A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  He led them to a school tent. Inside, Jones sat on a carpenter’s horse with Harriet Tropp beside him.

  “Charles, all is lost,” Jones said in a glum voice. “Every gun in this place is gone.”

  Garry was taken aback; he’d spent years defending Jonestown from rumors that it was an armed camp. “Jim, I didn’t know you had any guns here,” he said.

  Jones ignored his comment. He said that the residents were upset with the lawyers because they’d insisted he welcome Ryan into Jonestown and the visit had been a disaster.

  “Your life is not safe here,” Jones said. “People are angry at you.”

  Garry thought this odd, considering the friendliness of the passing throng. Jones told his adopted Korean son, Lew, to escort the lawyers to the East House to wait until further notice. After arriving at the cottage, they grew anxious when they noticed a line of men exiting the building next door carrying weapons and boxes of ammunition and hustling back toward the pavilion. The situation grew more ominous when Don Sly—the same man who tried to stab Congressman Ryan—showed up and sat on the cottage steps, as if he were guarding them. Sly, his hand wrapped in bandages, refused to talk to them, but kept calling out to the men carrying weapons, “When do you want me up there?”

  The lawyers heard Jones begin to address his people, but his voice was too distant to hear very well. They made out random words, including death. Sly finally stood and followed the others.

  As Garry and Lane were discussing their alternatives, including fleeing into the bush, two armed men returned to their cottage. They feared the worst.

  Garry recognized Poncho Johnson, the nineteen-year-old who sang “The Greatest Love of All,” the previous night. As the young men walked down the pathway toward them, they laughed and kidded around.

  “What’s going on?” Garry asked.

  “We’re committing revolutionary suicide,” said Poncho, grinning widely.

  Garry recalled the September siege and Huey Newton’s complaint that Jones didn’t understand what the term meant.

  “Is there no other alternative?” Lane asked.

  “No,” said Poncho, still smiling.

  “Well, Charles and I will stay back and tell the story to the world,” Lane replied. Poncho considered this for a moment before nodding his assent. The teens hugged the lawyers good-bye, and raised their fists in a revolutionary salute before turning away.

  As the lawyers ran toward the jungle in their business loafers, Garry overheard a man, who appeared to be somewhere nearby, state gruffly, “Let’s not be divisive,” followed by three gunshots.

  Hyacinth waited in her cottage for her sister to return from the meeting.

  That afternoon, Zipporah had come by with the breathless news that two families were leaving with the Congressman.

  “That so?” Hyacinth replied before dropping the subject. She was careful not to show her disappointment at not being among them, but had her own escape plan in the works: She was due in Georgetown to get the bottom plate of her dentures fixed, and while she was there, she planned to find her way to the American embassy.

  As the sisters spoke, Jones came on the loudspeaker and ordered everyone to the pavilion. Zippy pressured her to go. “Jim is going to be awful mad if you don’t,” she said. When Hy refused, blaming, as always, her lame leg, Zip turned to search through her belongings. “I believe I’ll wear my red sweater tonight,” she said. The remark struck Hy as odd; her sister never spoke of such trivial things as clothes. She promised to tell Hyacinth all about the meeting when she returned then turned and walked out the door.

  The congregation assembled. Parents held small children on their laps; older kids sought out their friends. Edith Roller no doubt sat next to Eddie Washington, in their usual spot near the front. Edith’s journal ends, mysteriously, on August 31. Her activities that day were typical: She typed up a large-letter edition of the news for seniors, lectured on socialism, and lined up to have her athlete’s foot treated at the sore table. The FBI never found the last three months of her journal, although agents did recover a letter she wrote Jones in September in which she complained that someone had rifled through the crate where she stored her journal and had taken part of it. Maybe one of the policemen, reporters, or soldiers who arrived on the scene after the massacre kept her final pages as a souvenir. Or perhaps Jones himself destroyed them, unhappy with Edith’s frank disclosures.

