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A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown
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A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown

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In 1954, a pastor named Jim Jones opened a church in Indianapolis called Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church. He was a charismatic preacher with idealistic beliefs, and he quickly filled his pews with an audience eager to hear his sermons on social justice. As Jones’s behavior became erratic and his message more ominous, his followers leaned on each other to recapture the sense of equality that had drawn them to his church. But even as the congregation thrived, Jones made it increasingly difficult for members to leave. By the time Jones moved his congregation to a remote jungle in Guyana and the US government began to investigate allegations of abuse and false imprisonment in Jonestown, it was too late.

A Thousand Lives is the story of Jonestown as it has never been told. New York Times bestselling author Julia Scheeres drew from tens of thousands of recently declassified FBI documents and audiotapes, as well as rare videos and interviews, to piece together an unprecedented and compelling history of the doomed camp, focusing on the people who lived there.

The people who built Jonestown wanted to forge a better life for themselves and their children. In South America, however, they found themselves trapped in Jonestown and cut off from the outside world as their leader goaded them toward committing “revolutionary suicide” and deprived them of food, sleep, and hope. Vividly written and impossible to forget, A Thousand Lives is a story of blind loyalty and daring escapes, of corrupted ideals and senseless, haunting loss.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherFree Press
Release dateOct 11, 2011
ISBN9781451628968
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown
Author

Julia Scheeres

Julia Scheeres is the author of New York Times bestselling memoir Jesus Land. She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two daughters and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

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Rating: 4.124999904761905 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm old enough to remember this horrible news story. Scheeres uses thousands of pages of letters, memos and diaries to look beyond the sensationalism and try to understand what drew people into the situation in which they would commit "mass suicide." In doing so, she completely changed my view of what happened. The people who followed Jim Jones to Guyana did so for many reasons; some were concerned with racial and gender discrimination in the U.S., some were socialists, some were so poor and/or forgotten by society that this was their first taste of affection, belonging and order in their lives. The group Jones started in Indiana and consolidated and grew in California emphasized equality and justice. But Jones deliberately moved the group to Guyana to separate them from any social safety net and gain complete control. The book emphasizes how completely isolated the Jonestown group was from civil society. Jones controlled what they ate, whether they ate, whom they could write to. They had no phone connection to the outside world and their mail was censored. Most did not want to die, and many resisted Jones' commands right to the end. Many drank the poison believing it was just another "loyalty test" like those Jones had conducted before. Jones had used violence, drugs and starvation to completely remove the will to live in those who seemed the most strong and resilient. This book actually reminded me of "The Fear," a book I read recently about Robert Mugabe's attempts to terrify and manipulate his own people. Scheeres also emphasizes the Guyanan govts attempts to intervene. Neither the Guyanans nor the Americans did everything they could to help the people who were essentially prisoners in Jonestown, but the Guyana govt. comes off better than the Americans and much better than they are usually portrayed in popular versions of this story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Wow, what a heartbreaking story. I have read articles and watched documentaries about Jonestown, but for some reason this book really brought the tragedy to the forefront of the mind. I don't understand how this type mind control happens but was truly fascinating reading about it. Scheeres had a hit with Jesus Land and this one follows in those footsteps. Very well researched and written.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Well worth reading, whether you remember the event or not. The author makes an excellent effort to be respectful to the people who died at Jonestown, while exposing the most gruesome and unbelievable facts about the events and what led up to them.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An engrossing read that got more in depth than anything I've seen previously (which, admittedly, isn't all that much). I did have some slight confusion here and there due to timeline backtracks that made it a little difficult for me to remember exactly what else was supposed to be going on at the same time. Also, I kept forgetting who was who. Part of that, I'm sure, is my general difficulty with names but some of it was because a person would be introduced and then only mentioned by first name, even after a significant number of pages without a mention. It took me only a week to read this book because I found it so interesting but if I had trouble with the (in)frequent mentions of people we were supposed to know, I can only imagine my feeling of loss if I had read this on a slower timetable. (I'm still a bit confused as to who was who in Jones's inner circle but oh well!)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow, I hardly know where to start. The first words that pop into my mind are powerful, informative, engrossing, and heartbreaking. Before reading A Thousand Lives, I only knew the very basics about Jonestown: a bunch of zealots drank the Kool-Aid. Now I have a much deeper understanding of who these followers of the People's Temple were and why they did what they did. As the author states, no one seeks to join a cult. They sought to change the world, foster equality, and set a positive example of socialism. Instead, they were deceived and deprived of the most basic human needs required to make good decisions. Julia Scheeres does an excellent job of providing a factual account (there are more than 40 pages of footnotes at the end) without giving it a clinical feel. A huge part of why I could not put this book down was the individual stories about the members. Even with knowing the ultimate end, that 913 people would lose their lives, I did not know which of the members would escape or which would be a part of the 913. I rooted for every one of them, especially the children. I felt the heartbreak and frustration of the family members whose efforts were stonewalled over and over again. One thing that I would have liked to have seen included in this book would be a photograph section. I was very young when the Jonestown incident occurred, so I didn’t have any visual references to pull from. I think that some photographs would be of value to help the reader feel the full impact of the story; that beyond the staggering number, these were real human beings with hopes and dreams who wound up lying dead in a field. I recommend A Thousand Lives to anyone interested in religious movements, socialism, or psychology. The language is descriptive yet not graphic or explicit. Students studying psychology or behavioral sciences should find it fascinating. It did take me back to Psych101, remembering Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the basic essentials that humans need to survive both physically and mentally. Chronicling such a complex story was a huge undertaking. Julia Scheeres did a great job of both recording the history and giving the members of the People’s Temple a voice.Please note that I received an advance reading copy of this book from the publisher, which did not influence my review.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I heard about this book in an article calling people out for using the phrase "drinking the Kool-aid" without knowing the full story of its origins. The article must have been convincing because I put this book on my to-read list and it ended up being a part of my Fenner fundraiser shopping spree.

