“I learned my lesson,” he told the crowd, pretending to cower. When he returned to his seat, his buddy Ed Crenshaw pressed him for details, but Stanley kept up the ruse.
Jones, however, wasn’t finished meddling in his relationship.
During a rally a few nights later, a counselor walked up to Janice as she and Stanley sat together and, taking her by the hand, led her to Dr. Schacht. Schacht had written Jones several notes describing his fantasies about black women, and now, as Stanley watched in disbelief, Jones announced Dr. Schacht and Janice were now a couple. Janice deserved better than a two-timing troublemaker, Jones told the crowd.
That night, Stanley talked to Janice for hours in their loft, apologizing for his bad behavior and promising radical changes, begging her not to dump him for the doctor. Although Janice resented being handed from one man to the other like a prized dairy cow, she was still angry with Stanley and wasn’t quick to soothe him. She was moved into Schacht’s cottage the next day.
Jones continued the drama. He annouced to the community that Dr. Schacht “was introduced” into Janice, and told Stanley, “You have learned what life is like.”
But then Janice refused further advances by Schacht. She preferred her Stanley—her big, flawed, sexy bear hug of a man over the depressive, pale weakling that was the camp doctor. Schacht was crestfallen. “Life is shit, except for socialism,” he told the pavilion crowd. “I want to die a revolutionary death, and I’ve been hesitant and afraid, but boy, it look(s) good.”
Jones was also upset and blamed Stanley for everything. The debate went on for hours, as residents rehashed Stanley’s past trespasses, and Jones recounted everything he’d done for Stanley, including springing him from jail and allowing him to live in the church. On a tape recording of the confrontation, you can hear Stanley being slapped, and Jones’s admonitions for people not to rip his shirt, which he had paid for. Stanley himself barely speaks. He shut down, just as he did when his mother beat him.
His silence only fueled Jones’s fury.
“How in the hell do I know, when you won’t be loyal to a woman, how in the hell do I know what the fuck you’re going to do on the front line, when we’re here facing a goddamn war? You don’t ever talk. Nobody opens your mouth.”
The couple’s sex life was exposed, as Jones grilled Janice on her method of birth control, and Stanley on how long he could maintain an erection. Jones, who’d been swilling booze all evening, became increasingly vulgar, bragging that he could stay hard for “eight hours straight.”
“Woo, that’s strong brandy!” he called out. “I’m drunk!” Jones chastised those who refused to laugh at his antics. “You smile, bitch, or I’ll pour it up your vagina,” he threatened one woman, and he asked another woman who stood to speak: “Do you want to fuck?”
“Drink it up!” someone yelled.
He proceeded to fart, burp, piss behind a blanket, and finally vomit, but the meeting continued deep into the night.
“The only fuck I want right now is the orgasm of the great fucking grave,” he bellowed.
As Stanley stood in front of Jones with blood dripping from his lip, he brooded. My, how the Reverend Jimmy Jones had fallen, he thought bitterly. How he was reduced.
He and Eddie Crenshaw sometimes talked about high-tailing it out of Jonestown. But it was more jive talk than anything. It was just blowing off steam. Eddie would never leave his wife, Francine, and their one-year-old baby girl. And Stanley, for his part, couldn’t abandon Janice, who remained loyal to Jones, despite everything. He’d promised her that they’d be together forever.
CHAPTER 20
RELATIVES
Confined to his jungle dystopia, Jones’s only line of communication to the outside world was his ham radio. He conversed deep into the night with his lieutenants in San Francisco and Georgetown, issuing directives, keeping tabs on the opposition, ranting about conspiracies, and managing the farm. Carried over public airwaves, these conversations were anything but private.
Dozens of amateur radio operators in the United States eavesdropped on Temple transmissions for various reasons, not the least of which was the fact that most of Jones’s top aides were women and most hammies—as they were called—were men. The Temple’s female operators had “real sexy voices,” one man later told the FBI.
