Despite all his hard work, Jim Bogue remained the low man on the totem pole. Everyone knew that he’d tried to leave the church, and the community had a long and unforgiving memory. Jones certainly never let anyone forget his trespass. As soon as he assembled the shortwave radio and got it working, for example, the Touchettes banned him from using it, saying the order came from Jones himself. In the evenings, he smoldered as he heard the Touchettes laughing with their children or the folks back home. To appease him, they allowed him two short calls back to California. Both left him disheartened. The connection was poor, Edith sounded aloof, and the Touchettes sat at his elbow listening in to make sure he didn’t say anything negative about the project.
He was a born tinkerer, and his inventiveness was a boon to the settlement. He engineered a quicker method of sowing seeds by converting the farm’s spring-tooth tiller, which was dragged behind the tractor to break up soil, into a planter. Using discarded boards, he built a platform on top of the tiller upon which four workers sat and dropped seeds into funnels made from bleach bottles connected to pieces of cut-up hose. The seeds dropped into the furrows made by the tiller’s tines and were covered by a chain dragging behind the mechanism. Bogue’s invention allowed the settlers to plant five acres in one day, a job that previously took forty workers four days to complete.
But even this breakthrough didn’t raise his status.
Night after night, as he lay on a thin cot in a roomful of men in the Port Kaituma boardinghouse, he remembered Jones’s promise of sending his family down to him. Weeks turned to months. Whenever he asked the Touchettes about it, the curt answer was always “soon.” After a while, he stopped asking. Birthdays passed. Anniversaries passed. Christmas. New Year’s. He stopped watching the calendar, forgot what day it was. He was caught in a time continuum; the same steam rose from the tangled vegetation each day, the same loneliness filled his heart each night. He tried to stop thinking about Edith, his daughters, about Tommy, and focused on his daily chores. The quicker the village was built, he led himself to believe, the quicker his family would be sent to him.
He withdrew emotionally, then physically, from the others, and began spending nights alone in Jonestown. Their sycophantic praise of Jones irritated him, and he worried his resentment would make his tongue slip. He invented excuses for his nightly absence: He had to guard the beans he was drying so animals wouldn’t get into them. He needed to maintain the tractor that evening so it wouldn’t stall production the next day. As dusk fell, he unrolled his sleeping bag on the dock he’d built and lit a wiki torch fashioned from a rag dipped in a jar of diesel oil to ward off the vampire bats. He felt unmoored. It was eerie to be alone in the dimming jungle as the howler monkeys started bellowing at each other across the clearing. It felt as if he were the only, the last, man on earth. The glittering tapestry of stars seemed closer than his family.
But his solitary idyll did not last long. The other settlers decided to join him, believing they’d finish the project faster by living on site. Jim watched in dismay as they carried their bedrolls into the newly built senior citizens’ dormitory, and with resentment as the Touchettes moved into a private cottage with their two sons.
Two years passed.
On the day Tommy arrived at Jonestown, in July 1976, Jim Bogue’s biggest concern was purple nutsedge and pigweed. The weeds produced seeds before the cultivated plants, thus assuring their survival, and now that Northern Guyana was in the middle of its first rainy season, the jungle was quickly reclaiming the fields. His Amerindian crew spent entire days bent over in the drizzle, plucking weeds by hand. As soon as they finished one plot, they doubled back to reweed another.
He heard the tractor laboring up the muddy road into Jonestown before he saw it, and reluctantly stopped working. Jones was expected. He came periodically to check on their progress and filmed videos to show the folks back home. Everyone but Bogue was aflush with excitement. As farm manager, it was his job to debrief their leader on food production, and as he walked down a pathway toward the central area in his rubber boots, he ticked over the points he wanted to make. He lined up beside the road with the others, cheering with them as the tractor lumbered into view. Jones climbed out of the trailer bed and strode down the line shaking hands, looking, with his trademark dark glasses, khaki shirt, and greased-back hair, like a third-world dictator. Bogue composed his face into flat lines, hoping Jones wouldn’t detect his low-simmering anger. He could hardly bear to glance at the newcomers jumping down from the trailer behind Jones, but the bubble of hope he knew would only hurt him rose in his chest anyway.
