A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  Harriet Tropp suggested implementing Soviet-style production goals: six-month, one-year, two-year, and five-year plans. “The Soviets found such planning to be the key to motivation and building community initiative,” she wrote Jones. “It will provide a kind of psychological balance for the effect of the White Nights on the kids—they will develop the determination to sacrifice for the collective, but also have the accompanying sense that we are building something, and not just going from one day to the next.” Division supervisors duly submitted their long-range goals: a five-year swine breeding plan, a new school with proper walls where students would be sheltered from rain and noise, a 100-acre citrus orchard, and dozens of other improvements and structures designed to reduce crowding and “make the place more liveable.”

  Jones, of course, had no interest in making Jonestown more livable. He was plotting his “orgasm of death.”

  He reinforced his bleak outlook with carefully selected books and movies. In the evenings, mandatory films included No Blade of Grass, a horror movie about a virus that decimates the world’s grain crops and plunges the world into chaos, The Pawnbroker, a grim portrayal of a Nazi death camp survivor, and Night and Fog, a documentary on the horrific medical experiments performed on children at Auschwitz and Majdanek. Jones screened the films repeatedly, pausing the reel to interject his own nihilistic commentary. His gloom was contagious. “I saw the movie ‘No Blade of Grass,’ last night, which was a perfect reminder of what you have taught us to expect for the future to come,” Liz Ruggiero, twenty-four, wrote Jones. He read aloud from the memoirs of Chilean socialists who were tortured by the Pinochet regime, commending their bravery, and adding: “There should be no fear of death here, and I am very impatient with you that still fear death, which is the last enemy that we’ve overcome in many a White Night.” The Jonestown library stocked five hundred copies of The Question, the account of a French-Algerian communist named Henri Alleg, who was brutalized by the French military for supporting Algeria’s independence. As children sat in their parents’ laps, Jones read gruesome descriptions of Alleg’s torture before making his point: It was better for the community to take their own lives than to let the enemy torture them to death. The lesson took. A survivor would later testify that “You got to the point where you thought, what would you rather do? You would rather kill yourself first before they got ahold of you.”

  Edith Roller’s journal is remarkable in that it is the only known document to chronicle daily life in Jonestown. She spent mornings typing up her handwritten notes from the previous day, sitting on her lower bunk with a typewriter perched on a shipping crate in front of her. In the resulting pages, she recorded Jones’s mental decline by quoting his bizarre pronouncements and describing his cruel behavior. “I think I’m a mutation that dropped off some asteroid,” he announced one night. She listed the conspiracies he saw everywhere. The chickens were dying because the CIA had injected them with a disease. The spy agency had also injected cancer cells into Marceline. The US Senate Armed Services Committee was funding the Concerned Relatives. A shadowy entity called the Eureka Research Association had been contracted to kill him.

  Edith was cautious in her reflections, knowing the Jonestown leadership scrutinized her writings. Nonetheless, a subtext of quiet desperation emerges. “I spent a most frustrating and tiring day,” she frequently wrote, or “I had a very bad day at the end of which I felt completely demoralized.”

  She was dragged into Jonestown’s darkness against her will. Twice, Jones called her to the front of the pavilion to slap someone during a confrontation. Even in discipline, he wanted the appearance of integration and selected her when he needed a white person to join an attack. The first woman she hit was Michaeleen Brady, a thirty-five-year-old Long Beach, California, native. Brady, who was there with her two daughters and four of her siblings, suffered from mental-health problems that frequently got her in trouble, and had just been released from a two-week stint in the isolation box for assaulting her boyfriend. She emerged looking “very haggard” and “fearful,” Edith noted in her journal. Three days later, Brady was on the floor again, this time for threatening a security guard with a cutlass.

  During Brady’s confrontation, two black women slapped her in the face before Jones ordered Edith to do the same. But Edith felt sorry for Michaeleen. The two women had once shared a security shift at the San Francisco Temple, patting down visitors as they entered the building. When Jones called on her, Edith stood with great reluctance and walked to where Brady cowered before the Temple leader. She paused before raising her hand and cuffing Brady lightly on the cheek. Several onlookers chided Edith for not hitting her hard enough.

