Stanley Clayton was incredulous. From where he stood, he had a good view of the people lying in the field. Some fidgeted, smoothing down the sharp stalks of field grass. Others whispered to each other. They sure didn’t look like they were dying.
Edith Roller was alarmed. She thought mass suicide was unwarranted. Her roommates had told her about the September siege, when Jones started advocating death, and now, as the sun sank below the jungle canopy, she was deeply afraid. The line inched forward, trancelike. Even small children were silent, their eyes luminous with the magnitude of the event, sensing their parents’ consternation.
She wondered if Jones would really go through with it, and studied him as he sat in his throne chair observing his followers drink what he’d told them was poison. While their faces were rife with anguish, his seemed unmoved, even detached. She recalled how he often said life was just pain for him and that he regretted being born, and decided that, yes, he was fully capable of making them all die.
She’d only been in Jonestown three weeks, and she was very clear about one thing: She did not come to Guyana to end her life. She came to help, to do something useful with it. She wanted to teach, to write the history of Peoples Temple.
She tried to distance herself from what was happening by intellectualizing the event. She thought of rebels who’d died bravely for their beliefs, including the Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, and Jose Rizal, martyr of the Philippine Revolution. She regretted that she’d no longer be able to read poetry. Shakespeare came to mind. Hamlet, as well as Henry IV, in which Feeble states, “We owe God a death.” She thought about her sisters, and her friend Lorraine. She was sure they’d dismiss Jones as a lunatic when they got the news, and possibly her as well.
As she drew closer to the table, she formulated her last words to Jones. She’d recommend he tell the world, over the ham radio, that they had died to protest fascism. In a peculiar way, she enjoyed the experience. Everything was so vivid and profound. Time slowed, even as her thoughts raced. She felt a new fondness for the members around her, for her new friend Eddie Washington. They would die together.
She was annoyed that she left her watch in her cottage—her roommates had been rushing her to get to the pavilion—and wondered if the first people who drank the potion were already dead. The thought amused her: What difference does time make when you’re waiting to die? She was used to timing all her activities for her journal entries, but she’d never be able to write: “I died at 5:30 p.m. on the 16th of February 1978.” She tried to psych herself up for her last act, resolving to be a credit to herself, to drain the cup without hesitation. Afterward, she’d calmly sit on the grass and watch the last wisps of sunset fade, and then, after a few minutes, pass out.
Her reverie was interrupted by Jones’s voice. He was crying.
“You didn’t take anything,” he said quietly. Tears ran down his face. “You had only punch with something a little stronger in it.”
He’d conducted the drill to learn which of his followers would obey him during an emergency, and which would defy him. The people who collapsed or felt dizzy during the ritual were merely experiencing the power of suggestion; he added: “The mind is very powerful.”
The next day, Jones asked residents to write up their impressions of the exercise.
“As far as my thoughts after I drank the solution—I was trying not to think at all,” wrote Queens, New York, native Maria McCann, twenty-five. “It is so amazing to me how we live here from one day to another. One day we are drinking a death potion and the next day we’re producing in the fields as though we have a long life before us.”
Parents who’d brought their children to Jonestown believing they were giving them a better life were deeply troubled. “My children took the day good except for Leanndra,” wrote Carol McCoy, who’d followed Jones from Indiana. Her daughter, who turned nine on the day of the crisis, was “scared, cried and couldn’t understand. She felt this way before when we talked about death. I don’t know quite what to say to her except to make her feel death would be so much better. She spent the night with me on her birthday and was afraid to go to sleep because she was afraid she wouldn’t wake up.”
In her journal, Edith was circumspect. “Was this movement to come to naught, to a pile of dead bodies and an abandoned agricultural experiment in the small country of Guyana?” she wrote. “Is this what (Jones) will be remembered for?”
She recalled a service in which he’d promised his congregation: “If you stay with us, your fondest hopes, all that you ever imagined you could be, will be fulfilled.”