    This book broke my heart in a thousand ways. It made me angry. It made me despair. It made me swear threats and epithets as I slammed the book down on the table, as if my bargaining could still somehow influence the outcome of events. To the point where for a while my husband avoided me while I was reading, because if I talked about it, he would get too angry.

    Well written, sympathetic characters (not including Jim Jones, of course, whose head you never get into). My only complaint about the book is that I wish it were footnoted, and not just endnoted. This book was incredibly well researched, and when I got to the end and saw the notes I finally realized to what extent. But while I was reading, I kept wondering, "How does she know that?" It probably should have occurred to me to check for endnotes, but it didn't, and I would have appreciated footnotes, okay?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was a kid when this happened but remember being stunned by how many died. I never really thought much about the people who died except as crazy cultists. This book helped me see them as real people and feel compassion ... so many were idealists who yearned for a better world and believed Jones would provide that. I doubt I will ever be able to hear the phrase "don't drink the Kool-Aid" again without feeling sick.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    We've all heard the phrase "drink the Kool Aid", but sometimes tend to forget its tragic origin in the mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana. In A Thousand Lives Julia Scheeres's aim is to help the reader understand the reasons that people were drawn to Jim Jones and his church, why they followed him into the wilderness of Guyana, and how they ended up dying in a mass-murder/suicide. While his early ministry was not particularly controversial, Jones told his followers that "for some unexplained set of reasons, I happened to be selected to be God." His primary message was that God had done nothing to help humanity, but he, Jim Jones, would. He began drugging people surrepticiously to prove his special abilities, and his congregation grew into the thousands. He formed a governing board called the planning commission. Jones himself began taking Dextroamphetamine. This drug can cause paranoia, and it had this affect on Jones. Jones began to fear outsiders, and instilled this fear in his followers.All members of his church were expected to move into communal living quarters, and turn all their property and earnings over to the church. Families were broken up, children were abused, yet Jones managed to retain his control over his followers. In 1974, Jones purchased a remote tract of land in Guyana, and sent "pioneers" down to start clearing the land. They sent back rosy descriptions (untrue) to lure as many members as possible. After an extremely negative newspaper article in August, 1977, the Temple began a massive effort to bring its followers to Guyana. Seven "special Aides" went to the various communes at midnight to inform them that they had been called to the promised land. Members were not allowed to make calls. They were driven to the Temple and loaded onto buses. They left from various airports. The next day, there were hundreds of empty seats in local classrooms, and many missing employees. The communes were emptied in a matter of days. Members disappeared without even informing family members.Once in Guyana, life was hard. There was not enough food, living conditions were primitive, and the amount of work that needed to be done was overwhelming. Jones appeared less frequently to his members. He was drug-addled much of the time, and was more and more paranoid. All links to the outside were cut off, and there was increasing talk of suicide among the leaders of the church. In fact, a great deal of planning went into obtaining the poisons, determining dosages and delivery means, and so forth, making it clear that the mass suicide/murder was not spontaneous, but was carefully orchestrated.Many members had attempted to leave, but were forced to stay, sometimes with their children held ransom. There were frequent inquiries from the US Ambassador regarding requests for information about various church members from their families who were concerned about their welfare. Inquiries from relatives in fact instigated a Congressional investigation, and Congressman Leo Ryan along with aides went to Jonestown to meet with church members in order to be able to reassure their families. Instead, he found many members who wanted to leave, so many that not all would be able to be brought out that day on his plane. As Ryan and some of the families were attempting to leave, some loyal church leaders opened fire, killing the congressman and others. Then the church leaders began implementing the plan to poison all remaining members.This book was based on diaries that were kept by several members, some quite detailed, interviews with survivors, and other contemporary documentation. In the end, Scheeres prefers that the incident not be remembered as the source of the "drink the Kool Aid" phrase, but:"If anything, the people who moved to Jonestown should be remembered as noble idealists. They wanted to create a better, more equitable society. They wanted their kids to be free of violence and racism. They rejected sexist gender roles. They believed in a dream."How terribly they were betrayed."Recommended3 1/2 stars
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a well-researched and docuemnted book detailing the lives of Jim Jones's followers. The narrative is based on 50,000 pages of documents (diaries, notes, etc) released by the FBI and seized from Jonestown. The author has a good voice and is able to convey both Jim Jones's persuasiveness, at least his persuasiveness in the beginning, and the entrapped feeling his followers must have felt. I knew of the Jonestown tragedy since I was a kid, but I had always thought it was a willing mass suicide. I was very wrong.

    Author Julia Scheeres tells the story of Jim Jones and his followers, beginning in Indiana, moving to California, to Brazil and then to Guyana. She tells of his drug addiction, his sexual infidelities and methods of controlling his followers via sex (both male and female), his physical abuse and threats perpetrated against his followers -- both adults and children (so so heartbreaking to read about), and of his entrapping and control of his followers. Through the pages of A Thousand Lives, Scheeres details individual followers' lives -- pieced together from diaries, eye witness accounts and letters. This book is not just a reporting, but an unfolding of a story with multiple people's points of view.

    I was surprised to learn that Jones had political ties, both in the US and in Guyana, which enabled him to maintain his operations and keep going. It is amazing, of course viewed in retrospect, that this political pressure he put on leaders in the US and in South America actually worked. After the massacre was over, one third of the people murdered at Jonestown were children (over 300 children). Jim Jones used threat and force to keep people in his church, to prevent them from leaving the grounds of his compound and to ultimately murder them. I won't detail how Jones controlled his followers -- but it is sad and horrific. I will never use the phrase "drink the kool-aid" again to mean someone who buys into a crazy idea.

