Every newcomer was expected to do fieldwork for their first weeks in Jonestown to partake as equals in the socialist endeavor, even seniors. But a group of elderly women, including seventy-two-year-old Zipporah, banded together after their first day and rebelled. “We didn’t come here to work in the hot sun,” they protested. Jones reassigned them to shaded jobs: plucking chickens, sorting rice, and making toys.
Jonestown seemed paradisiacal to Hyacinth at first. Its promise out-shined the encroaching shadows. She enjoyed catching up with old friends, or sitting on her deck at sunset, watching the sky turn purple and orange and listening to the chorus of tropical songbirds. She delighted in the sprays of bougainvillea and hibiscus flowers that were planted throughout the settlement. They were living in a lush garden; everything seemed to thrive.
It was hard for Hyacinth to navigate the uneven wooden walkways on a cane, and especially difficult to carry a tray in the dining tent, so an aide started bringing meals to her cottage. After breakfast, she’d make her slow way to the field next to the pavilion, where she’d join other seniors in stretching exercises led by medical staff. Then she’d report for her job with the toy crew and spend a few hours in friendly company as she sanded wooden trains or stitched up dolls that were sold in Georgetown stores. Her days were largely unsupervised, and in the afternoon, she often stayed in her cottage to read and rest.
Her biggest complaints, when she first arrived, were the heat and bugs. Her cottage windows didn’t have screens, and she spent hours stalking flies and mosquitoes with a swatter. And while the tin roof made a melodious sound during rainstorms, it turned the cottage into an oven as the sun curved overhead.
Still, she focused on the good things.
Right before Hy and Zip left California, word of the chicken gizzards spread through the communes. Rose Shelton, who handled the “passed cancers,” admitted the sham to a few folks after the New West article appeared, and from there the news was whispered up and down hallways. Hy chose not to believe it. She was convinced that Jones was a true healer, and that he’d cured her breast cancer.
Jones obliquely addressed the New West charges. He was good at explaining things away. “We don’t abuse children in this church,” he’d tell his followers in a gentle voice. “You were all here as witnesses; you saw what happened. That child would have ended up in juvenile hall if we hadn’t helped him. Our discipline is given in a loving manner, and it works. And he’s doing so much better because of it.”
True believers had an answer for everything. They excused Jones’s peculiarities with the maxim, the end justifies the means. The beatings, the swats—it was all showmanship, they said. The discipline didn’t really hurt. Jones’s antics—like stomping on a Bible, saying “fuck” or “cunt” in the middle of a sermon—were all theater. He liked to get a rise out of people to force them to pay attention.
Those members who were offended by his increasingly bizarre and cruel behavior kept quiet, and in their silence, seemed to condone it.
When Jones said that John Victor Stoen was his biological son, Hyacinth Thrash refused to believe that, too. He made the announcement during a congregation-wide meeting in the pavilion. It was nighttime, and he sat in his usual place, in a light-green wooden chair on a stage at the front. He was holding John John on his lap and his children, biological and adopted, stood around him. As hundreds of his followers sat on hard benches facing him, Jones said he was forced to “relate” to Grace Stoen, despite his deep revulsion for her, to keep her in the fold. It hadn’t worked, this they knew, as she was one of the former members who spoke with New West. He made a second announcement: Temple attorney Tim Stoen had also defected, and had joined forces with Grace to win custody of the child.
The conversation startled many, especially the seniors who were unaware that Jones was unfaithful to his wife. Jones continued, stating Maria Katsaris would now care for the boy. “His mother is Maria, and that’s the way it is here. If anyone ever makes any other issue, then you’ll have difficulty with me. John is my son.”
Hy was dumbfounded. She turned on the bench to her sister and blurted: “That’s Tim’s boy up there!” Zip shushed her, but Hy continued to roil inside, remembering how in Indianapolis, Jones always preached marital fidelity. When had he changed?