The stateside hobbyists patched calls from Jonestown through to phone numbers around the United States in exchange for a postcard confirming the exchange, called a QSL Card. (Radio shorthand for “I confirm receipt of your transmission.”) Operators collected these cards as avidly as boy scouts did badges, and displayed them on their radio room walls. The more exotic the locale, the more prized the card. Jonestown’s was in high demand. The settlement’s calling card included the station’s identification number, WB6 MID/8R3, and one of two illustrations. The first was of the Jonestown logo, an outline of Guyana containing an image of the sun rising over rows of plants, the second was a triptych of photographs—a black woman peering into a microscope, a pair of hands holding a cassava stem, and a white man and a biracial boy using an acetylene torch. Temple operators took to the airwaves offering a QSL card to anyone willing to patch a call through for them, and almost always found a taker.
But ham-radio operators soon started complaining about Temple operators to the Federal Communications Commission, which governs wireless communications. The FCC’s rules forbid business communications, broadcasting outside authorized frequencies, obscene language, messages in code, and require operators to identify their station at ten-minute intervals. The Temple routinely violated all these rules, and the government agency started monitoring the Temple’s transmissions. Although Jonestown was outside its jurisdiction, the FCC repeatedly cited the Temple’s San Francisco station, WA6DTJ, for violations. The church just paid the fifty-dollar penalty and continued breaking band rules. This contemptuous disregard irked many ham users, who in turn refused to patch through the group’s calls. Jones, always one to overreact, interpreted this rejection by a loose group of hobbyists as part of the widening campaign to destroy him.
In mid-March, the Jonestown leadership sent an open letter to Congress charging several government agencies, including the FCC, with harassment. One sentence of the letter stood out: “I can say without hesitation that we are devoted to a decision that it is better even to die than to be constantly harassed from one continent to the next.” It was signed by Pam Bradshaw, a Jonestown health worker whose sister, Sandy, was the probation officer who smuggled guns to Guyana. Although the weird message from a fringe group living in South America didn’t do more than raise a few eyebrows in the US Capitol, it set off a firestorm among the Concerned Relatives.
Yulanda Williams, who’d promised never to criticize the church as part of her bargain with Jones, finally decided to go public. On April 10, 1978, she signed an affidavit about the “teaching and practices of Rev. James Warren Jones in Guyana, South America.” In it, she charged Jones with taking residents’ money and passports, censoring their communications with the outside world, and preventing them from leaving. Jones would “rather have his people dead than live in the United States,” she stated. She revealed everything in damning detail: the atmosphere of terror, the lies passed off as “news,” the bizarre punishments.
Her affidavit confirmed the worst fears of friends and families with loved ones in Jonestown. The next day, a group of about fifty people, including relatives, former members, and a cadre of reporters, descended on 1869 Geary Boulevard. Tim and Grace Stoen were there, as were the Olivers and Steven Katsaris. When they knocked on the front door, there was no answer. As they walked around the building, they could see Temple aides scowling down from the upper-story windows. At the street level, every door was locked. When the group reached the back parking lot, which was enclosed by a chain-link fence, they saw a man near the fleet of buses and called him over. It was an associate minister named Hue Fortson. As the news cameras rolled, Katsaris slipped Fort-son a sheaf of papers t
hrough the closed gate. On the first sheet were the words “An Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones.”
The document charged Jones with holding their family members captive and called him to task for the suicide threat in the letter to Congress.
“We frankly do not know if you have become so corrupted by power that you would actually allow a collective ‘decision’ to die, or whether your letter is simply a bluff designed to deter investigations into your practices,” it read. “Has this ‘decision’ already been made or is it to be made in the future? If made, when and where? Were our relatives consulted? Did anybody dissent? By what moral or legal justification could you possibly make such a decision on the behalf of minor children?”