    Ultimatley this book was very informative but (I hate to say it) entertaining. I listened to the audio version and am glad to have learned what I did about the tragic victims of Jonestown. It was heartbreaking to learn, however I still recommend this story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I didn't know much about Jonestown before, so this book really helped me understand what went on from the inside. I wish there would have been more about the survivors after they left Jonestown. Also, the dispassionate journalistic tone didn't always work for me. Still, I couldn't stop reading it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I found this a thoroughly unsatisfactory book, poorly written and poorly organized. It is filled with journalistic rather than insightful writing. The reader does not gain much knowledge about the means used by Jim Jones to delude so many simple-minded people even after they had to know he was evil and a thorough fraud. There are source notes but they are not easy to use and there is no bibliography. I hope there is a better book on this than this one, but if there is I do not know it..
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Scheeres effectively demytholgizes and poignantly puts human faces on this terrifying tragedy.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    At last! It took me a long time to get through this. Scheeres has written a thorough and sympathetic account of the lowest tier of the People's Temple membership - not Jones's true believers, but the rank-and-file who thought that maybe this guy had some good ideas and realized only too late just how badly they were being conned. Longer review later.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If you thought you knew the Jonestown massacre story, you don't. What a tragic story of deception on the part of Jim Jones.

    "Today, few Americans born after 1980 are familiar with the Jonestown tragedy, although anyone with an Internet connection can listen to the haunting tape of the community's mass extinction. And while the phrase "drinking the Kool-aid" has entered the cultural lexicon, its reference to gullibility and blind faith is a slap in the face of the Jonestown residents who were goaded into dying by the lies of Jim Jones, and, especially insulting to the 304 murdered children. As the FBI files clearly document, the community devolved into a living hell from which there was no escape.

    If anything, the people who moved to Jonestown should be remembered as noble idealists. They wanted to create a better, more equitable, society. They wanted their kids to be free of violence and racism. They rejected sexist gender roles. They believed in a dream.

    How terribly they were betrayed."

