I listened along with the other parishioners, feeling proud of our work. I thought about all the people we had helped, the famous ones like Angela Davis and Dennis Banks, and the little people who were constantly lost within the system. There was a lot to be proud of, in spite of the defectors, the press, the whole controversy. I was relieved to hear Jim come across as strong and confident. Clearly, I thought, our Promised Land had already restored his spirit.
But as the days passed, Jim’s mood grew worse. He was frantic about the proposed investigations and angry that he had been compelled to run. Having always been in charge of every situation, his inability now to call the shots and manipulate circumstances was wreaking havoc with his sensibilities. With each broadcast from his outpost, he sounded more discontent. There were rantings about the conspiracy against us and long tirades against Grace Stoen, who had stepped up her effort to get her little boy, John Stoen, back.
On a drizzly afternoon in late August, I brought Mama back from her bronchoscopy. The surgeon had biopsied a small segment of tissue for further examination. Mama was visibly shaken. I settled her onto her couch-bed, and prepared to go. She asked me not to leave her but I explained that I had to at least touch base with Teresa. Mama didn’t complain; she went into the kitchen and put some of her protein cookies in a bag for me to take to Teresa.
When I entered the cramped radio room, Teresa looked exhausted and worried. I pulled out the bag of Mama’s cookies and she sprang from her seat to grab it, and pulled me down into the chair next to her as she stuffed one into her mouth.
“We need to talk,” she said, then she hesitated. She seemed to be listening to the static, as if she was afraid. She started when Jim’s voice crackled through the radio, ugly and adamant.
“We need Bibles! More Bibles, big shining Bibles. I want you to go to the Bible Exchange! We need them for protection. Do you copy?”
Teresa, her hand shaking, began to bite at her fingernails. Tiny beads of sweat had broken out on her upper lip.
She slowly picked up the microphone, intermittently depressing and releasing the button as she spoke, deliberately breaking up her message back to Father.
“We … ve … poor … We can’t … py … do … re … me? Repe … Ur … message. Ov … We are un … to read … do … Py … Over.”
“The Guyanese government has turned against us, violated our sovereignty.” We heard the crystal-clear message from Jonestown. “They have joined forces against us … We will have to make a stand. You must send more Bibles for our study program. Do you read me? Over.”
Again, Teresa feigned radio problems. I looked at her, amazed.
“Teresa, I understand what he’s saying. He wants guns!”
“We cannot read you.” Jim sounded exasperated. “Your transmission is too broken up. We will try again in an hour. Over.”
There was silence.
“What’s the big deal?” I asked.
There had been a time when a demand for Bibles would have been understood simply as Bibles, a ploy to present the Temple as a church for those people monitoring our radio communications. Recently, however, Bibles had begun to be a code word for weapons and ammunition.
Teresa looked at me defiantly, moved the radio dial slightly off frequency, and turned down the volume.
“We need to talk …” she repeated.
I followed her into the narrow windowless closet she called her room. Notes were strewn on the floor and file folders were piled high on her bureau. Her sleeping bag was still crumpled up on the floor under her long built-in desk.
“Lucinda, I’m afraid,” she said, keeping her voice down. “Something’s wrong. Something is happening to Jim.”
I was confused. In my understanding back then, it made sense that Father would want to protect our community. After all, we were close to the Venezuelan border and Jim had initially told the Guyanese Prime Minister that we would be a bulwark against possible infringements on the border. I had no idea why guns in Jonestown would cause Teresa to lose her nerve and act in a completely uncharacteristic way. She must be totally exhausted, and unable to think clearly. Why should anything be wrong? Jim sounded, as always, worried about the conspiracy. Perhaps Teresa had been away from Father’s aura for too long and was losing her way. I felt disconnected. For the last few weeks, my thoughts had been with Mama and Teresa’s terror didn’t make sense to me.
I looked into Teresa’s tired and dark circled eyes. Her blond hair was oily and she needed to shower and take a nap.
“Father has his reasons and we should not try to outguess him,” I said.