  As the crowd waited for Jones to appear, a young woman named Shirley Smith climbed onstage and began dancing and singing about being a freedom fighter. She appeared to have lost her mind, a witness would later say. The guards got her down.

  After a long delay, Jones appeared. He climbed on stage and sat in his light-green chair, then reached over to turn on the cassette recorder, as he’d done hundreds of times before. He began speaking in the past tense:

  “How very much I’ve loved you,” he said in a weary voice. “How very much I’ve tried my best to give you the good life.”

  He told the community that one of the supposed defectors was planning to shoot the congressman’s plane down, and that his action would prompt the Guyanese army to invade Jonestown. Before the soldiers came in with their guns blazing, he said, “We had better not have any of our children left.”

  The “death tape,” as Jones’s last speech became known, ran for forty-four minutes, and included more than thirty edits in which Jones stopped recording, presumably to censor voices or sounds he didn’t want taped for posterity. (After one early edit, Jones warned someone called Ruby that she’d regret what she said, if she didn’t die first.)

  Jones’s voice, at some points, is thick and slurred. Like Elmer Fudd, he lisps some words: “Suicide” becomes “thuicide,” and “simple” sounds like “thimple.” Most likely, he was high. His autopsy report would reveal longterm barbiturate abuse.

  Stanley Clayton was stirring a pot of black-eyed peas when the alert was called. All day long folks had been coming by the kitchen—which was behind the dining tent and out of view of the pavilion—with updates: The Parks were leaving. Then the Bogues. Al Simon wanted to leave with his kids but Bonnie wouldn’t let him. As the cooks bustled about, preparing the evening meal for one thousand people, Larry Schacht and Joyce Touchette came into the kitchen to retrieve a large steel drum. They were carrying boxes of Flavor-Aid, a powdered drink mix, and Stanley presumed Jones was going to stage another drill.

  Around five-thirty, Lew Jones came into the kitchen and told the crew to report to the pavilion. It was the first time the on-duty kitchen workers were required to attend an emergency meeting, and Lourece Jackson, a Louisiana native who was there with her three teenagers, turned to Stanley with a stricken face.

  “This is it,” she said. “We gonna die.”

  As they followed Lew past the playground and up the walkway to the pavilion, they could hear Jones telling the assembly that enemies would soon be “parachuting in” to torture and kill them. “So my opinion is that we be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece, and step over quietly, because we are not committing suicide,” Jones said. “It’s a revolutionary act. We can’t go back. They won’t leave us alone. They’re now going back to tell more lies, which means more congressmen. And there’s no way, no way, we can survive.”

  Stanley searched for Janice. She was seated toward the back, as usual. She slipped her arm through his. Her eyes were big with fear.

  “Anyone who has any dissenting opinion, please speak,” Jones said.

  Christine Miller, sixty, a native of Brownsville, Texas, stood up. Miller, who had no kin with her and only attended Temple services in Los Angeles sporadically before coming to Guyana, had written Jones months before that she “did not find the peace she expected” in Jonestown, and asked to leave. “It seems that I’m in a cage like a bird,” she wrote.

  On the evening of November, 18, 1978, the outspoken Miller was the only person recorded on the death tape who op
posed Jones.

  “Is it too late to go to Russia?” she asked.

  Jones said it was: The attack on the congressman set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the violent invasion they’d longed feared.

  Miller persisted: “I feel that as long as there’s life, there’s hope. That’s my faith… . I look about at the babies and I think they deserve to live, you know?”

  “I agree,” Jones said. “But don’t they also deserve much more? They deserve peace.”

  “When we destroy ourselves,” Miller continued, “we’re defeated. We let them, the enemies, defeat us.”

  “We will win,” Jones said. “We win when we go down.”

  “I think we all have a right to our own destiny as individuals,” Miller insisted. “I have a right to choose mine, and everybody else has a right to choose theirs.”

  Lue Ester Lewis, a forty-eight-year-old Louisiana native, yelled at Miller that she was “scared to die,” and was joined in heckling her by several others. Jim McElvane, the towering security chief, stepped to the microphone and ordered everyone to simmer down.