“I didn’t feel that I had achieved all I could do and I knew others had not,” she wrote.
Her diary and hundreds of other personal notes were part of the fifty thousand pieces of paper the FBI collected in Jonestown after the killings. They tell a tale of individuals who came to Guyana expecting Eden but found hell instead. Gathered from the settlement’s mud by agents looking for clues to explain the largest mass murder-suicide in modern times, the slips of paper tell the real story of Jonestown: not of a brainwashed people who killed themselves and their children “at the snap of a finger,” but of idealists who realized, too late, that they were trapped in a nightmare.
CHAPTER 18
HYACINTH
Hyacinth Thrash certainly never heard Jones mention suicide before she moved to South America. She didn’t venture to the pavilion for the punch drill, but Zippy told her about it later. Some people went into hysterics, believing they were actually dying, Zip said, “but it was more of a pretend thing.” The sisters laughed about it.
Hy rarely attended community meetings since the September siege; she used her lame leg as an excuse. When she did, she was offended by what she’d see: the violence, Jones braying about his sexual prowess or squalling about spies hidden in the jungle. One night, she watched him eating peanuts and popping pills at the same time. Another night, he shot a pistol into the air and growled, “I ought to kill everyone last one of you.” On yet another occasion, he forced a sixty-year-old woman who’d complained about Jonestown to take off her clothes and parade naked up the aisles. Hyacinth couldn’t stand being party to the woman’s humiliation and covered her eyes with her hand as she passed. The next day, Hyacinth met the woman on a path, and she turned away in shame. “Don’t you turn your face!” Hyacinth told her, before embracing her, right there in broad daylight. Was she the only one who noticed that Jones was going crazy?
Since her arrival six months earlier, the quality of life in Jonestown had steadily declined. At first her breakfast tray contained juice, coffee, and pastries, but now it was usually rice and gravy, which tended to be lunch and dinner as well. She didn’t understand why Jones kept selling their produce and meat in Port Kaituma when they didn’t have enough food to feed themselves. She kept hoping Jones would at least save the chicken gizzards for them; in the South, folks ate them battered and deep fried; the very thought made her mouth water. Once, a staff member walking back from Jones’s cabin brought leftovers to Hy and her roommates, a regular meal of meat, salad, Jell-O, and coffee. Hy was astonished; she had no idea such delicacies existed in Jonestown anymore.
There were other signs of trouble. She’d learned that Jim and Marcie had separated. She’d found their separate cottages strange, but assumed it was because Jones worked late and Marcie wanted to sleep. When her roommate Esther Mueller told Hy that the couple hadn’t lived as man and wife for years, she was shocked. In the States, they’d always presented themselves as a unified front, father and mother, although Hy refused to call them anything other than what she’d always called them: Jim and Marcie.
From her porch, where she liked to catch the afternoon breeze, she could see Jones’s cottage in one direction, and Marcie’s in the other. Once she heard a racket and looked down to his cottage to see him cursing at several young women who were waiting on him, dressed only in their underwear.
At meetings, Jones sometimes called on residents to test
ify to his skills as a lover. “You ain’t been fucked until you been fucked by Jim Jones,” one woman said. Then he called on a male resident, who said the same thing. The audience laughed uncomfortably, while Marcie hung her head. Hy wondered why Marcie didn’t call the police to put him in a nuthouse.
One night, around midnight, Hy heard a noise outside her window and looked out to see Marcie struggling with two of her sons. “I’ve taken this for fourteen years and I’m not going to take it any longer,” she heard Marcie yell. Her sons urged her to quiet down before she woke the entire camp, and ushered her back to her cottage.
Hyacinth secretly hoped that the trouble between Reverend and Mrs. Jones would lead to the failure of the project, so that everyone could go back home. She was confident she and Zippy could rebuild their lives from scratch again, as they’d done in Indianapolis and in Redwood Valley.
