"Death in the Jungle" by Candance Fleming

First, Americans learned that a “strange religious cult” called Peoples Temple had assassinated California congressman Leo Ryan after he’d visited their jungle commune, Jonestown.

Originally it meant “a practice of religious veneration and the system based around such veneration.”

And using the word has real ramifications.

It denigrates critical thinking.

It warns of severe or supernatural consequences for defectors.

For several long moments the boys teetered precariously on the rafters.

He lay there alone, absorbed in morbid revelry.

He brimmed with ideas to revolutionize the staid and well-established church…so many ideas.

But his glib tongue and cute merchandise often got him in the door.

Some soothed or cajoled.

The young man who’d once felt marginalized reveled in the adulation of the crowds.

In the 1950s a young white upstart preacher had far more clout with city officials than the most educated and established Black ministers…simply because he was white.

Instead, they placated the ministers while continuing on with business as usual.

In a paper towel lay a putrid mass.

In those days the concept of socialism was virtually taboo, and anyone who espoused it was considered un-American.

He would make socialism his church’s basic tenet and one day eliminate the Bible altogether.

Jones first broached the topic at a Sunday-night service in 1959.

When Stephanie was finally interred, it was in the Black section of a nearby cemetery, swampy and sloping.

They’d endured days of hatred and spittle, but they’d sparked a sit-in movement that spread across the country.

It had been revealed to him that America would soon be under nuclear attack and everyone living in Indianapolis would be obliterated.

Ostensibly, he was still searching for a nuclear-free haven, but in truth, he was vacationing.

It was during this Hawaiian respite that Jones read an article in Esquire magazine titled “Nine Places to Hide,” which listed the cities and/or regions where people had the best odds of survival following nuclear war.

Even stalwart members like Hyacinth and her sister, Zip, started church shopping.

Many blamed his death on a national climate of violence, hate, and extremism.

This galled him.

Still others were regaled with descriptions of idyllic California.

In the face of adversity, they were fighting for their dream of racial equality.

And since she’d scrimped most of her life to get by, she knew how to stretch a dollar.

His actions made clear that they were an ad hoc family, and he was, in essence, their father, a model of love.

After years of nagging, Christine Cobb—mother of Jim Cobb Jr., the boy whose ear Jones claimed to have healed—gave her husband an ultimatum.

And these had been for minor infractions.

The woman—twenty-three, lean, and taciturn, her long, dark hair caught back in a tight ponytail—was fretful.

Such gushing was uncharacteristic for their serious, methodical daughter.

If she was dutiful enough, loving and persistent enough, she could fix her husband’s flaws.

She reinvigorated him in a way that allowed him to go on with their important work.

Jones wasn’t virtuous—he was cheating on his wife.

She hated Jones for making her mother sad, and she heartily agreed with her father: Jim Jones was nothing more than “a charlatan.”

The Temple reverberated with the sound of adoring worshippers.

Donning clever disguises, they weaseled their way into people’s homes by pretending to be a senile senior citizen, or a suddenly faint expectant mother, or a door-to-door makeup saleswoman.

Jones urged them to reveal their intimate experiences graphically and in lewd detail.

But in the years since the move to California, the sessions, now called catharsis sessions, had grown more violent.

Week after week the congregation’s virulence increased, and sometime in 1971 it spilled over into physical violence.

As the little boy screamed, ultraloyalist Jack Beam held a microphone to his mouth, amplifying the boy’s pain and fear.

He also won hearts and souls through cultural appropriation.

For the most part Peoples Temple remained insular.

It also had a warren of rooms that the Temple renovated into apartments.

While he touted the Temple’s commitment to racial and economic equality, he didn’t say a word about its devotion to socialism and corporal punishment.

He claimed to suffer from a litany of ailments—liver problems, anemia, heart palpitations.

He publicly criticized Jim Sr. for smoking and drinking, and attacked him for eating chicken during the Temple’s short-lived foray into vegetarianism.

They called her bourgeois for living with the comforts his hard work provided.

If a member complained, Jones replied, “Modesty is a bourgeois affectation. True socialists would never be ashamed of their bodies, or their natural bodily functions.”

Still, Hyacinth demurred.

It had long been Temple policy for members to proselytize to the rest of their relations, and the Temple’s membership included as many as three generations of some families.

The prodigal son had returned.

They drove in silence, wending their way through the city streets.

Months earlier twenty-year-old Pietila had been elevated to the PC, but the meetings left him feeling both disgusted and disillusioned.