“Lucinda, it’s not right. It isn’t the same anymore. He’s not thinking clearly; he’s acting strangely and what he is asking for is wrong.”
I shrugged and left the room. It was another of Father’s odd requests which would come to nothing. I wanted to be with Mama and all my worries were with her, but I knew I had to step in and review the situation with my other comrade on the Diversions Committee. We decided to take the situation in hand. I gave her a large sum of money for the acquisition of guns to be immediately purchased and covertly shipped to Jonestown. In the meantime, I asked Robbi to take Mama to her follow-up appointment to get the results of her bronchoscopy.
I was in my room listening to Teresa, who was again simulating transmission problems, when Jim’s private telephone line began to ring in my room. Jim’s wife, Marceline, a kindhearted woman, had just come in to check on our finances when I lifted the receiver. A tiny voice was trying to talk to me and my body stiffened with fear.
“Darling … ?”
“Mama? Is that you … ?”
“Honey …” Her voice became even quieter and I closed my door to drown out the sounds from the radio room.
“I have cancer.”
My body sank. I sat on the floor, trying to say something.
“Are you there, honey?”
“Yes, Mama …” I whispered.
I could not control my breathing. Marceline was suddenly kneeling next to me, staring wide-eyed into my face.
“Mama? What happened?” I asked with tears streaming down my cheeks.
I felt claustrophobic. Marceline was too close. I needed space to breathe. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to scream Get away, for God’s sake. Let me talk to my mama alone.
“They want to remove part of my lung.”
Marcie was leaning into me, trying to take the phone.
“Please, Marcie. I’m fine.” I wiped at my eyes. “Can I speak to my mother in private? She is calling from the hospital. She has lung cancer.”
Marcie grabbed my shoulders and squeezed me, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Of course. Go to her now. I’ll inform Jim.” She headed to the radio room.
“Mama, I’ll be right over. I’ll be there in a minute, okay?”
“Oh, Debbie … I’m so sorry … I …”
“No, Mama … don’t … I’m coming.”
Mama’s illness engulfed me, and I ebbed further and further away from the front lines. Marceline and Teresa arranged for Robbi, one of my faithful Offering Room workers and my friend, to take over the daily finance dealings with the banks.
On August 25, 1977, Mama’s cancer surgery took place. I wandered through the hallways, making superstitious pacts with myself. If I didn’t step on any of the floor-tile borders and managed to walk smoothly never touching the edges, Mama would be fine. If I stared at the couch across from me, without blinking, the power of my concentration would make her well. After she was transferred to the ICU, I stood in the room near her while the heart monitor beeped out shrill, irregular tones, and willed Mama to recover, cell by cell, with each beeping sound, as if each beep represented hope.
The doctor had had to remove Mama’s entire right lung, along with an adjacent lymph node. Throughout her drugged recovery, she softly complained of her difficulty breathing. I held the oxygen mask slightly off her nose to reduce her sensation of suffocating and had the nurse i
ncrease the oxygen flow. Mama awoke intermittently and asked for my forgiveness, anguished about having gone back to work when I was still in grade school, blaming my unhappy childhood on herself. I lowered my head and cried.
Mama grew stronger but in early September, her doctor met with me and explained that her cancer had metastasized. It had spread into her other lymph nodes and she would need aggressive treatment.
“It will make her very ill and there is only a fifty percent chance that it will help.” While I was wondering what I should tell Mama, Robbi came to the hospital with the latest news: Grace’s and Tim’s efforts had culminated in the issuance of a custody order for John-John Stoen and a warrant for Jim’s arrest for contempt of the Guyanese court.
With each new exposé from New West magazine and the subsequent articles in the San Francisco Examiner, Robbi treated me to a blow-by-blow account of the celebrities who had been patched-in via telephone and whose messages had been blasted over the loudspeakers in Jonestown and in our San Francisco meetings. On one particular day during what seemed to be six days of hysteria, while Robbi was describing both Angela Davis’s message of support and that of Huey Newton, the Black Panther leader, the telephone rang next to Mama’s bed. It was Teresa, sounding panicked.
