hands on bent supplicants, they rose up with renewed hope, a hope and renewal Bogue wanted for himself.

  At the urging of several members, the Bogues stayed for a potluck after the service. Jones sat down next to Bogue and told him of his dream of founding a community based on equality and love, where no one would be hungry, marginalized, or lonely. The pastor exuded serenity. In his warm brown eyes and boyish smile, Bogue found compassion. The family spent the better part of that Sunday at the church, together in a pleasant environment, and on the drive home, Jim Bogue felt a little less hollow inside. Perhaps this church represented the healing their family needed.

  They returned the next Sunday, and the next, and were quickly drawn into Temple life. They attended picnics and dances, helped paint other members’ homes and organize food drives. Their children played with Temple kids. Edith volunteered for secretarial work, and helped with the church’s “telephone tree.” The Temple helped the couple focus on something larger than themselves.

  The Bogues didn’t need Temple charity. They operated a care home for mentally disabled adults out of one side of their duplex, and Jim did occasional massage work—a family trade—on the side. Like other members, the Bogues agreed to donate 15 percent of their income to further Jones’s ministry, and when Jones raised members’ contributions to 25 percent, they didn’t object. There was so much need in the world. Neither did they balk when Jones asked if they could house a couple of Temple members who were down on their luck.

  But the glow faded for Jim Bogue after a few months. Reverend Jones had a doomsday obsession that didn’t resonate with him. He’d learned that the primary reason why the church moved to California from the midwest was to avoid a nuclear attack. The attack never happened, and the whole thing sounded a bit absurd to him. And then there were the false affidavits. He’d sat in a room with a large group of members as a church secretary told them to incriminate themselves on paper. The statements were merely a loyalty test, she said; they’d be filed away for safekeeping and only made public if a member tried to betray the cause. There’d been attempts on Father’s life, she said, and he needed assurances that his followers were willin
g to put their reputations on the line to guarantee his safety.

  Parents were told specifically to confess to molesting their children. Bogue blanched at this, but saw other parents that he respected write without hesitating. Still he paused, pen in hand. Most Temple members would have a moment like this at one point or another, a moment when they ignored what their gut instinct said was wrong or unfair and followed the crowd. Some members crossed that line and forgot about it. Others were nagged by a sense of wrongness. Jim Bogue dashed off a sentence claiming to have abused his three daughters and handed his paper to the secretary, eager to get rid of the repugnant words. His “confession” was collected with everyone else’s and filed away in the church office, but it lingered in his mind like an insult.

  When he told Edith he was quitting the church, she appeared to take the news calmly. But Edith was smitten with Jim Jones, and the first thing she did after her husband’s announcement was to consult her pastor. Jones gave her detailed instructions on how to proceed.

  The next afternoon, as Bogue refurbished a secondhand trailer that he’d bought for a family trip to see his brother in Alaska, a patrol car from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department nosed up his driveway. A deputy walked over and handed him an eviction order and a separation petition. Stunned, he left to spend the night at his parents’ house.

  The next morning, he marched back into his house and told Edith he wasn’t going anywhere. It was his home, too. She threatened to divorce him and take the kids unless he returned to Peoples Temple. She also let him know that, with Jones’s encouragement, she’d drained their joint bank account and taken his name off the care-home license.

  Her actions left Bogue penniless and homeless. He refused to leave the house. A few hours later, one of Jones’s associate pastors, a thin black man named Archie Ijames, showed up. Ijames reminded Bogue about the statement he’d signed saying he molested his daughters. Bogue started to protest, but Ijames cut him off. The false confessions were meant for situations like these, where members tried to betray the church by leaving.

  Bogue was numb with anger. When he called Jones to complain, the preacher was too busy to talk to him. Bogue was at a loss. Jones was esteemed in the community, friendly with local power brokers. Bogue’s first job after moving to Ukiah was as a janitor at the courthouse, where he developed a healthy fear of authority. Who was he to defy Jim Jones?

  Confronted with Jones’s brazen interference in his private life, he felt like the country mouse: timid, feeble, and tongue-tied. He gave the situation more thought. Despite everything, he loved Edith. And what was church once a week, compared to losing his family, his home, and his financial security?

  And so he did what he’d always done, he shut his mouth and gritted it out.

  When Edith struck up a relationship with family friend and Temple member Harold Cordell, he pretended it wasn’t happening. Harold Cordell was also married, a father of five kids. Bogue rebuilt Harold’s electric stove when it broke and lent him money to buy a car. But a few months before he left for South America, Bogue returned from his second job working the late shift at the Masonite company as a machine operator, and found Harold sleeping on top of his bed, while Edith slept under the covers. Edith swore nothing untoward had happened. She gave him some drawn-out, convoluted reason that seemed perfectly logical to the two of them, and Bogue didn’t know what to believe. As he turned on his heel, he briefly entertained the notion of shooting them both and stuffing their bodies into the septic tank in the backyard.