    A Thousand Lives, pg. 250
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Harrowing, humanizing and enlightening: Scheeres tells the story of individual lives in a way that is disturbingly easy to relate to. Rather than a "crazy cult" of "brainwashed zombies" that are impossible to identify with, Jonestown residents were in fact just ordinary human beings fighting for a better life. They were driven by intelligence, individuality, personal experience and their own humanity. Moreover, rather than naively embracing a ridiculous fate that most people would balk at, the FBI files show just how many kept fighting for survival even at the end: to save themselves, their loved ones, their children. Some did. Others died trying. The misrepresentation of "Revolutionary Suicide" was the construction of one man's delusional paranoia, and it shouldn't be seen as anything other than coerced mass murder. If this book helps people understand the true story rather than the media nonsense about brainwashed zombies, perhaps we can actually learn from what happened. And hopefully stop using that stupid phrase.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love socialism, and I’m willing to die to bring it about, but if I did, I’d take a thousand with me. - Jim JonesThis is about Jonestown, Jim Jones, and how he took almost a thousand lives. We remember it as a mass suicide, and the phrase "drinking the kool aid," has come to mean someone who mindlessly swallows lies and obeys because that's how the poison was administered. I think this is one of saddest stories I've read in a long time--and considering my recent reading has included tales of genocide and war--that's saying a lot. I think part of what I found so sad--the slaughtered children aside, hundreds of them--is this is a tale of people who willingly followed. These people didn't come to Jonestown in cattle cars they were shoved into at gunpoint--they came by plane and boats having handed over their lives to the People's Temple and Jim Jones in pursuit of an ideal. Julia Scheeres tells the tale with a great deal of empathy. She grew up in a religious and interracial family, with an adopted black brother. She speaks in her introduction of how appealing she would have found the integrated People's Temple with its socially progressive ideals in its heyday--a place where she and her brother would have been welcome to worship side by side. She said in that introduction that she would not use the word "cult" unless quoting others--that she felt it blocked empathy and understanding. She focused in particular on five members who stood for and were typical of the whole--an elderly black woman Hyacinth Thrash; an elderly white woman, Edith Roller; a young black man, Stanley Clayton; Tommy Bogue, a white teen, and his father Jim. By focusing on them Scheeres makes clear what initially drew members in, the nightmare the settlement became even before the slaughter--and a personal dimension that makes these people to care about not dismiss as mindless zombies. When she focuses on the five, the narrative becomes novelistic, tells a story. But it also pulls back for a longer view that tells the story of Jim Jones and his inner circle. Scheeres was able to make use of a fairly recently released archive of records and documents the FBI recovered from Jonestown. Certainly the book gave me aspects of the story that if not before "untold" at least were by me unappreciated. For one, Jones had long morphed out and away from Christianity--his devotion by the time the settlement was established was to communism--he called the mass slaughter "revolutionary suicide," a phrase he took (and distorted) from Black Panther Huey Newton. Jonestown itself comes across as a mixture of Soviet Gulag and Southern Slave Plantation. For another, this was more mass murder than mass suicide--and was meticulously planned and prepared for months--not something done out of panic after Congressman Ryan's assassination. So yes, I think this book well worth reading, both as a gripping account of a tragedy and an insightful portrait of a planned dream of utopia turning to ashes--even if the lessons I'd draw from it might be different than Scheeres--although to her credit I think she leaves such conclusions up to the reader.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Julia Scheeres has written a compelling and lucid chronicle of one of the most bizarre cultural tragedies in recent memory. Because she understands that the facts about Jim Jones and his malevolent control of his congregation (the ironically named Peoples Temple) are strange enough, she resists the temptation to editorialize or slant her narrative in any way—until the very end, when such an analysis is impossible to resist.Scheeres reconstructs the devolution of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple—from its modest beginnings in Indianapolis to its horrifying end in Jonestown, Guyana—with the skill and clarity of an accomplished storyteller. Since she does not have to invent or create any of the story elements, she focuses her energy on creating a compelling narrative that reveals the humanity and character of the admirable men and women who were duped by Jim Jones’ evil genius.While she does not resist labeling Jones and those who were complicit in his demented scheme as power-mad sociopaths, she makes a strong case that the vast majority of his followers were naïve, well-intentioned, idealistic victims who simply placed too much faith in a man who could not be trusted with it.The final page of this book makes Scheeres’ opinion clear—most of the members of the Peoples Temple who perished in Jonestown were “noble idealists.” She also makes a strong case against the use of the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” as an indictment of gullibility and blind faith. After reading this book, I intend to drop that particular idiom from my lexicon.“A Thousand Lives” is a riveting piece of contemporary cultural history, and it addresses many of the themes with which America continues to struggle—race, religion, and power. This is history at its best—a clear, powerful narrative that presents the truth and provokes thoughtful questions to which there are no easy answers.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    After finishing this book, I am surprised at how little I knew about the origins of Jonestown. The author takes the outlines of the story we all know and makes it much more personal, exploring a number of families and tracing their paths to the temple. However, I must agree with the other reviewers who found the spelling and grammatical errors distracting. I don't understand how the editing process could have gotten this far off track.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Many people know the basic details about Jim Jones and Jonestown. However, this book provides an in depth look at this charismatic preacher, his idealistic world view and the people who followed him. It does not skip over the hard-to-swallow details but rather attempts to paint a psychological portrait of how these people ended up trapped and willing to die. It shows how Jim Jones' paranoia, combined with the harsh conditions at Jonestown created an environment where suicide became the solution.I thought this book was extremely well written. It provided interesting and little known details about the Peoples Temple and its members. It really answers the question why everything happened. Overall, I highly recommend this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Like some of the other reviewers, I still remember the first time I heard about the "mass suicide" (as it was called at the time) in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978.Julia Scheeres has done extensive research and provided us with background about Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple and the events leading up to the murder/suicide. She has told the background stories of serveral of the Temple members to bring the events into perspective and focus. People who joined the Temple because of its messages of equality and hope, because of the acceptance and caring community they found there. And by the time their leader had descended into madness, they were trapped: economically, physically and mentally.The events at Jonestown were, in 1978, shocking and difficult to understand. Even though Ms. Scheeres has written a thorough history of the Peoples Temple, they remain so. Reading this book broke my heart all over again.