“Lucinda, leave Robbi with Lisa and hurry over! We have an emergency. Jim wants you here to receive the instructions with me. Do you copy?”
Poor Teresa hadn’t been out of the radio room for weeks. I wondered if I had time to get her some chow mein from my favorite Chinese family grocery store on Filmore Street before joining her and Jim.
“Tell her now!” I could hear Jim bellow. “This is life and death and she cannot dawdle.” Odd, I thought, even from there he has his intuitive abilities.
When I drove into the church’s dirt parking lot, one of our guards ran over, said he’d park the car, and motioned for me to hurry to the radio room. Teresa was manning the dials as Father’s hoarse voice crackled through the radio waves.
“Do you copy? Is Lucinda in the room now?”
“Roger, over,” Teresa replied.
“Lucinda, you need to become more focused now. I realize you have been upset about your mother’s condition, but we are in a life-threatening situation here. Teresa needs your support and help. Do you copy?”
I looked quizzically at Teresa and took the mike. “Roger, this is Lucinda … I copy.”
“This requires your full attention. Lisa will get better when she is closer to me. Now …” The radio hissed and sputtered. “I need you to make some calls …” Father sounded extremely agitated and I thought I heard yelling far off in the distance on his end of the transmission. He instructed me to call a high-ranking Guyanese official, who was visiting the United States, and deliver a threat: Unless the government of Guyana took immediate steps to stall the Guyanese court action regarding John-John’s custody, the entire population of Jonestown would extinguish itself in a mass suicide by 5:30 P.M. that day. The message seemed a little contrived. I wondered why he would take his intimidation to such a violent-sounding extreme. Of course, I understood the end justified the deceitful means. This was only one of his strategic moves, I told myself, and his diplomacy skills would carry the day in the end. As a good soldier I made the contacts, relayed the threats with emotion, and wondered about Teresa’s misgivings.
Her strange doubts about Father worried me, yet, as always, I stashed my own fears into the secret compartment that rational thought couldn’t penetrate. On the whole, I was more concerned with Mama and the doctors’ admonition about her treatment. I could not get interested or in tune with the endless Jonestown frenzies. Later that evening it sounded as if the crisis had been halted. Another intense mind game, I thought, and hurried off to be with Mama.
It was a broodingly warm October dawn when I was roused from sleep and summoned by Teresa for another important assignment. I had to squint my eyes to adjust to the light in the radio room. It was 5 A.M. and my eyes were not ready to awaken. Teresa looked haggard as she signaled for me to sit next to her at the radio controls. Her eyes were bloodshot and she looked as though she’d been crying.
“Lucinda? Did I raise you from a lovely dream? Over.” Father’s voice seemed to snicker over the radio.
“No. Over,” I lied into the microphone as Teresa’s eyebrows rose.
“We are in dangerous waters and the snakes have begun to swarm their prey,” Father began. “You must find George,” he ordered. George was Tim Stoen’s code name. “You didn’t have any luck last time, but now we know where to snare him. He’s supposed to be arriving at City Hall today. He plans to join forces with the witch [Grace] in order to steal the boy [John-John] from me, the rightful father. Thank God the boy’s now safe with me.” He sighed. His voice sounded brittle, as if it might shatter with tears if he wasn’t careful.
As always, Jim did not reveal the source of his information or suspicions. He gave the uncanny impression that he just knew, as though he pulled these things from the ether plane, from where he said he came, or as though he had spies everywhere. It was too scary to think about.
Finding Tim, this time, was easy in the subterranean parking lot. When I approached him, I was taken aback by his sincere smile and kindness.