She started keeping tabs on Jones’s lies. Once he chastised a woman who requested a fan, saying, “I don’t know why you can’t take the heat. I’m Father here, and I’m taking it.” But Hyacinth knew he slept to the hum of an air conditioner. He also claimed that he ate the same food as everyone else, but of course she knew this was also a lie. When she heard him rambling over the PA system, she picked up a book and tried to tune him out. Once he got on the loudspeaker to admonish residents, “You ought to be like Hyacinth and Zip. They never complain,” which made her snort with bitter laughter. Although the sweat was running down her back and her stomach rumbled, she knew to keep quiet.
But as the months wore on, she felt more helpless and alone. When Jones didn’t send his mother’s body back to the United States for burial, she began to suspect that he wasn’t going back either. In her moments of despair, she recalled the Bible stories she learned as a girl: the travails of Job, David and Goliath. Jones made the sisters sell their big family Bible before they left California, saying it cost too much to ship. But she knew of other seniors who’d sneaked their Bibles in and kept them hidden lest Jones take them away. In the communal bathrooms, when they ran out of newspaper to use as toilet paper, Jones passed out a shipment of Gideon Bibles. Hy refused, and collected rags and pieces of paper instead. Zippy got angry whenever Hy mentioned God. White people wrote the Bible to justify slavery and to keep blacks poor and ignorant, Zip told her, repeating Jones’s teachings. He often read them Bible verses that sanctioned slavery, such as Ephesians 6:5: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.”
“What did God ever do for us?” Zip snapped, “Jim has done everything.” Hy didn’t dispute the fact of slavery; her own ancestors were slaves. But Paul wrote in Galatians that when a person believes in Jesus Christ, they were “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That was Hy’s belief, that Christ would free her. She knew that many black folks of her generation couldn’t read or write—but they could pray, and she was certain God heard their prayers.
During one meeting, Jones gave her a long, hard look, and she wondered if he could read her treasonous thoughts. Residents who held onto Christianity infuriated Jones; when eighteen-year-old Jair Baker got caught writing “Jesus Saves” in class, he was sentenced to the learning crew. Once, Dr. Schacht told the audience that an elderly male resident who’d just died made the mistake of calling out to Jesus from his deathbed instead of Jim Jones.
Nonetheless, Hyacinth kept praying to the God of her youth for deliverance. She didn’t dare get down on her knees for fear of being reported, but prayed ceaselessly in her head.
CHAPTER 19
STANLEY
Sex had long been one of Jones’s primary hang-ups. Although he had sex with both women and men, he argued that he was the only “true” heterosexual on earth. In San Francisco, he put male members of the planning commission on the spot by making them “admit” their attraction to other men. In Jonestown, he took this manipulation community-wide. He ordered residents to write up their sexual fantasies and to list the names of other members—both male and female—that they were attracted to. Most gave Jones the lurid details they thought he wanted to hear. Others gracefully evaded his prying. Zippy Edwards, who’d never married, wrote Jones that she was attracted to “flowers, trees, nature’s beauty.”
His profanity and sexually explicit commentaries at meetings rankled some seniors and parents with small children present, and Jones singled them out for mockery. He told them not to be so “uptight,” and pressured them toward groupthink. A single individual could overthrow the system, and on Jonestown’s final night, he’d need residents to obey his order as one.
Despite bragging at length about his own “fucks,” Jones didn’t allow his members the same freedom. The “relationship committee” approved romantic pairings, and casual liaisons led to the learning crew. But furtive sex still happened. The people needed release. The toolshed—off the beaten path, next to the garage—was a popular place for liaisons, but couples snuck into the thatched hut worrying that their partner would rat them out afterward, and sometimes, they did.