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The story of Peoples Temple still warrants attention, and in A Thousand Lives, Julia Scheeres tells it with a degree of thoroughness and detail that it’s rarely been given before. Although most of the principals of Peoples Temple died with it and many of its own records were destroyed before they could be seized, she was granted unusual access to remaining documents and government files, and was able to conduct in-depth interviews with some survivors of the massacre.Yes, Jonestown did have survivors, and not all of the Peoples Temple’s members were actually in Jonestown when Jones and his followers took (or, in some cases, were force-fed or injected with) cyanide-laced fruit punch. The fact that some followers--including over two hundred children--did not die by their own hand makes the term “massacre” more generally applicable to what happened than “mass suicide,” although “tragedy” certainly fits as well.Scheeres digs into the background of Peoples Temple, revealing that the group was formed almost twenty years before its founder spearheaded its relocation to Central America. In its early years, first in the Midwest and then in Northern California, Jim Jones attracted followers though his charismatic preaching and won their personal loyalty with his church’s idealistic devotion to social justice and equality. But as the groundwork was laid for the move to Guyana, the driving force behind the group became more more political; Jones had become a true believer in socialism, and he and other Temple leaders kept members in line through fear and threats of government persecution. In its later years, Peoples Temple was a cult of personality and politics that had little to do with religion; as good socialists, members were expected to reject God and put their faith in Jim Jones. By the time that some of them understood just how misplaced that faith was, they’d given up all their personal possessions to follow a man with an increasingly paranoid and dangerous worldview, and were stranded thousands of miles from their original homes and worried families.A Thousand Lives isn’t so much the story of Jim Jones himself; as the title implies, Scheeres filters that story through the perspectives of several Peoples Temple members--a pair of elderly African-American sisters, a former schoolteacher, a troubled young man from the Oakland ghetto, and a blue-collar father and his teenage son. These people are portrayed with great compassion, and vividly convey the complexity and confusion that riddled Jonestown. They may have been bit players in the overall narrative of Peoples Temple, but their stories are important, and they add depth and dimension to a history we may have thought we knew. Its ending may be well-known, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of this tragic tale; A Thousand Lives is a fascinating, and shattering, read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The author tries to provide a clearer understanding of the 1978 Jonestown massacre in which 900+ people died. She delves into the background of Jim Jones and shows his progression from religious leader to drug-addicted psychopath. Using recently released F.B.I. documents, she focuses on some of the members of the Peoples Temple "to tell the Jonestown story on a . . . more human scale" (xii).Why people joined soon becomes obvious. In the 1950s Jones seemed to have a passion for social justice since he actively fought for integration. His progressive message of racial and gender equality was appealing, and many of his followers found acceptance and a sense of community they had not previously experienced. The problem was that Jones was a master manipulator. He convinced people to follow him to Guyana to build a socialist utopia. By isolating them in a remote corner of the South American jungle, he made them totally dependent on him. Then he resorted to psychological warfare: he regularly abused them, deprived them (of food, sleep and hope), deceived them, and engendered a culture of fear. Too late the idealists who wanted to create a truly egalitarian society " free of violence and racism . . . [and] sexist gender roles" found themselves trapped in "a living hell from which there was no escape" (250) and goaded into committing "revolutionary suicide" by a lie that soldiers were poised to storm the camp.Besides providing the personal perspective of Jonestown's settlers, the book shows how Jones had the assistance of many other people, including doctors and lawyers, in engineering death. Politicians, both American and Guyanese, also assisted, sometimes actively and sometimes by choosing to ignore allegations of abuse and false imprisonment: "Jones's powerful friends helped him. . . . His old friend California Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally wrote the Guyanese prime minister to reassure him that Jones was an upstanding citizen, and the men he helped elect [in San Francisco] - Mayor Moscone, City Supervisor Harvey Milk, and District Attorney Joseph Freitas - rallied behind him as well, refusing to heed calls to investigate the Temple" (55). Later, "A House of Representatives investigation found fault with the US Embassy's dealings with Jonestown on several levels" (245 - 246). These enablers would undoubtedly prefer that Jonestown residents be remembered as members of a suicide cult, but that is disrespectful to the 304 children killed and the "many residents [who] had been forcibly injected with cyanide" (236).The book is certainly a caveat about the dangers of fanatical faith and giving up control of one's mind, body and resources. The one weakness in the book is that it has a fair share of grammatical errors: "Every newcomer was expected to do fieldwork for their [sic] first weeks in Jonestown to partake as equals in the socialist endeavor, even seniors [sic]. . . . [Jonestown's] promise outshined [sic] the encroaching shadows" (87). Though more careful editing should have been done, the content shows evidence of extensive research and tells a heartbreaking story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's been 33 years since this tragedy occured, in which 914 people died in a mass suicide/murder scheme in November 1986, and the story still is repugnant to me. I can perhaps understand that individuals might choose to commit suicide for a variety of reasons, but I'm not able to comprehend participating in a mass suicide event that included killing hundreds of innocent children. Julia Scheeres has done extensive research, including interviewing survivors, and its shows in the details she was able to uncover to give us so much of the story behind the headlines. She begins with the young Jim Jones and traces his "call" to ministry, his education, and his founding of the People's Temple.But she doesn't stop with Jones' story. By telling us the story of several members of the church - young, old, black, white, married, widowed, divorced, single, recovering addicts, paroled criminals - we begin to understand why people felt wanted, needed, and hopeful that here was an opportunity the world was not offering anyplace else. As she follows these members through the years from California to Guyana, we witness the increasing megalomania of Jones and the tension, the uncertainty and the terror of those who finally come to realize that there is no way out of the situation in which they have placed themselves.It's terrifying, shocking,and appalling, but it's mesmerizing, spell-binding, and absolutely compelling. It was so depressing to see that the promise of hope so many accepted was perverted by someone purporting to be God, and that people could believe such a person could in fact lead them to eternal happiness. Watching Jones turn disatisfied people into sub-human creatures who could turn on their own spouses, and children, was not a pleasant reading experience, but it was a story that once started could not be put down. It's a powerful story, and one that deserves to be shown to the world, if for no other reason than to prevent it happening again
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is a difficult read to say the least. It is a very disturbing, but accurate account of the happenings of Jonestown. Whether you see why people fell into the trap they did, or you feel they should have stood against Jim Jones, is a moot point upon reading this historical account. It's full of survivors' stories of Jonestown and the unraveling of Jim Jones mental state. Though accurate, it does have a few technical writing errors that seem to take some of the emotion and the moment out of the reading. Overall, a well researched book that I will be adding to my reference section of my library, rather than my 'read again' shelf.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    33 years later, it’s still inconceivableOn November 18, 1978, the day of the Jonestown massacre, I was nine years old. I vaguely remember the news stories, but I’ve always wanted a more adult understanding of these inconceivable and tragic events. I don’t read a whole lot of non-fiction, but Julia Scheeres’ A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown seemed like exactly what I had been looking for.The book takes its title from an eerie 1975 Jones quote, “I love socialism, and I’m willing to die to bring it about, but if I did, I’d take a thousand with me.” And it delivers on what it promises in the title, starting with “hope.” Scheeres describes Jones’s early life in Indiana, and the way he was drawn to the church from childhood. By the time he was a teenager, he was preaching on street corners. And he was preaching a fairly radical (for the times) message of inclusion, integration, and racial tolerance. This was the philosophy on which he founded his first church in Indiana in 1954. Reverend Jones’s attitudes about race were ahead of his time, and he quickly built up a devoted, multicultural flock.Alas, it didn’t take long for “deception” to enter the picture. Jones was a practitioner of faith healings. While some may claim to have been genuinely helped by the man, his trickery in bringing about his so-called miracles is well established. In addition to simple cons, Jones was a master manipulator. He utilized all kind of tactics—from inducing paranoia to actually drugging people without their knowledge—all the while increasing his sway over his church-goers. A few years after the Indiana church was established, he convinced a healthy percentage of them to pick up and relocate to rural Northern California to avoid a predicted nuclear explosion in Chicago. The relocated People’s Temple thrived in Redwood Valley, California, before it eventually relocated yet again to San Francisco.Scheeres reduces the epic tragedy to a human scale by introducing the reader to several individual church followers. Dating all the way back to the Indiana church were sisters Hyacinth Thrash and Zipporah Edwards. In Redwood Valley, grief led the entire Bogue family to the church. In San Francisco, juvenile delinquent Stanley Clayton stayed on the straight and narrow because of the church community. And Edith Roller, a well-educated, 61-year-old “opinionated loner” came to the church as an agent of social change.Scheeres writes, “The