  He tamped down these violent emotions. He’d trained himself, by then, not to do the normal thing. Since Jones forced him to rejoin his church, he’d signed more false statements and confessed to being a violent revolutionary who would kill for “the cause.” He’d watched children, including his own, beaten, and struggled to override his human and paternal instincts to protect them. He’d transported food that was stolen from a San Francisco warehouse and distributed it to the church communes. He’d sunk deeper and deeper.

  Bogue needed to believe that the scene on his marital bed was innocent. He considered Harold a good friend, but more importantly, Harold was Jones’s bus driver, and a planning commission member. He was in a position of power, Bogue was not.

  So when Jones pulled Bogue aside several years later, during which time the church had slowly yet inexorably come to dominate his life, to ask him if he’d be willing to help establish the Temple’s overseas mission, he immediately said yes. Jones flattered him, saying Bogue’s inventiveness and experience working at a hay farm would make him an ideal pioneer.

  He knew the appointment would make Edith proud; here was the man she most admired in the world choosing her husband for a crucial task. He knew he was expected to assent, but he also felt oddly honored that Jones asked him.

  “Don’t worry, Jim,” Jones assured him. “As soon as you get settled in, I’ll send Edith and the kids down to you.”

  Jim Bogue cast his hopes and dreams on the project. It represented, for him, a clean start for his family; a place where he’d regain his rightful place in the household. A place where his children would look up to him, and his wife would again cherish him. When he first arrived at the jungle plot, he thought of his wife and kids with each stroke of his cutlass, each chop of his garden hoe. They were his motivation as he labored in the searing equatorial heat and brushed away malarial mosquitoes. He was preparing a new home for his family. He imagined giving them a tour, his kids bubbling with excitement, Edith’s heart defrosted at last as she saw the utopia he’d built her. Twenty years after they met, he was still inspired by her schoolgirl smile, so full of hidden Edens. He wanted her to feel the calloused pads on his hands, his bronzed and muscled arms. They were proof of his love.

  He built Jonestown’s first structure, a dock for offloading cargo from trucks, fashioning the floor from wooden poles and the walls from tree bark. It later became the banana shed. He laid the foundation for the kitchen using a garden hose as a level. He fixed the Caterpillar and the backhoe when they broke down and work came to a standstill. He solved the water problem: The barrels they used to collect rainwater runoff from the roofs were infested with mosquito larvae, so Jim went out with a posthole digger one morning and, after probing several depressions in the earth, struck the water table. He eventually dug three wells for the settlement, providing the entire community with fresh water for drinking and bathing.

  The greatest challenge for Jim Bogue, who was quickly named farm manager, was the soil. The rain forest dirt surprised him; it was completely different than the abundant, soft loam in California. The topsoil was acidic and only a few inches thick; underneath lay impenetrable red clay. If he scooped up a handful in his fist, squeezed it and let it dry, it turned into a rock-hard ball. The United Nations classified the jungle soil as “non-productive.”

  Nevertheless, he threw himself at the challenge. He spent all day, every day, learning the rhythms of tropical agriculture from the natives, resorting to hand gestures when their broken English failed. The Amerindians used slash-and-burn agriculture. The ash from the burned vegetation added another layer of nutrients to the thin soil, but the method forced them to move their crop locations every few years as they depleted nutrients and weeds outpaced the harvest. Bogue hoped that by sweetening the soil with enough crushed seashell and wood ash, and by staying on top of the weeds, he could beat the odds and keep the Temple farm operating permanently.

  The first crop he planted was a hundred acres of corn. Each of his crew of barefoot natives, including men, women, kids, and seniors, carried a stick, and would poke a hole in the ground, drop in a few kernels, then cover them with a swipe of the foot before walking a few paces and poking another hole. It took seventy-five workers several weeks to plant the field.

  But as soon as the corn started silking, brown moths appeared. They fluttered about the emerald leaves like flecks of mud, each female depositing thousands of eggs on the green stigmas. When the larva hatched, they fo
llowed the silk into the ear, where they burrowed into the tender kernels. Pesticides couldn’t penetrate the cornhusks, so the Guyanese crew walked the field picking off the worms by hand. They’d quickly fill two-gallon buckets with the writhing pests. Bogue lost half the crop, and learned a valuable lesson: The jungle, with its constant warmth and humidity, was the perfect petri dish for anything that swarmed, slithered, infested, or infected.

  There were other missteps. The climate veered between droughts and downpours. During the wet season, monsoonlike rains washed away precious topsoil and seedlings, something the pioneers learned to counteract by plowing along the contour of the hills instead of up and down them and by protecting tender sprouts in a covered plant nursery. During the dry season, they formed bucket brigades to transport water from nearby creeks.

  At first, they planted the same food they were used to eating: temperate crops such as carrots, celery, and asparagus. But these never grew longer than a man’s pinkie; the soil chemistry simply wasn’t right. They started over with local greens: starchy tubers such as eddoes, sweet potatoes, and cassava, legumes such as pigeon peas and cutlass beans, as well as bananas, pineapple, and citrus fruits. They learned to adapt and experiment, forever preoccupied with their urgent task: finding a way to feed the hundreds of Temple members who would join them in the promised land. The mission’s success depended on their efforts. They planted thousands of orange trees, and these were just starting to bear fruit when the farm came to its violent end, four years later.