In the late summer of 1977, Jones felt besieged on all sides. Apart from the media attack and the custody battle, a man named Leon Broussard had crept out of Jonestown early one August morning and walked to Port Kaituma, where he told police that Jonestown was a “slave colony” and complained that he was forced to haul lumber all day under the supervision of a club-wielding guard. When Broussard told Jones he wanted to go home, he said, several members jumped him before making him crawl to Jones’s feet and beg for forgiveness.
Broussard happened to be in Port Kaituma when US Consul Richard McCoy flew up to visit Jonestown for the first time. Local authorities told him about the escapee, and McCoy interviewed Broussard before driving to the settlement. Jones told McCoy that Broussard was a liar and a drug addict, but agreed to pay his ticket back to the States. The conversation led McCoy to believe that Jones would send future malcontents home as well. In reality, Leon Broussard would be the last person to successfully escape Jonestown until its final day, although many others would try, and fail.
US embassy personnel had been making periodic checks on the American group since July 13, 1974, when a consular officer interviewed the nine pioneers living there at the time and reported to his higher-ups that they appeared “earnest, well-organized, and well-financed.”
Shortly after the mass exodus began, McCoy flew to Port Kaituma to visit two residents whose relatives were concerned about them. In the wake of the bad press dogging the Temple, McCoy expected more such requests, and he wanted to establish a protocol for doing welfare-and-whereabouts checks on Americans living in the camp. He told Jones that he wanted everyone he interviewed to have their passports in hand so he could verify their identity, and he wanted to talk to them in an open space where they could speak without fear of being overheard.
The first person he interviewed was Carolyn Looman, a thirty-four-year-old Ohio native who called her parents from Georgetown saying she changed her mind about going to Jonestown. After they didn’t hear anything more from her, they asked McCoy to check on her. McCoy spoke privately with Looman in the field outside the pavilion. He told her that her parents had sent a return plane ticket for her; if she wanted to leave, all she had to do was walk with him to his car, which was parked a few hundred feet away, and he would help her get home. Looman smiled and shook her head, saying her parents were mistaken; she was perfectly happy in Jonestown, where she taught seventh and eighth grades. What he didn’t know was that the Temple had caught wind of Looman’s phone call, and pressured her to change her tune.
The second resident McCoy wanted to see was John Victor Stoen. Grace and Tim Stoen wanted to know how the boy was faring. John John was trotted out, and seemed healthy enough, but it was tough to assess a beaming five-year-old.
McCoy returned to Georgetown satisfied with his findings, but the stench of Broussard’s accusations lingered. Suddenly local officials were dropping by Jonestown unannounced. One pointedly referred to the New West charges and told Jones “the government does not approve of such tactics.” A police investigator took pictures of the pit Tommy dug for punishment even as Jones’s aides insisted it was excavated by backhoe. Yet other regional bureaucrats pressured Jones to send the settlement’s kids to the Port Kaituma school, and allow Amerindians to live in Jonestown as unpaid apprentices.
Jones didn’t want interference from outsiders, of course. He wanted to isolate his people so he could carry out his macabre plan. He argued that there was no room to house Guyanese on the project, and that the Temple children would be traumatized if they were separated from the group. He offered Regional Minister Fitz Carmichael, who was generating most of the pressure on the settlement, the services of his land-moving equipmen
t, his doctor, his “water diviner” Jim Bogue, even a sizable donation to his political party, but Carmichael stuck to his guns.
Jones wrote Prime Minister Burnham complaining about the interference of these “low level, petty bureaucrats.” He depicted his project as a noble charity, and expected deference, not interrogations. Several months later, Burnham himself handed down the order validating the Jonestown school.
American bureaucrats also had Jonestown in their sights. Based on a tip from former members, US customs agents did a spot check on ninety crates bound for the settlement, looking for smuggled guns. They found nothing, but passed along the tip to the International Police Agency, Interpol, which alerted Guyanese Police Chief C. A. “Skip” Roberts to be on the lookout for contraband. Roberts was a regular PR stop on Paula Adams’s route, and when he showed her the Interpol report, she acted offended.