world seemed to be imploding in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his message struck a nerve. The headlines were saturated with death: Vietnam, nuclear war, murdered civil rights leaders, and student protestors. Americans of every stripe were angry, insecure, afraid. Gone was the Leave It to Beaver complacency. The establishment fissured along with its enabler—mainstream religion—and people turned for solace to alternative sources of supposed wisdom, including gurus, spiritualism, astrology, and self-help. The time was ripe for a self-appointed prophet like Jim Jones.”Scheeres details the events that led inexorably to the Temple’s final move to Guyana and the shocking tragedy that occurred there. She is assisted in this effort by new information in the form of thousands of pages of FBI documents that have recently been declassified. The full perversity of what went on with Jones for years, and the crimes he perpetrated against his followers, is staggeringly difficult to believe: the sex, the drugs, the madness, and the abuse of power. It’s a terrible, terrible story, and yet the book is a quick read—in part because the last 40-some pages of the book are made up of end-notes than can be easily skipped.I think that Scheeres has done a reasonable job of relating the history in as impartial a manner as anyone could. Following specific Temple members closely and watching their eventual fates unfold was an effective way to tell the story. Where I felt let down was in trying to understand with any real depth the psychology of those involved. I especially hungered for more information on what was going on inside Jones’s head, but that may be something we will never know. You couldn’t sell this story as fiction; it’s simply too unbelievable. Looking back seems worthwhile, but in the end, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to have learned.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a fascinating glimpse into the world of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Julia Scheeres takes the story one step further by allowing the reader to meet some of the people who followed Jones from the US to Guyana and ultimately, their deaths. She used public documents (such as letters, diaries and journals) as well as taped material and survivor/family interviews for her information. The result is a fast moving and engrossing read. The back stories of several of the members are told, giving us insight into what made Jim Jones and his vision so attractive to them. While the main story unfolds, the reader also sees the events through these members. From the angry street kid to elderly spinster sisters to the family unable to cope with the death of their child, we find out how Jones reached out to them and made them feel that they were essential to him and that he loved and needed them. As he descends into a drug induced paranoia, we see them try to make sense of his erratic behavior, to rationalize and accept his actions as being in their best interest. Even up to the end, it is fascinating to see what they thought and how many still believed in him. My only complaint is that the book ended and I wanted more. Quick read and fascinating subject.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A THOUSAND LIVES: THE UNTOLD STORY OF HOPE, DECEPTION, AND SURVIVAL AT JONESTOWN by Julia Scheeres surprised me. I thought the story of Jim Jones, his cult, and the mass murder-suicide (which, according to what is now known, was actually a massacre) that ultimately occurred was an old one, that nothing new could be said about it. Most of us know Jim Jones was a cult leader who lead his followers to a mass murder-suicide at Jonestown. But there’s so much more to know now, and that new information is related in this book.First of all, A THOUSAND LIVES doesn’t use the word “cult.” Why not? Scheeres says something like, no one practicing a religion thinks it’s a cult.Jones wasn’t always a creep. His life reminds me of a long-time politician’s life. They start their careers as good and sincere and honest, but the power they have over others’ lives eventually goes to their heads and corrupts them. It’s interesting to see Jones as good and sincere and honest and then become the creep who lied to his followers and became more interested in his power over them than in improving their lives.But Jones became more than a creep. He became a mad man and was far worse than we knew.And the book contains so much more previously unknown information. But I don’t want to give it away here; as some reviews will. Just believe there is more here for you to learn now.Some of the information Scheeres divulges left me with more questions: how could so many adults, including several politicians and people in other positions of power, have been fooled by a monster? And how could so many of them do ANYTHING at his command? I say “monster,” and I know you’ll agree with me that Jim Jones was after you read this. I remember what was said when the massacre happened. It wasn’t called “massacre” then. Read this, and you’ll see that it was.Scheeres has gathered together this new information in a way that she can get more personal. She examines the lives of specific members of the cult, especially when they lived in Jonestown, Guyana. It was difficult to read sometimes but definitely more interesting than just a recitation of information. It even gets frightening as cult members try to defect and leave but can’t. They were trapped. Were they also drugged? Were they hypnotized? Scheeres presents evidence that they were but says not.If I were gathering together this information, I would have organized it differently. And I would have posed my questions someplace near the beginning and then tried to answer those questions. But what a job it must have been to sift through everything now available to her! So much disgusting information that I’m sure will make you see some aspect of the Jonestown massacre differently.I won an ARC of this book through goodreads.com’s First Reads program. This is an honest review.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It never ceases to amaze me how we let ourselves be lead by maniacs and monsters, even when we say we'll never allow it to happen again. This nonfiction book about charismatic Jim Jones and his followers, their eventual deaths at Jonestown, is a prime example. Fascinating, horrifying, and tragic beyond words. Good people wanted someone to believe in, and thought they found their answer in Jones. And initially, perhaps they had - someone who believes in equality, in fairness, in treating people right. This account of Jones's downward spiral and of the people who became his slaves and his victims is not easy reading emotionally. The author tells the story in a very straightforward way, not needing to resort to histrionics or purple prose. Some of the victims, the ones whose stories she was able to tell, became very real people, not just more statistics in a thousand dead bodies left to rot in the jungle.The book is must reading for anyone who ever wondered why? How can these people get caught up with someone like Jones? How can they throw their lives away? While I still can't comprehend how someone like Jones can act as he did, I do understand better the position and actions of his followers. The Jonestown tragedy is an important page in history, and one that too few younger adults know about.Thank you to Simon & Schuster/Free Press for providing me with an advance reader's edition.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An incredibly written and heartrending tale. This reads like a work of horror, but is completely true.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    While I can tell I'm going against the grain here by giving this book a lower score, I'll try to do my best to justify my reasoning behind this action. First off, I understand this is a non-fiction piece about Jonestown, but this woman had a LOT of material to work with, and I felt like she only summarized what the survivors (or victims) said or did instead of letting them tell us. There were only a few parts in the book where we actually read word-for-word what Jones himself had said to the mass of his people. By this, I was disappointed. That being said, I understand it wouldn't be necessary to always put what the people had said verbatim, but I think it would have been a lot easier to read if she had done so intermittently. Secondly, this book gave me the vibe that I was reading from a script of a documentary, not a book. It didn't seem so bad near the end of the book, but now that I'm reading another non-fiction piece, I think she could have done a better job turning the events into an actual story instead of just dealing us out information that kind of overloaded me. As far as the pros go, this is a very good book if you want to learn the step-by-step process through how the Jonestown massacre came about. However, that is kind of my con as well--I didn't want to read a textbook illustrating that Edith wrote in her diary on August 26 but not August 27, or that on September 20th, Edith's roommate started complaining about her hip hurting (these are examples I made up). I will say that I expected more. I expected to be entranced and entrapped by Jones as so many of his people were. However, even though the author states she is going to try to do just so, I never get caught up in Jones, only in his slurred speech and addiction to speed. I wanted to be hypnotized by Jones's words to feel the anguish his people perhaps felt later, as betrayal. Therefore, I gave the book 3 out of 5 stars because, while like a textbook, it tells you thoroughly what happened, Scheeres doesn't give me the craving I felt for more detail about the victims, the survivors, and of course, Jones. It does, however, lead me to want to investigate more about this all-too-famous massacre.