  A few weeks later, Brady showed up at Edith’s adult literacy class, accompanied by a guard. She asked Edith if she could sign up for the class, and Edith noted in her journal that Brady seemed drawn to her. Most likely, she sensed in Edith a welcome bit of humanity.

  Four months after her arrival, however, Edith reported another resident for saying she wanted to go home. A Nashville native named Lovie Jean Lucas, seventy-four, confided in Edith that she was lonely, preferred cities, and didn’t realize that she couldn’t return to the States when she came to Jonestown. “She is a senior, seems well educated, is not likely to try to leave the area, but we have orders to report all negative comments,” Edith noted in her journal. Before leaving California, members signed a release promising to “work diligently” at the settlement and “to keep a cheerful and constructive attitude,” or else they’d be “responsible for any and all costs and other obligations incurred in” returning home. This wording led many Temple members, including Lucas, to believe they’d be free to leave Jonestown any time they wanted to. In March, when Jones announced “No one leaves until all are here,” alarm rippled through the settlement.

  Nonetheless, Lucas, who owned a barber shop located a half block away from the Geary Boulevard church, wrote Jones that she’d “got a strong instinctive urge to get ready, and pack and so I did—I’m all packed.” If he let her go home, she promised to send him a “box of jewelry” each month. Instead, Jones publicly berated her for wanting to return to racist America.

  It was now an offense to even utter the words, “I want to go home.” Danielle Gardfrey, thirteen, was assigned to the learning crew for doing so, and Jones warned Mary Baldwin, fifty-two, that she’d be condemned to a hospital bed for saying she didn’t like Jonestown.

  Residents sized up the jungle and their chances of getting through it alive. “Sometimes I feel like getting away from it all,” Brenda Warren, sixteen, wrote Jones. “I walk by the bush and say, ‘I could just leave,’ but I don’t really have the courage as I say I do.”

  Edith Roller knew better than to ask to leave. She was particularly annoyed by the tedious rallies, and after one meeting that lasted from dusk until dawn, she wrote Jones a memo suggesting ways to expedite them. When she showed the note to one of Jones’s secretaries, however, the woman warned her not to criticize “the office,” so she threw it away. That did not stop her from keeping a thorough accounting of the problems riddling the settlement in her journal.

  She noted each meal she ate in her diary, and as the months passed, there was less and less protein. Dinner was “a chowder of fish heads and greens,” or “curried chicken necks.” Sometimes, her plate only contained a few slices of watermelon or pineapple. Often she was hungry.

  When the farm analysts met in July to predict the settlement’s harvest for the next six months, they were discouraged. In ideal conditions, without excessive rain, drought, or equipment breakdown, they calculated that the farm would only produce enough beans to feed residents every third day and enough rice to feed them once a week. By the middle of August, Jim Bogue reported that the garden was worse than he’d ever seen it. The soil was so ridden with pests and disease that seedlings emerged from it deformed and dying. Field workers handpicked beetles and worms off the plants, but there was no way to stop the onslaught of the acous
hi leaf-cutter ants, which could strip entire plots of cassava to leafless stalks overnight. Bogue suggested visitors bypass the fields altogether, a major defeat for the farm that the Guyanese government touted as a “model of cooperative agriculture.”

  Jones complained constantly about how much it cost to feed residents. Some of his aides collected donations from neighboring farms in the North West District, but these were paltry; on one sweep, they were given 380 overripe mangos, 100 oranges, and forty-eight pineapples—far from enough to sustain one thousand people. The entire country was undergoing a food crisis, and the government was forced to import staples such as rice.

  Most, if not all, residents lost tremendous amounts of weight due to a combination of insufficient calories and a plague of intestinal parasites. Their ribs stuck out, they felt wan and passive.