His eyes were drawn to a slight figure balancing a duffle bag on his shoulder. A boy. A teenaged boy. He looked away at his weed-choked fields and felt the pull of interrupted work. He knew better. But the kid was staring at him, a wide grin spreading over his face. It was Tommy. His son. Filled out and grown some, a scraggle of fuzz on his upper lip. Fifteen now, almost a man. Two years! Two years Jones had stolen from them. He rushed forward to fill his arms with his boy, eyes streaming.
Jones and the others stood back and watched the father-son reunion in smug unison. They’d kept Tommy’s arrival a secret from him, like so many other things. But it didn’t matter now. His family was being returned to him.
CHAPTER 9
THE PROMISED LAND
Tommy had never seen his father cry before. They weren’t a family of criers, especially not his dad, who seemed to be a pillar of stoicism. The embrace was awkward for Tommy; the others were looking at them and laughing. He pulled away before his dad was ready to let him go.
Things had been bad for Tommy back in California after his father left. He kept finding trouble. He missed his dad. His mother couldn’t control him, so Temple counselors placed him in the care of an African American woman who beat him regularly for minor infractions, such as getting home from school fifteen minutes late. His dad spanked him in the usual fashion, on the butt with a belt, but this woman grabbed his wrist and beat him with a section of rubber hose as he ran in circles, leaving welts all over his body. When another church member saw his bruises, Tommy moved into the Geary Boulevard church.
There were people living in every nook and cranny of the upper floors. A counselor led Tommy to a windowless supply closet and opened the door. Inside, a red-haired kid was sprawled out on the floor in front of a tiny television, watching Creature Features. It was Tommy’s favorite show. He plunked down next to the kid, introduced himself. The boy’s name was Brian Davis. Brian noticed a saxophone among Tommy’s stuff and said he played, too. They had more things in common: They were both fourteen, and both came from families that were ripped apart by Jim Jones. Brian’s father was a member, but his mother defected. His two younger brothers lived with her in a suburb south of San Francisco; Brian and his dad crashed at the Temple.
Both boys, after moving into the church, became wards of the Temple. They rarely saw their families, except at church services. They became comrades in mischief. They cut classes at Presidio Junior High School and skateboarded down to Ocean Beach to smoke and gawk at girls. Together they could pretend to be normal teens. Together, they were free.
They got caught smoking weed and spent two nights working on their hands and knees, first picking lint off the sanctuary carpet, then scraping linoleum off the kitchen floor. It didn’t matter that they had school the next day; counselors prodded them when they started to fall asleep. There were worse punishments: when Tommy failed a class, Jones sentenced him to fifty whacks with the board of education, and Brian got fifty whacks for refusing to attend services in Los Angeles. It was humiliating, as a macho-posturing teenager, to be spanked in front of the entire congregation, to have a whimper of pain escape your mouth and be amplified by the microphone. It was difficult to keep your voice from breaking when you said “Thank you, Father” afterward, and it hurt to sit down for days.
After Tommy broke a Temple rule by associating with outsiders—an aunt and uncle who lived in San Fran
cisco—and bringing Brian with him, the boys were moved into separate rooms and forbidden to speak to each other.
It was the last straw for Tommy. On the bus ride home from the Los Angeles Temple the next weekend, he got off at the Buttonwillow rest stop and walked into the darkness, hiding until the fleet of Greyhounds pulled back onto Interstate 5. He climbed onto the bathroom roof. It was the middle of the night. He had no plan. He just wanted out. He camped up there for several days. A transportation worker felt sorry for him and brought him food, but the man also notified the cops. Tommy told the police his church group had left him behind. When the police returned him to his aunt and uncle, Tommy divulged everything: the beatings, the fear, the control. They were appalled. They called his mother, but she said Tommy was exaggerating and insisted he return to the church building. His relatives were powerless to intervene. At the Temple, he told Jones the same lie he fed the cops: He’d been left at the rest stop.
Jones was dubious, but gave him a choice: He could go live with the uncle he hardly knew in Alaska, or he could join his dad in Guyana. The answer was obvious.