Book preview

A Thousand Lives - Julia Scheeres

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A Thousand Lives

Riveting . . . You will not be able to look away.

—San Francisco Chronicle

Julia Scheeres’s book sheds startling new light on this murky, mini-chapter of contemporary history. . . . the narrative is [a] compelling . . . psychological mystery.

—The Wall Street Journal

"Julia Scheeres’ A Thousand Lives . . . tells the tragic tale of Jonestown—in its way, a peculiarly American apocalypse."

—Los Angeles Times

A gripping account of how decent people can be taken in by a charismatic and crazed tyrant.

—The New York Times Book Review

How do you tell a new story about Jim Jones and his followers, when everyone knows how it ends? . . . Julia Scheeres’ riveting A Thousand Lives gives us reason to look again.

—The Miami Herald

Almost unbearably chilling . . . but tempered with enormous sympathy.

—The Boston Globe

A work of deep empathy for so many lives lost in the name of different shades of hope.

—Los Angeles Times

The first solid history of the Temple . . . less a warning about the dangers of religosity than a clear headed chronology.

—San Francisco magazine

"The revelations of [A Thousand Lives] shine through our everyday relationships to war, our politics, our beliefs and our own actions. This is a strikingly relevant book ."

—San Francisco Sunday Chronicle Book Review

Gripping.

—The Globe and Mail

Chilling and heart-wrenching, this is a brilliant testament to Jones’s victims, so many of whom were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Scheeres shows great compassion and journalistic skill in reconstructing Jonestown’s last months and the lives of many Temple members (including a few survivors) . . . [A Thousand Lives is a] well-written, disturbing tale of faith and evil."

—Kirkus Reviews

Her account is notably levelheaded in a field where sensationalism, conspiracy theories and bizarre reasoning run free.

—Salon

"Jonestown has become a grim metaphor for blind obedience—for fanaticism without regard to consequences. In the aptly titled A Thousand Lives, Julia Scheeres captures the humanity within this terrible story, vividly depicting individuals trapped in a vortex of hope and fear, faith and loss of faith, not to mention the changes sweeping America in the 1960s and ’70s. She makes their journeys to that unfathomable tragedy all too real; what was truly incredible, she shows, was the escape from death by a tiny handful of survivors. Drawing on a mountain of sources compiled and recently released by the FBI, she changes forever the way we think about this dark chapter of our history."

—T. J. Stiles, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

For those who can picture only the gory end of Jonestown, Julia Scheeres offers a heartbreaking and often inspiring glimpse of what might have been. Her masterfully told and exhaustively researched A Thousand Lives should stand not only as the definitive word on Jones’s horrific machinations, but on the utopian dreams of a bygone generation. A worthy follow-up to her superb memoir, Jesus Land.

—Tom Barbash, author of On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal

The definitive book on Jonestown and the Danse Macabre of suicide and murder orchestrated by mad Jim Jones. Julia Scheeres takes us by the hand and leads us gently, inexorably, into the darkness.

—Tim Cahill, author of Lost in My Own Backyard

This the best book in a good long time on the dangers of fanatical faith, the power of group belief and lure of deep certainties. These demons that haunt the human mind can be countered only by facing them with courage and honesty. This is precisely what Scheeres has done.

—Ethan Watters, author of Crazy Like Us

"I thought I knew the story of Jonestown, but in reading A Thousand Lives discovered that much of what I’d read and heard was pure myth. Through meticulous research, beautiful writing, and great compassion, Scheeres presents an engrossing account of how Jim Jones’s followers—eager parishioners who yearned for a more purposeful life and were willing to work for it—found themselves trapped in a nightmare of unfathomable proportions. This book serves as testimony to the seductiveness of religious fervor and how in the wrong hands it can be used to nefarious ends. It is also a poignant and unforgettable tribute to those who lost their lives and to those few who survived."

—Allison Hoover Bartlett, author of the bestselling The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: An Adventure

Chapter 2: Church

Chapter 3: Redwood Valley

Chapter 4: Dad

Chapter 5: Edith

Chapter 6: Traitors

Chapter 7: Exodus

Chapter 8: Pioneers

Chapter 9: The Promised Land

Chapter 10: Georgetown

Chapter 11: Siege

Chapter 12: Bullets to Kill Bumblebees

Chapter 13: Runaways

Chapter 14: Concern

Chapter 15: Control

Chapter 16: Release

Chapter 17: Drill

Chapter 18: Hyacinth

Chapter 19: Stanley

Chapter 20: Relatives

Chapter 21: The Embassy

Chapter 22: Control

Chapter 23: Escape

Chapter 24: Chaos

Chapter 25: November

Chapter 26: Ryan

Chapter 27: End

Chapter 28: Bodies

Chapter 29: Survivors

Acknowledgments

Photographs

Reading Group Guide

About The Author

Notes

Index

For the people of Jonestown

I love socialism, and I’m willing to die to bring it about, but if I did, I’d take a thousand with me.

—Jim Jones, September 6, 1975

Introduction

Had I walked by 1859 Geary Boulevard in San Francisco when Peoples Temple was in full swing, I certainly would have been drawn to the doorway.

I grew up in a conservative Christian family with an adopted black brother; race and religion were the dominant themes of my childhood. In our small Indiana town, David and I often felt self-conscious walking down the street together. Strangers scowled at us, and sometimes called us names. I wrote about the challenges of our relationship in my memoir, Jesus Land.

Suffice it to say, David and I would have been thrilled and amazed by Peoples Temple, a church where blacks and whites worshipped side by side, the preacher taught social justice instead of damnation, and the gospel choir transported the congregation to a loftier realm. We longed for such a place.

Unfortunately, the laudable aspects of Peoples Temple have been forgotten in the horrifying wake of Jonestown.

I stumbled onto writing this book by accident. I was writing a satirical novel about a charismatic preacher who takes over a fictional Indiana town, when I remembered Jim Jones was from Indiana, and Googled him. I learned that the FBI had released fifty thousand pages of documents, including diaries, meeting notes, and crop reports, as well as one thousand audiotapes that agents found in Jonestown after the massacre, and that no one had used this material to write a comprehensive history of the doomed community. Once I started digging through the files, I couldn’t tear myself away.

It was easy to set my novel aside. I believe that true stories are more powerful, in a meaningful, existential way, than made-up ones. Learning about other people’s lives somehow puts one’s own life in sharper relief.

Aside from race and religion, there were other elements of the Peoples Temple story that resonated with me. When David and I were teenagers, our parents sent us to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic that had some uncanny parallels with Jonestown. I could empathize with the residents’ sense of isolation and desperation.