  In the final months, dinner was reduced to lumpy flour gravy served over rice. Jim Bogue preferred to eat his in the shade, where he wouldn’t see the telltale shapes of the weevils infesting the rice. In San Francisco, Jones had railed against the injustice of a world where two out of three babies went to bed hungry; now, he was imposing that same injustice on his own people.

  The lack of roughage gave Edith, and many others, chronic constipation. Because Jones was too cheap to buy real medicine, health workers passed out green papaya or plantain as a laxative, but this did little to help. Edith was also one of many residents who suffered from athlete’s foot: The heat, humidity, crowded quarters, and poor hygiene in the communal showers caused outbreaks of the fungus, as well as of ringworm. A “sore table” was set up in the pavilion to treat residents’ various skin afflictions with ground cassava powder and Irish vine. But these homeopathic remedies didn’t work either, and Edith’s itchy feet added to the torment of the endless nighttime meetings.

  Naturally, Jones’s followers wondered why he didn’t use his paranormal powers to cure them or multiply their food as he’d supposedly done with the KFC dinner in Redwood Valley. He had a ready answer: Doing so would take energy away from him that he needed to keep their enemies at bay.

  Edith’s physical discomfort only added to her crankiness. She thought of her friend Lorraine and her three sisters constantly, but rarely wrote them. After a censor vetoed her second letter home several times over perceived criticisms of the project, she delayed making the required “corrections,” and then lost her desire to send it altogether. Like many residents, she volunteered to return to the States to “take care of traitors,” and when Jones complained about money, she wrote him saying she’d be willing to return to her Bechtel job and send her wages down to the project. It was the closest she’d get to directly asking to go home.

  Whenever possible, she sought out the solitude of her cottage. She sneaked back between classes, or on a rare night when there wasn’t a required function in the pavilion. Alone on her bunk bed, she’d console herself with poetry. She’d brought along the collected works of her favorite poet, W. B. Yeats, and although she’d donated the book to the school library, she checked it out frequently herself.

  Surely she must have found a new and terrifying insight into his most famous poem, “The Second Coming”:

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

  The best lack all conviction,

  While the worst are full of passionate intensity.

  CHAPTER 23

  ESCAPE

  Despite the odds, many residents still clung to the hope that somehow, someday, they’d get out of Jonestown alive. Human instinct is to survive; surrendering to death is unnatural. The younger, stronger residents fantasized about sprinting through the jungle, and the older, weaker ones prayed for divine or governmental intervention.

  Hyacinth Thrash alternately implored God to save them, and fell into depression. Some days, she didn’t even bother getting out of bed. She could hear Jones’s scaremongering lies over the PA system as she lay on her mattress: racists had taken over the United States; residents should be happy to be safe in Jonestown. Then he’d start up with the suicide talk again. One day, Hy started to say, “Maybe we’d be better off dead …” but stopped herself. She thought about taking up her cane and hobbling into the jungle, but she feared she’d fall and wouldn’t be able to pick herself back up.

  One night, Hy saw Zippy slip from bed and sit down at the small table in their cottage to fill a page and a half of paper with her neat schoolgirl cursive. She’d seen her sister do this before, and knew she was writing Jones another love letter. When Zip left for breakfast the next morning, Hy read it. “I know that it was not by chance that I turned on my TV that Sunday morning and you were there,” Zip had written. “I never will forget the feeling that came over me when I heard you speak. I knew at once that I had found what I had been looking for … I am blessed to be here.” Hyacinth remembered that same morning with bitterness. She threw the note in the trash, but later worried that her action would be discovered, and took it out again.

  As far back as Redwood Valley, Jim Bogue recalled Jones asking his followers if they were willing to die for the cause, if they would lay down their life for the brothers and sisters sitting beside them: their black, socialist family. Bogue always thought it was just idle talk and theatrics.

  He was certain that Jones never mentioned revolutionary suicide before Guyana, and he was very worried. Whenever Jones kept hinting that something might happen, it eventually did. There were several occasions when Jones mentioned that he was so afraid for so-and-so who’d betrayed the cause, or associated with outsiders, or held back money and warned that some harm would befall the person, and sure enough, it did. They’d suffer a stroke, crash their car, get mugged. Bogue had no idea, of course, that Jones had engineered such mishaps, including chemically induced “strokes.”