“Debbie, I know you are under pressure to scare me. I want John-John back. Grace is his rightful mother and he should be here with her. When she left, it wasn’t safe to take John-John; she wanted to find a home first, not frighten the boy. She was looking out for his welfare all along. I know you think you are doing the right thing, but I’ve been to the Promised Land. I’ve seen …” He stopped mid-sentence as if fearful. Perhaps he thought I was taping the conversation. His voice was pleading with me, as though hoping I would grasp his thread of insinuation. I wanted to ask him what he was saying, but felt disloyal for yearning to understand a traitor. And then it was over. Tim looked around nervously, patted his briefcase, and headed toward the staircase. Watching him disappear into the darkness, I stood very still. I was trying to figure out how to proceed when I heard Tim’s voice calling back to me.
“You’re a good kid, Debs. None of it is what you think.”
I felt ill and confused about Tim on my drive back to the Temple. It would take me eighteen years to learn the whole story: Tim had become disillusioned with the harsh life in Jonestown and used one of his legal missions in the capital to flee. Initially he went to England, but was tracked down by Jim’s aides and persuaded to return. Fearing for his life, Tim came back only long enough to try and destroy any Temple documents that might defame him, then defected again.
When I reported back to Father, I was afraid to tell him I didn’t push Stoen to take more money. Tim was sure of himself, seemed sane, and I didn’t understand my own feelings about him. Why had I momentarily understood his plight? Why had I wondered what Tim had wanted to say? I was frightened by my own disloyalty to Father when I entered the radio room to relay my account.
“George refused the money. Over.” I prayed Tim would not give me away in subsequent conversations with Jim.
“What? You saw him? What happened?” Jim sounded defeated.
“He refused. He was adamant that money was not the issue …”
“Dear God, he’s become principled too?” He exhaled in disbelief, his voice filled with grief. I heard shuffling, as if someone was walking toward Father. I wondered if he was whispering something into Carolyn’s ear. I heard more shuffling and thought perhaps they would assign someone more effective than me. I felt ill. What if Teresa approached Tim and asked him why he wouldn’t take more money? What if Tim said I never offered him any? What if he announced that I had understood and shown him compassion? Oh Jesus. I would be killed for such a betrayal.
But my worries receded when nothing happened and Teresa and the transmissions from Jonestown quieted into a faint hum. I returned to my concerns and focused on Mama. I needed to have her closer to me. I determined that I would have her move in.
By late
October, Larry, who was now living with Papa, came over and helped move Mama into my old room at the Temple. He brought a little refrigerator Papa had purchased for her, which fit into the closet I had fixed up with a hot plate. Every day after work, he shopped for fresh fruits and vegetables for Mama, and picked colorful bouquets of flowers from Papa’s yard.
Now I saw Mama every day. In the evenings I’d check in on her and often slept on the floor next to her. Mama was changing. She was frightened. The cancer they had removed was a rare form and her doctors had asked her permission to send samples to other research hospitals. Mama asked me if it was because she was not a good enough believer that she had gotten sick.
“After all,” she pondered, her voice trembling a little, “Father says people who leave or have doubts often find themselves riddled with cancer …”
I worked hard to convince her that that wasn’t true, not for her and not for me. But deep inside, in the secret compartment where I stored bad thoughts, I felt betrayed. By whom, I was afraid to say. Had it been my doubts that had made Mama sick? Father had said it was dangerous to deceive the leader.
While I toiled over financial ledgers again, Teresa was busy manning the radio and Larry was working longer hours at the hospital. Mama waited, alone and lonely, for my visits. Papa’s offer to take care of Mama at his house, which had once been their house, was rejected and he, Annalisa, and Tom were not allowed to visit inside the Temple. It was nearly impossible for them to contact us. Mama didn’t have a phone in her little space and I never dared to give them Jim’s private number in my room.
By November, Jim asked that I begin attending to the radio communications. Once Teresa had established contact, she often leave me alone while Father talked with me. Jim consoled me, spoke about Mama and the effect of her condition on me. He was concerned that I had become overworked. He often talked about the beautiful cabins awaiting Mama and me in the jungle. Then he put Mark on the radio. I was embarrassed, especially when Mark spoke of his dreams of our living together in Jonestown as husband and wife. I could feel my cheeks redden when he said how much he missed me and fantasized about the day we would be as one.
Seductive Poison Page 17