As it turned out, the customs agents just hadn’t looked hard enough.
The Temple applied repeatedly for permits to import guns into Guyana, but when Guyanese authorities didn’t respond to the requests, Jones resorted to gunrunning. Emigrating Temple members turned in their weapons before leaving the States, and these were broken down and hidden in false-bottomed crates marked “agricultural supplies.” Because the Temple was permitted to import farm supplies duty-free, Georgetown customs officials routinely waved these shipments through without inspecting them. On the off chance that they did open a crate, the PR girls shimmied forth holding bottles of good whiskey.
The woman spearheading the Temple’s gun-smuggling operation was a California probation officer named Sandy Bradshaw, who regularly sent Jones updates on her purchases:
“Tonight I got seven boxes (50 rounds each) for .38 bibles (hollow-point for defense) and 20 boxes (50 rounds each) of .22 bibles, both without signing for them,” she wrote Jones in an undated memo. “Merry Xmas from the system! I will get more tomorrow since I got this break tonight.”
The code name “bibles” was a nod to abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, who raised money for antislavery activists to arm themselves. The rifles the abolitionists accumulated were known as “Beecher’s Bibles.”
Jonestown’s arsenal would grow to include more than thirty firearms, from .38 specials to a Ruger 30/.06 with a high-powered scope, to the Remington Model 700 .308 caliber bolt-action rifle used to kill Congressman Leo Ryan.
In one memo discussing Temple defectors, Bradshaw wrote Jones “there are enough bibles here to do a lot of praying if necessary.” In another note, she dropped the code completely: “It is my understanding we can get as many rifles/shotguns as we wish.” On Jonestown’s last night, these weapons would be turned on residents when their leader commanded them to drink poison.
While the Interpol report exacerbated Jones’s long-held paranoia that the US government was out to get him, a sharp turn in the custody battle would push him over the edge.
At the beginning of September, Grace Stoen’s lawyer, Jeffrey Hass, flew to Georgetown with a copy of a California court order compelling Jones to return the boy to his mother. Paula Adams, informed of Hass’s arrival by embassy officials, cozied up to him at his hotel, posing as a tourist along with Harriet Tropp, a Temple member with a law degree. Hass told the women that he had a court date on September 6, during which he planned to convince the Guyanese magistrate to honor the California order, and that he hoped to reunite mother and son by the end of the month. However, if his plan didn’t work, he told the women that several former Temple members, including the Stoens, had consulted a private investigator about kidnapping children from Jonestown.
When the women reported the conversation to Jones, he was deeply rattled. He feared losing John John would open the door for other custody battles between Jonestown residents and their estranged spouses in the States.
His anxiety only skyrocketed when he learned that his closest ally in the Guyanese government, Deputy Prime Minister Ptolemy Reid, was traveling in the United States to witness the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty. Reid was Jones’s go-to man. When Temple members started flooding the immigration office, Reid suspended protocol to allow them to be processed posthaste. He also transferred several pesky regional officials who voiced concerns about Jonestown, and refused to investigate their reports.
To Jones, it seemed too uncanny to be coincidence: His strongest ally was overseas while his enemy’s agent, Hass, was in Guyana, trying to take John John away from him. His mind went wild with thoughts of conspiracy. What he engineered next would come be known as the six-day siege.
Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of September 5—the day before the scheduled hearing—Jones called aside his adopted black son and namesake, Jimmy Junior. As a Jonestown guard, Jimmy, seventeen, carried a .38 on his hip and a carbine rifle in his hands. Now, at his father’s bidding, he crept into the bush, then turned and aimed the .38 at Jones’s cabin as his father pressed his body against a far wall. He squeezed the trigger and shots exploded in the darkness, striking terror into residents as they lay in their bunk beds. When Stephan Jones, who was also on the security force, and others rushed to the scene, they found Jones lying on the floor. He acted disoriented and told them he’d been standing at the window when he had a premonition and bent down, narrowly missing the bullet.