  Bogue’s sole concern, as Jones stepped up his suicide drive, was finding a way to get his children out of Jonestown alive. He got them into the church, and now he had to get them out.

  Since Jones was constantly badgering residents to come up with ideas to make money, Bogue proposed gold prospecting. The ruse would allow him to roam the bush around the colony and start forging a path toward freedom. He didn’t know a thing about gold, other than that it was worth nine hundred dollars an ounce and that Guyana seemed lousy with it. He’d seen wildcat miners in rubber boots trudging up the road to Port Kaituma clutching small bags of the precious metal. They didn’t have any sophisticated equipment, yet they collected it by the handful from streams. Why couldn’t he do the same? Gold seemed to be all that the cursed jungle was good for. The leadership agreed to give him a go at it, even ordering prospecting guides and pans for him.

  He set off into the jungle with his handpicked collaborator, another disgruntled Jonestown resident named Al Simon. Bogue found a kindred spirit in Al, a Pomo Indian who was born on a reservation in Middletown, California. Like Bogue, Al was soft-spoken and introspective. Neither man was in Jones’s inner circle, nor aspired to be. The two men had worked together in various farming capacities at the settlement, and something in Bogue’s gut told him Al was trustworthy. It was possible to get a sense of another resident’s true feelings by reading their body language during Jones’s harangues: a wince, a sigh, a moment’s hesitation during a death vote. It was risky to approach another resident, however, and it took months for Bogue to broach the topic of escape with Al. At first, they talked about the failure of the farm. This conversation eventually led to a discussion of other failures, including those of Jim Jones. The men cautiously agreed that Jones couldn’t be a seer, and compared notes on the lies they’d caught him telling.

  Al was also deeply unhappy in Jonestown. His wife, Bonnie, was a true believer and a security guard who flirted openly with other men, but Al was intent on saving his
three small children and his father. In the rallies, he sat with his two-year-old daughter, Summer, sprawled out in his lap sleeping, while Crystal, four, and Alvin, Jr., six, dozed on the bench beside him. He was thankful that they were too small to understand most of the discussions. Like Bogue, he suspected Jones would make good on his threat, and subtly let him know he opposed it. Al had never feared death until his children were born, he wrote the Temple leader: “I felt that the lives of my kids meant more than mine. I had a fear of dying because I felt since I helped bring them into the world, I felt I couldn’t die because they were so little… . I feel all the children here should have a right to live to carry on.”

  As the months passed, however, it became increasingly clear to him that Jones didn’t give a damn about anything, even children.

  After Jones approved Bogue’s gold prospecting endeavor, the two men used machetes to carve out a path behind the sawmill. They planned to hack a trail to the narrow-gauge railway that ran between Port Kaituma and Matthew’s Ridge several miles away. One advantage of Jones’s drug addiction was that he stopped micromanaging the settlement; the men could be gone an entire day without raising suspicion. Bogue sent Jones periodic updates saying he’d found a promising streambed that had a “good rock formation, good water source,” always adding that he’d need more time to suss it out.

  Jim’s two older daughters were onboard with the plan. He’d whispered it to Teena, twenty-two, when she was on his planting crew, and to Juanita, twenty-one, when they worked together at the piggery. They agreed to keep the secret from their mother, who was so trusted by Jones that he sent her to Georgetown to do public-relations work. Bogue was vague with his son Tommy, who talked in his sleep, but warned him to stay off the learning crew. It would be impossible to retrieve his son if he were under armed guard.

  Marilee, ninteen, was another matter. Bogue felt as though he’d lost his youngest daughter to Jones as well as his wife. Since the beginning, both had been what he called “100 percenters.” The chasm between him and his youngest daughter only widened during his long absence as a pioneer. When the time came, he planned on grabbing her, kicking and screaming if need be, and dragging her to freedom; she’d thank him someday.