  But Christine wasn’t done yet. In a brave, desperate move, she appealed to Jones’s paternal instinct.

  “You mean you wanna see John die?”

  Her audacity elicited outraged screams, but Jones hushed the crowd.

  “He’s no different to me than any of these children here,” he said.

  An old man stepped up to the microphone, crying. “Dad, we’re all ready to go. If you tell us we have to give our lives now, we’re ready—I’m pretty sure all the rest of the sisters and brothers are with me.”

  His words were roundly applauded. The tide had turned in Jones’s favor. He’d been goading them toward this night for years.

  The dump truck and tractor-trailer returned, speeding down the Jonestown road. A guard rushed forward to whisper in Jones’s ear. He turned to the crowd.

  “It’s all over,” he announced. “The congressman has been murdered.”

  There’s a pause, an edit, before he speaks again, his voice now urgent: “Please get us some medication. It’s simple. It’s simple. There’s no convulsions with it. It’s just simple. Just, please get it. Before it’s too late. The GDF [Guyana Defense Force] will be here, I tell you. Get movin’, get movin’. Don’t be afraid to die. If these people land out here, they’ll torture our children, they’ll torture our people, they’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this.”

  Eddie Crenshaw, back from the airstrip, sat down heavily next to Stanley.

  “Man, they just blew Congressman Ryan away,” he said, shaking his head.

  Jones’s aides arrived carrying the drum Stanley saw them borrow from the kitchen, and placed it on a table at the front of the pavilion. It contained a dark purple liquid that had been carefully mixed by Dr. Schacht and included grape Flavor-Aid, potassium cyanide, Valium, chloral hydrate (used to put patients to sleep before surgery), and potassium chloride (used in lethal injections to stop the heart muscle). The aides piled paper cups and packages of syringes on the table beside the drum. As nurses tore open the packets of syringes and dipped them into the deadly punch, Stanley panicked. There was a line of guards with crossbows circling the pavilion, and beyond them, a ring of men holding guns. About twenty-five armed guards, total. He noted that their weapons were trained on the residents, not on the jungle.

  At the front of the pavilion Maria Katsaris stood before the mic and told residents to form lines.

  “You have to move, and the people that are standing there in the aisles, go stand in the radio room yard. Everybody get behind the table and back this way, okay? There’s nothing to worry about.”

  She asked mothers to bring their babies forward. First in line was Ruletta Paul, whose husband, Robert, hiked out that morning, leaving her and their three young sons behind. As the stunned audience watched, Ruletta picked up a needleless syringe from the table and squirted it into the mouth of one-year-old Robert Jr. before using another on herself. Her actions were calm and deliberate. She walked out of the pavilion and sat down in the adjacent field, rocking her baby. It was sunset, but the sky was gray with low-slung clouds.

  Some mothers followed willingly. But others hugged their infants to their chests. The nurses tried to cajole them into surrendering their children before summoning guards to pry their babies from their arms. At the beginning of the tape, you can hear babies babbling and cooing in the background; a few minutes later, they are crying.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Maria told the crowd. “Everybody keep calm and try and keep your children calm … and the older children can help love the little children and reassure them. They’re not crying from pain. It’s just a little bitter tasting. But they’re not crying out of any pain.”

  The day before, Marcie boasted to reporters that thirty-three babies had been born in Jonestown. On November 18, 304 minors would be murdered there, 131 of them under age ten.

  Jim McElvane, sensing the building unrest, again stepped up to the microphone. In his soothing baritone voice, he urged residents to quiet down before talking about his experiences as a therapist specializing in reincarnation.

  “Everybody was so happy when they made that step to the other side,” he assured the crowd. “If you have a body that’s been crippled, suddenly you have the kind of body that you want to have.”

  As he spoke, kids screamed. High-pitched, terrified, inconsolable screams. They were being poisoned to death. Jones, sitting on the stage, interrupted McElvane to reassure the crowd that death was only “a little rest, a little rest.”