In Jonestown, Tommy found the work hard, but not unbearable. His dad taught him agriculture and carpentry: He got so good at hammering that he could pound nails with either hand. He had no idea that his dad was so knowledgeable in so many areas and Tommy’s admiration for him grew. He relished spending time alone with him, reestablishing their bond. He’d missed him more than he realized, and felt centered again in his presence. He knew his father loved him deeply, and strived to please him. He was only fifteen, and he was building a town. He felt proud of his accomplishments.
There was an Amerindian boy there about his age there named David George, whom the Touchettes took in because his mother was too destitute to care for him. In Tommy’s free time, he and David palled around the jungle together. Sometimes they’d stalk bizarre creatures, such as the giant horned rhinoceros beetle that sounded like a helicopter as it flew through the underbrush, a giant toad that the locals called “mountain chicken,” because it supposedly tasted like chicken, or fish that crawled out of the streams and lived on land. They regularly ran across anteaters, sloths, snakes, armadillos, monkeys, and parrots. It was like living in a zoo. One day Tommy saw a fat earthworm sticking out of a hole and started pulling on it; its body kept unspooling until it was nearly as long as he was.
Sometimes the boys raced each other through the bush as if they were on a giant obstacle course, ducking under vines, bounding over logs. At first, David, running barefoot, always beat Tommy. “Come on, Yankee boy!” he’d call over his shoulder. David was a practical joker, and liked to hide from Tommy, ducking behind the broad trunk of a rubber tree, or into a ravine. There’d be a disconcerting silence where, just moments earlier, their laughter rang. Tommy would scan the shadows yelling David’s name, hoping the elusive twenty-foot-long green anaconda would not choose this moment to appear. The jungle was disorienting. The same jumbled greenery spread in every direction; there was no path out. Just as he started to feel desperate, David would pop out, calling, and the race would continue.
* * *
In the early days, there was a real sense of camaraderie in Jonestown. Everyone did their part to make it a success. The old people sorted rice and cleaned vegetables, the able-bodied planted, weeded, sawed, and hammered. Very few Jonestown residents had ever gotten down and dirty on a farm; many referred to rows of cultivated plants as “aisles.” But these urbanites were soon baptized with mud and sweat into rural life. They had a vested interest in making the farm productive; its success was their success.
During the rainy season, their afternoon labors paused when dark clouds rolled over the clearing, trailing gray curtains of water. The workers dashed for cover, squealing with laughter. Calculating the time you needed to outrun the rain was a game. Fifteen minutes after the downpour began, the sun would blaze overhead again as steam rose from the fields. The air would be filled with the clean mineral scent of washed earth, and the settlers picked up their machetes and hoes and hammers in high spirits. They were proud of their handiwork. It was fascinating to watch a seed you’d patted into the dirt sprout up and stretch toward the sky, branch out and flower into fruit, into vegetables. Parents knew their efforts would feed their children. Older members felt useful again.
In the evenings, the settlers washed off the mud caking their bodies in the communal showers and gathered for dinner together, a multihued family, to discuss the day’s trials and triumphs. When Tommy arrived, there were only two dozen people living in Jonestown. In the early days, residents ate well: eggs and biscuits with coffee for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, fried chicken or fish with local greens for dinner. Cans of Pepsi were shipped up from Georgetown, and the kitchen handed out peanut butter fudge as treats.
After dinner, they socialized in the large, open pavilion at the settlement’s center. The seniors visited with each other, fanned by the evening breeze, and played dominoes or cards. Parents doted on their children. Sometimes the group watched movies or television shows sent from the States. Other times teens brought out a boom box and blasted funk music, doing the electric boogaloo while a few spry seniors danced the jitterbug. Couples snuck off to have sex.
There was a real sense, before Jones arrived, that they were creating a new world. Jonestown was a clean slate for everyone. You could shed your old self and become someone better there.
Shortly before the New West scandal broke, the Temple released a progress report on Jonestown. Hundreds of acres of land were now cleared, the document boasted, and the sawmill operated around the clock churning out frames for cottages that the settlers erected at the rate of one a day. The furniture department built beds, cabinets, and cribs. Jonestown was already a functioning village, with a medical clinic and a long tent that served as the school.