It was signed by twenty-five relatives of thirty-seven Jonestown residents. Stoen, who would file lawsuits against the Temple on behalf of several members and relatives, told reporters that many families had been too afraid of reprisals to speak out against Jones prior to that day. One grandmother who told a radio station that she was worried about her granddaughter in Jonestown, for example, later received a letter from the girl stating she was “sorry to hear she called the radio station, but since you did, I will not be writing you anymore.”
The group asked Jones to allow their family members to return to California for a seven-day visit, at their expense. Afterward, they promised not to interfere if their kin wanted to go back to Jonestown. If Jones didn’t comply with their request, the group told reporters, they’d consider hiring mercenaries to rescue their relatives from the jungle camp.
The confrontation made the next day’s papers, including the front page of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, which ran a photo of Steven Katsaris handing the accusation to Fortson.
That night, an agitated Jones summoned the community to the pavilion.
“Several of your relatives, nearly all of your goddamned relatives, have signed a petition,” he announced. “They got a powerful backing. I wouldn’t be surprised there’s not a fascist coup in the making in USA, certainly there’s a reactionary hold in elements of government, (or) these fuckers wouldn’t stand (at) our door.” He accused the group, falsely, of throwing rocks into the parking lot and threatening to “shoot our people,” but he did not reveal the content of the petition.
The Concerned Relatives were the latest addition to the powerful conspiracy threatening to destroy their movement, he said. He riled up the crowd, then asked residents who were related to the petition signers to describe how they’d torture their family members, given the chance. He recorded their statements, most of which were given in flat, hesitant tones, on cassette tapes and punctuated their sentences with his high, hyenalike laugh.
He ranted for hours, skipping from the treachery of the relatives to that of the CIA and of the Guyanese government, which was still pressuring Dr. Schacht and Don Fields, the pharmacist, to complete their residencies in Georgetown.
He then turned the conversation, again, toward suicide. “We can make an incident in history,” he said. He was already scripting their last statement to the world: “We’ll say we have died in protest to thus thus thus …”
A woman stood to speak. “I feel that, if we took a stand … where we all decided to die, that it might never be interpreted correctly in history, and that we owe our commitment to socialism to stay alive as long as possible.”
Angry at her objection, Jones cut her off. “You pricks don’t want to face a white night, because you’re not capable of facing a white night,” he yelled.
As the night wore on, residents became increasingly dismayed.
He paused from his rants to ask a question in a soft, confiding voice.
“How many are still glad you came?”
It was a set-up, a question he asked often. A few poor souls always fell for it, and Jones’s face darkened when he saw them.
“Catch ’em,” he ordered his guards. “That’s what you’re supposed to do is catch ’em. Anybody don’t have their hand up. Catch ’em.”
On April 17, Jones responded to the Concerned Relatives in a press conference held via shortwave radio at Charles Garry’s office. The event had been meticulously planned, the press release much debated by Temple leaders. As the reporters sat in Garry’s office, Harriet Tropp, in the Jonestown radio room, read a statement denying the Temple had sent the letter to Congress in one breath, and defended it in the next.
“Any person with any integrity or courage would have no trouble understanding such a position,” she said. “Before we will submit quietly to the interminable plotting and persecution of this politically motivated conspiracy, we will resist actively, putting our lives on the line, if it comes to that. This has been the unanimous vote of the collective community here in Guyana. We choose as our model not those who marched submissively into gas ovens, but the valiant heroes who resisted in the Warsaw ghettos. Patrick Henry captured it when he said, simply: ‘Give me liberty, or give me death.’
“The group of Concerned Relatives is a cruel, monstrous hoax,” she added scornfully.
Several residents whose relatives signed the petition got on the radio to denounce their family members as child molesters, drunks, drug addicts, racists, and terrorists. “Leave us alone,” was the overwhelming message. But listen carefully to the tape and you can hear Jones and Tropp whispering lines to people as they sit at the microphone. The residents’ voices are stilted, their intonation wrong, the delivery mechanical. It’s evident they’re reading from prepared scripts, many unwillingly.