Thus began Jonestown’s first, and longest, white night, a term Jones coined to denote any acute emergency, inverting the pejorative usage of black into white. It was the first of many fake assaults Jones would launch against the community to keep his followers fearful and obedient.
“Alert! Alert! We are under attack!” Jones shouted into the public address system, whose speakers were strung on poles throughout the camp and fields. He ordered everyone to convene at the pavilion. Panicked residents jammed on their rubber boots. In a few minutes, hundreds of people flooded up the dark walkways, many crying with fear, wearing their pajamas. Jones, standing on the stage at the front of the pavilion, was ranting and semicoherent. He told his followers that their government allies had deserted them, leaving fascists in control of the country. Mercenaries surrounded Jonestown at that very moment, he shouted, poised to invade and kidnap their children. Jones swore that he wouldn’t let any of his people be captured: If they came for one, they came for all.
His aides passed out hoes, pitchforks, and cutlasses, and told residents to form a line facing the jungle. They stood shaking with fright and exhaustion all night and into the next day, when Jones permitted them to sleep in shifts. They were paired off; one slept on the ground while the other stood guard. No one was to surrender or be taken alive, he commanded; anyone who tried to desert would be hacked to death with a cutlass.
On September 6, as residents held imaginary invaders at bay with garden hoes in Jonestown, Hass won a crucial victory in Georgetown. Supreme Court Justice Aubrey Bishop ordered Jones to bring John Victor Stoen to his courtroom on September 8 to discuss the case and issued Hass a writ of habeas corpus compelling their appearance. The next day, Minister of Information Kit Nascimento offered Hass his plane, and the lawyer flew up to Port Kaituma to deliver the order to Jones accompanied by a Georgetown police inspector. When Hass reached Jonestown, now in the second day of its supposed siege, a throng of hostile residents watched him step out of his rented Land Cruiser. When he asked for Jones, Maria Katsaris told him the Temple leader had left two days earlier and was “on the river somewhere.” She refused his request to look around. Dejected, he rode back to Port Kaituma, where two local officials told him they’d spoken to Jones at the camp forty-five minutes earlier. Clearly, this was not going to be an easy fight.
After Hass left, another wave of panic broke over Jonestown. When Jones returned from his hiding place and heard that Hass had flown up in the minister’s plane, he was certain that the Guyanese government had turned on him.
He announced that he was moving the entire community to the nearest socialist country, Cuba, and started trucking seniors to the Port Kaituma river, where the Cudj
oe was moored. The plan was to ferry groups of members to the island, 1,300 miles away. Jones told Jim Bogue to stay behind and sell off the farm equipment before joining them.
Hy was among the first group to reach the boat. It was the middle of the night, and she’d been up for hours listening to Jones howl about armed invaders. She was beside herself with anxiety. As a group of old women jostled down the narrow gangway, which only had a railing on one side, someone tripped, triggering a domino effect. Hy’s cane slipped, and she was knocked down. An eighty-year-old woman fell into the water and broke her hip. But Jones pressed on. He passed out cutlasses and ordered the old women to defend the boat even as the injured resident moaned at their feet.
One of Jones’s aides had thought to grab recording equipment before they left Jonestown and taped Jones as he addressed his geriatric corps. He denounced the Guyanese officials who helped Hass as “miserable sonabitches” who were “more interested of the approval of the special interest of the ruling class in United States than they are standing up for socialism.” He suggested bribery was at work.
A few hours later, Jones announced that Cuba would only give asylum to him and his immediate family, but that the “rivers were blocked to the rest of my people. So, my God, if they won’t let us all go, then none of us go.” Hy was relieved. She’d been standing on the boat for hours, a heavy cutlass in one hand, her cane in the other. Her good leg ached. She just wanted to go to bed; she was too old and crippled for such maneuvers. When the truck returned the women to Jonestown at dawn, she found a stranger sleeping in her bed and shooed the person out before easing herself onto the thin mattress. She put her cane at arm’s reach, in case Jones started hollering again.
A Thousand Lives Page 11