  Poisoned parents, weeping, carried their poisoned daughters and sons into the muddy field, cradling them as best they could, as their children began to convulse and froth at the mouth. They watched their kids die before beginning to strain for air themselves. The odor of burnt almonds—the telltale sign of cyanide ingestion—hung in the air.

  In the pavilion, McElvane continued to tell the living how appealing death was: “It feels so good. You’ve never felt so good as how that feels.”

  A woman came to the microphone and chastised those who were afraid.

  “This is nothing to cry about,” she said. “This is something to rejoice about. We should be happy about this.”

  Other residents began coming up to the microphone to say their goodbyes, but Jones interrupted them.

  “For God’s sake, let’s get on with it,” he reprimanded the crowd. “Let’s just be done with it. Let’s be done with the agony of it.”

  The screams grew louder. “Die with a degree of dignity,” Jones ordered. “Lay down your life with dignity. Don’t lay down with tears and agony. Stop the hysterics. This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die. There’s nothing to death … Look children, it’s just something to put you to rest.”

  A woman began to shout hysterically, apparently refusing to hand over her child. It’s impossible to hear her words over Jones’s voice: “Mother, mother, mother, mother, please. Mother please, please, please. Don’t do this. Lay down your life with your child, but don’t do this.”

  Stanley Clayton, sitting hip to hip with Janice, deluded himself into believing it was just another drill until a boy named Thurman Guy, fifteen, veered back into the pavilion and ran into him before collapsing against a pole. The boy was wheezing, his eyes unfocused, and he began to shake uncontrollably.

  “Get him out of here!” Jones shouted, as horrified residents watched.

  Stanley grabbed the boy’s arms and another man lifted his legs. As they carried him into the darkening field, his body went limp, and in that moment, Stanley knew beyond a doubt that Jones was making good on his mass suicide threat. Looking around, he noticed all the other bodies. Aides were dragging small corpses into rows to make room for more Temple members.

  Returning to the pavilion, he watched a foster girl named Julie Ann Runnels, twelve, refuse to drink the poison. She kept spitting it out. Finally, her court-appoint
ed guardian, Paulette Jackson, and nurse Annie Moore grabbed her hair and pulled her head back. They poured the punch into her mouth and then covered her mouth and nose, forcing her to swallow it.

  “No!” a boy shrieked loudly, somewhere near the microphone.

  “Children!” Jones admonished. “It will not hurt, if you will be quiet.”

  They would not be quiet. Their screams grew louder, so Jones took their parents to task: “Quit telling them that they’re dying. Adults. I call on you to quit exciting your children, when all they’re doing is going to a quiet rest.”

  Their deaths were anything but quiet.

  After all the kids were killed, Jones told the adults to step forward. “Where is the vat with the green C on it? Bring it here so the adults can begin.”

  Edith Roller certainly didn’t want to die.

  A few weeks earlier, Jones asked residents to answer the question: “What would I do if this was a final White Night?” Edith wrote, “I would like to teach, and write. Write about the people I have known in our country, and our cause and in the Philippines, Greece and India, all of them of great worth and charm. Some short stories, even poetry… . Want to do more to give children the love they need. Want to plant rows of vegetables. I would like to raise a kitten.”

  Edith must have stood in line with Eddie Washington. Perhaps they held hands. She must have worried about what her sisters and her friend Lorraine would think of her when they heard the news. Most likely she drained her cup without hesitation, determined, as she’d been during the prior drill, to “be a credit to herself.” One hopes she comforted herself, one last time, with poetry.

  As the crowd dwindled, Jones taped one last lie for posterity: “We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”

  After clicking off the recorder, he descended from his throne and started pulling stragglers toward the vat. At the same time, his wife, Marceline, walked around embracing people, saying, “I’ll see you in the next life.”

  Janice could read it in Stanley’s face: He wanted to split. But her family—her mom, two sisters, brother, and grandmother—were already dead. She’d seen their bodies lying in the field.