One night, Jones decided to make an example of a couple that was caught having forbidden sex. As the band struck up a seductive version of “Red Roses for a Blue Lady” he ordered them to disrobe and copulate. Edith described it in her journal: “the crowd, including children, watched attentively with laughter and cheers as Ellen was helped to undress and Chuck took off all except his red shorts. Jim chided some of the seniors for their disapproval, saying this demonstration would be good for children, show them ‘there’s nothing in it’ and might even cure some cancers. ‘In fact, I’m sure it will.’ … Chuck tried to perform while Ellen played the role of the frigid female, but he was unable to ‘get it up.’ ” Jones finally let them sit back down, saying, “You couldn’t have seen a show like this on Broadway.”
As the couple was humiliated at the front of the pavilion, Stanley Clayton took a long look at Ellen Klingman’s naked body and became aroused. Ellen had a reputation as a flirt; she worked in the bakery, where she gave free samples to attractive men. Now that he knew the thirty-one-year-old married mother of four was “hot”—and that her husband wasn’t in Jonestown—he decided to pursue her. He considered himself a “player” in the States. Seducing—or attempting to seduce—women was a pastime for him, payback for an unaffectionate mother.
His feelings for Janice were complicated. He loved her, but he also loved spreading himself around. Being faithful would give her a power over him that he wasn’t ready to concede. And yet Janice stayed, hoping he’d outgrow his wanderlust. During their mandatory three-month separation, they’d met frequently in the tool shed, and now they shared a loft together.
Stanley’s chance at Ellen came in early April. Janice was in Georgetown for an eye doctor appointment, and he was feeling randy. He hunted Ellen down during Sunday afternoon free time and, with a wide carnal smile, invited her back to his loft. She didn’t hesitate. But once they were naked and fully charged, a pang of guilt crept into him—a new sensation for Stanley. When he had kissed Janice goodbye, he felt the same pang. “I can’t do it,” he told Ellen. She left disappointed.
But Sebastian McMurry, a security worker who’d gone to Berkeley High with Stanley, had seen the couple enter the cottage. They’d also seen Sebastian, and when Ellen balked, Stanley reassured her. “He’s cool,” he said. But Sebastian—who was close to Jones’s sons—was not cool with rule-breaking, and reported them. That night they were on the floor. Stanley tried to defend himself—they did not have sex, he insisted—but the reputations of both parties made guilt a foregone conclusion. They were assigned to the learning crew.
When Janice returned, Jones convened a special meeting to inform her publicly of Stanley’s betrayal. There were no private lovers’ quarrels in Jonestown: every conflict was paraded before the crowd. According to protocol, Janice was supposed to slap Stanley, but she didn’t want to hurt him; she knew
how damaged he was already. “Just do it!” Stanley whispered to her, but she refused. As a result, Janice also was sentenced to the learning crew. And so the three of them—Stanley, Janice, and Ellen, worked side-by-side, carrying prefabricated cottage frames from the wood factory to the residential area.
The whole business infuriated Stanley. He’d done the right thing for once, and he still got in trouble. Now he and Janice were doing hard labor in ninety-degree heat and, like everyone else on the crew, prohibited from speaking to anyone but their crew supervisor. Janice gave him dirty looks; he shot her back pleading ones. His anger surged with each new indignity. He got tired of the supervisor barking orders and, in protest of his treatment, refused to drink water.
That night, he was confronted again. When he didn’t show remorse for his behavior, Jones’s primary enforcer, Johnny Brown Jones, marched him into the darkness as Jones and Charlie Touchette followed. After the pavilion slipped from view, they stopped, and Touchette pressed a handgun to Stanley’s head.
“So you wanna die, huh?” Touchette asked.
“Go ahead and kill me because I’d rather be dead than be here,” Stanley answered.
When Jones saw that Stanley wasn’t intimidated, he told Touchette to lower the weapon. Stanley repeated his defense that he was unjustly accused—he didn’t have sex with Ellen—and Jones switched gears. “You should never oppose the office,” he told Stanley in a confiding tone, “or others will follow suit.” He made a deal with Stanley: he’d take Janice and him off learning crew if Stanley acted scared when they returned to the pavilion, as if they’d roughed him up. Stanley agreed.
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