Additionally, they claimed the Temple’s actions and concerns didn’t match its rhetoric.

The potential damage to the church had to be immediately stanched.

Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton had recently published a memoir titled Revolutionary Suicide, in which he wrote: “Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we move against these forces, even at the risk of death.”

Mired in grief, Jim Bogue had found hope and compassion within the church.

These punishments didn’t deter the boys.

If that was Stephan’s decision, then he would abide by it.

But as Jones’s drug use escalated, Suzanne found herself growing more and more alienated.

But as Jones’s drug use escalated, Suzanne found herself growing more and more alienated.

The church leader controlled a bloc of thousands of voters in San Francisco, where elections were often decided by slim margins.

Somehow Jones had gotten wind of the proposal and convinced New West’s editor to forget about doing the article, insisting it would jeopardize the church’s good works.

He talked with San Francisco pastors who decried the adulation Jones demanded from his members.

Sexual coercion.

As was the Temple way, every available space was jammed with bunks, cots, and sleeping bags for members en route to Jonestown, or for the semipermanent administrative staff that would rotate in and out from the settlement every few months.

When a member’s departure was imminent, special aides submitted a change-of-address form to the post office on the person’s behalf.

Beneath it ran an ominous subheading: “Jim Jones is one [of] the state’s most politically potent leaders. But who is he? And what’s going on behind his church’s locked doors?”

She spilled details about the church’s financial dealings—how she kept “a kind of log of documents that she [notarized]…including power-of-attorney statements, deeds of trust, guardianship papers, and so on, signed by temple members and officials.”

These children had been placed in Temple homes by “federal courts, state courts, probation departments” because they were seen as “disturbed or incorrigible.”

In his terse letter he didn’t mention the allegations.

Chapter Twenty-Nine Father in Jonestown
WAVES OF PEOPLE POURED INTO Jonestown—toddlers, teens, pregnant women, schoolchildren, babies, the elderly and infirm.

Tropp knew this was “a volatile statement,” but as a committed foot soldier to the Cause, she also knew Jones relied on her.

This, said Stephan, “became a pattern of Dad’s leadership. An order would be given, then rescinded or modified. [We] soon learned to overlook… [Dad’s] more histrionic statements.”

If it included anything that could be construed as anti-Temple, it was filed away, never to be delivered.

They also patrolled the settlement’s perimeter, monitored the front gate, and surveilled residents’ movements from a forty-foot-tall guard tower near the cottages.

It had been an arduous trip, first by plane to Georgetown and then along the coast aboard a rusty shrimp trawler, the Cudjoe, owned by the Temple.

Seeing the truth written on their faces validated his own feelings.

Sitting in front of the microphone, conveniently located in his cottage, Jones read aloud textbooks on communism and guerrilla warfare, biographies of revolutionaries, or whatever else he felt like.

Hyacinth Thrash didn’t need to flee into the jungle to escape Jones’s endless harangue.

He’d given up a luxurious Berkeley apartment, a fancy sports car, and a lucrative private law practice to work as a Temple attorney.

Suddenly, retaining custody of the precocious and spoiled, often sweet, occasionally naughty child was “a matter of life and death,” member Bonnie Yates later wrote.

Jones’s followers still held their defensive line but with less zealotry.

By the fifth night Jones had upped the ante.

“Side kick to the stomach, sweep kick to the ground,” explained Tommy, “that [would] teach [those on the crew].”
Three weeks later Jones finally released the boys with one stipulation: They were never to speak to each other or be seen together again.

“What a waste of time when the world’s in shambles and we need to be changing it.”

Residents gathered at practices to whistle and clap as the team dunked and scrimmaged.

She resisted his overtures at first but inevitably gave in.

The congregation was agog; no one ever spoke back to Father.

A consummate politician, he cozied up to the crowd by mentioning that he’d run into a former student from his teaching days here in the community, as well as an old classmate of his daughter’s.

The mention of Wilson, Jonestown’s tough, swaggering security chief, must have unnerved them.

Unlike Carolyn Layton, Lew Jones, and Dick and Harriet Tropp, who sequestered themselves in Jones’s cottage, Marceline put herself in the heart-wrenching middle of it all.

State Department pressured the Guyanese to bury all the bodies in situ.

While pathologists did perform a handful of perfunctory autopsies—on the bodies of Jim Jones, Annie Moore, and Carolyn Layton, among others—they did not look for any other answers.