A few nights later, Jones asked his followers to raise their hands if they thought they were going to live a long time. Of the sixteen people who raised their hands, only two would. He continued to warn them to be prepared for a mercenary attack, and on Saturday, April 22, as residents sat in the pavilion a little after midnight, shots from automatic weapons rang out in the darkness. People fell to the dirt floor and scrambled for cover under the benches. The guards switched off the banks of overhead lights, but there was a delay turning off the light over the stage, where Jones was sprawled on his stomach, barking orders into the microphone. He urged everyone to keep still, and then narrated the drama as it unfolded. The security guards were scouring the bush for the invaders, he told them. Then, “We got one of them!” He got up and left the pavilion to investigate, wanting to see if the captive had valuable intelligence information. He was gone for almost an hour as his followers lay on the hard ground in terror.
Edith Roller, crouched under a front row, reached up to grab the pillow she’d started bringing to sit on as the rallies got longer and longer, and slid it under her head. She thought it strange that guards lit flares around the pavilion—the bright light would make the residents sitting ducks—but an aide said the flares meant the danger was over. Jones finally returned, saying the wounded intruder had been carried away by his companions. There was no intruder, of course; Jones staged the event with the help of his guards.
He reconvened the meeting to analyze the group’s reaction to the crisis. Complaints were heard about adults who tried to save themselves before children, thereby putting their individual survival before the community’s, and about residents who didn’t follow instructions. The biggest complaint, however, was about the number of people who fell asleep. These Jones assigned to the learning crew, furious that they didn’t take his “emergency” seriously, or perhaps didn’t believe there was an emergency, or any mercenaries, at all.
CHAPTER 21
THE EMBASSY
On May 10, US Consul Richard McCoy returned to Jonestown. Again, he asked the residents he interviewed if they wanted to drive away with him. Again, no one accepted his offer. In a perfunctory report, he wrote that it was improbable that residents were being held against their will. “In general, people appear healthy, adequately fed and housed, and satisfied with their lives on what is a large farm.” The Temple spun his report in a press release announcing that the State Department had “refuted” the charges of the C
oncerned Relatives. Three days later, on May 13, Jones’s forty-seventh birthday, one of Jones’s top aides defected.
Debbie Blakey, twenty-five, had been a Temple member for seven years. She rose quickly through the ranks to become one of Jones’s sexual intimates and a church financial secretary who helped establish the church’s overseas bank accounts. In Guyana, she also worked on the PR crew, a position that gave her access to various diplomats, including Consul McCoy. One day, she finagled a way to be alone with him and asked him to help her get out of the country. He issued her an emergency passport and flew back to the States with her. On the plane ride home, Blakey told McCoy about the dire situation in Jonestown. The conversation left him frustrated. Like the Concerned Relatives’ charges, Blakey’s accusations were too broad, he’d later testify: They lacked damning details, and she wouldn’t name individuals who could be charged with specific crimes. She told him the residents he interviewed were too afraid of reprisals to accept his offer to get out, but that seemed beyond comprehension to him. As a representative of the United States government, he could guarantee them safe passage home. Furthermore, he couldn’t understand how a single man could wield that kind of power over so many people.
The same day Blakey defected, Jones called an alert at two in the afternoon. Field workers sprinted, sweating and dirt-smeared, to the pavilion. Seniors stopped cleaning vegetables and sewing toys and hobbled over. Attendance was checked. Residents would remain in the pavilion until six the next morning—a full sixteen hours.
Jones announced that a member had defected who could do more harm than Tim Stoen, and that the defector’s lies would prompt the government to attack them. During the ensuing discussion, various people suggested seeking refuge in Cuba or Russia. Jones brushed their comments aside, saying the Temple’s brand of communism was “too advanced” for either country, and that he would no longer be allowed to lead them if they moved.
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