But the community was a long way from being ready to feed the hundreds of Temple members who inundated it in the summer of 1977, a fact acknowledged in the progress report itself: “Realistically, we can now expect that the farm will become self-sufficient within three to five years.” Citrus trees need five years to bear fruit. The pioneers had also failed to produce enough meat: The chickens and pigs kept dying, and Jim Bogue couldn’t figure out why. In May 1977, there were roughly one hundred people living in Jonestown, but by that fall there’d be seven hundred, five times more than the land could support. As Bogue watched groups of newcomers arrive on the tractor-trailer, he wondered how he was going to feed them all.
True to his nature, Tommy managed to find trouble even in Jonestown’s halcyon days. As he thrilled at some small trespass, he was perpetually optimistic that, this time, he’d get away it. He rarely did.
One day an Amerindian offered him a cigarette during a work break, and he didn’t think twice about taking it. They were in freedom land, after all. The Wednesday night catharsis meetings were gone, the board of education was gone, Jones was gone. When he was caught, he argued that it would be rude, in the local culture, to turn down a cigarette that was offered in friendship. The Touchettes didn’t buy it, and ordered Jim Bogue to punish his son. Bogue whipped his son with a bamboo switch as the assembled residents watched, his hand strong, his heart crushed.
The Amerindians showed Tommy how to make a simple press to extract sugar cane juice, and he built his own in the plant nursery. He didn’t even think to hide it. He was more interested in the mechanics of the contraption than in the rum it produced. His explanation didn’t wash with the Touchettes: The Temple forbade alcohol. Period. Again, he got swats.
Things got worse whenever Jones came for a visit. The adults grew tense and snippy, and inevitably, there’d be an angry meeting in the pavilion featuring Tommy Bogue front and center.
Jones invented new punishments for him. After eating a slice of watermelon, Tommy planted some of the seeds and grew them into fruit. He wanted something for himself, something he didn’t have to share with the entire community. The plants were discovered an
d Jones called him before the assembly to denounce him as an elitist. Everything was shared in a socialist society, Jones lectured; there was no mine or “yours”; there was only ours. Jones called for a plate of chopped hot pepper—Guyana grew many fearsome varieties, with names like Tiger Teeth, Ball o’ Fire, and Bullnose—and as his father sat in dejected helplessness, and others looked on with interest, ordered Tommy to start eating. Here was something the boy could consume all by himself, he joked sourly.
“Keep chewing until I say ‘swallow,’” Jones commanded. The first piece wasn’t so bad, but by the fifth, the capsaicin scorched Tommy’s nasal passages, and knifed tears from his eyes. He tried to maintain his dignity, to be calm and stoic like his father, but everything in him wanted to spit out the pepper and yell “Hell, no!” But then what? The punishment for directly defying Jones would be much worse.
Fed up, he began building a cottage of his own outside the settlement. It would be half fort, half refuge. He had it all framed up when it was discovered. He was accused of stealing from the cooperative, and ordered to dismantle the structure piece by piece and carry it back to the compound as Jones’s son, Stephan, guarded him. When one of the fifteen-foot poles slipped off Tommy’s shoulders, Stephan, a martial arts aficionado, slugged him behind the ear hard enough to make him stagger.
The next morning, Tommy was handed a shovel and a pickaxe and told to dig, which he did for sixteen-hour days for the next several weeks. He dug two pits for outhouses, one nine by nine feet, the other thirteen by thirteen, working alone as the sun burnt his skin off in layers. Worse punishments were yet to come.
* * *
After Jones moved to Guyana permanently, Temple leaders kept the exodus apace by showing members idyllic films of the colony. Jones had lost his PR battle with the news media but was now waging a new one to lure his followers to Jonestown. After showing the home movies, Jones’s aides told him which scenes the congregation responded most favorably to, and he directed Temple PR man Mike Prokes to use his Super 8 camera to shoot more of the same. The resulting images were spliced together to portray Jonestown as a land of plenty. The camera panned over fields of pineapple, cassava, banana, over cute pastel cottages, over pink hibiscus and purple bougainvillea blooming along the walkways. A dog rolling lazily in the grass. A pink-walled nursery with workers coddling babies. Children holding monkeys, an anteater, an armadillo. A teacher writing on a blackboard. Smiling seniors stretching to Motown on the lawn.
A Thousand Lives Page 9