You won’t find the word cult in this book, unless I’m directly citing a source that uses the word. My aim here is to help readers understand the reasons that people were drawn to Jim Jones and his church, and how so many of them ended up dying in a mass-murder suicide on November 18, 1978. The word cult only discourages intellectual curiosity and empathy. As one survivor told me, nobody joins a cult.

To date, the Jonestown canon has veered between sensational media accounts and narrow academic studies. In this book, I endeavor to tell the Jonestown story on a grander, more human, scale.

Julia Scheeres

Berkeley, California, March 24, 2011

Chapter 1

An Adventure

The journey up the coastline¹ was choppy, the shrimp trawler too far out to get a good look at the muddy shore. While other passengers rested fitfully in sleeping bags spread out on the deck or in the berths below, fifteen-year-old Tommy Bogue gripped the slick railing, bracing himself against the waves. He’d already puked twice, but was determined not to miss a beat of this adventure. The constellations soared overhead, clearer than he’d ever seen them. He wiped salt spray from his eyes with an impatient hand and squinted at the horizon. He was still boy enough to imagine a pirate galleon looming toward them, the Jolly Roger flapping in the Caribbean breeze.

This was his first sea journey. His first trip outside the United States. He squinted at South America as it blurred by, vague and mysterious, imagining the creatures that roamed there. A few years earlier, he’d devoured DC Comics’ Bomba, The Jungle Boy series, and now imagined himself the hero of his own drama.

The very name of his destination was exotic: Guyana.² None of his school friends had ever heard of it, nor had he before his church established an agricultural mission there. After his pastor made the announcement, Tommy read and reread the Guyana entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica until he could spout Guyanese trivia to anyone who showed the slightest interest in what the lanky, bushy-haired teen had to say. Aboard the Cudjoe, he ticked off this book knowledge to himself. Jaguars. Howler monkeys. One of the world’s largest snakes, the green anaconda, growing up to twenty feet long and reaching 350 pounds. The country was home to several of the world’s largest beasts: the giant anteater, the giant sea otter, the giant armadillo, the fifteen-foot black caiman. He knew a few things about the strangeness surrounding him, and those few things comforted him.

The plane ride from San Francisco to Georgetown had been another first for Tommy. He sat next to another teenager from his church, Vincent Lopez, and the two boys took turns gaping out the small convex window as they soared over the Sierra Nevada, the Great Plains, the farm belt—the entire breadth of America. The cement mass of New York City astounded him; skyscrapers bristled toward every horizon. At JFK International Airport, Pastor Jones, who was going down to visit the mission himself, kept a tight hand on the boys as he herded them toward their connecting flight.

Everything about Tommy Bogue was average—his height, his build, his grades—except for his penchant for trouble. His parents couldn’t control him. Neither could the church elders. He hated the long meetings the congregation was required to attend, and was always sneaking off to smoke weed or wander the tough streets of the Fillmore District. Ditching church became a game, one he was severely punished for, but which proved irresistible.

They’d only told him two days ago that he was being sent to the mission field. His head was still spinning with the quickness of it all. The counselors told him he should feel honored to be chosen, but he was wise to them. He overheard people talking about manual labor, separation from negative peers, isolation, culture shock: All these things were supposed to be good for him. He knew he was being sent away, but at least he’d get out of the never-ending meetings, and more important, he’d see his father, for the first time in two years.

His dad left for Guyana in 1974, one of the pioneers. He’d called home a few times over the mission’s ham radio, and in brief, static-filled reports, he sounded proud of what the settlers had accomplished: clearing the bush by hand, planting crops, building cottages. Tommy was eager to see it himself.

Finally, as the sun blazed hot and high overhead, the Cudjoe shifted into low gear and swung toward land. The other church members crowded Tommy as the boat nosed up a muddy river, the wake lifting the skirts of the mangroves as it passed. In the high canopy, color flashed: parrots, orchids, bromeliads.

The travelers slipped back in time, passing thatched huts stilted on the river banks and Amerindians, who eyed them warily from dug-out canoes. This was their territory. Late in the afternoon, the passengers arrived at a village named Port Kaituma and excitement rippled through them. The deck hands tied the Cudjoe to a pole in the water and Tommy helped unload cargo up the steep embankment. Pastor Jones, who’d spent most of the trip secluded in the deck house, welcomed them to the village as if he owned it. There wasn’t much to it beyond a few stalls selling produce and secondhand clothes. As he spoke, Tommy listened attentively along with the others; Guyana was a fresh start for him, and he planned to stay out of trouble. Jones told the small group that the locals were grateful for the church’s assistance—the mission’s farm would put food on their tables.

After a short delay, a tractor pulling a flatbed trailer motored up and the newcomers climbed aboard with their gear. The tractor slipped and lurched down the pitted road to the mission, and the passengers grabbed the high sides and joked as if they were on a hayride. All were in good spirits.

At some point, Tommy noticed the squalor: the collapsing shanties, the naked brown kids with weird sores and swollen bellies, the dead dogs rotting where they fell. The trenches of scummy water. The stench. The mosquitoes whining in his ears. The landscape didn’t jibe with the slide shows Pastor Jones had shown at church, which made Guyana look like a lush resort.

Tommy didn’t point out these aberrations, but turned to listen to Pastor Jones, who raised his voice above the tractor’s thrumming diesel engine. He was boasting, again, about how everything thrived at the mission. About the ice cream tree, whose fruit tasted like vanilla ice cream. About the protective aura surrounding the Church’s property: There was no sickness there, no malaria or typhoid, no snakes or jungle cats ventured onto it. Not one mishap whatsoever. The adults nodded and smiled as they listened. Tommy turned toward the jungle again. The bush was so dense he couldn’t see but a yard in before it fell away into darkness.

The tractor veered down a narrow road and passed through a tight stand of trees. The canopy rose two hundred feet above them. The light dimmed as they drove through this tree tunnel, as if they’d entered a candle-lit hallway and someone was blowing out the candles one by one. The air was so still it bordered on stagnant. Tommy glanced behind them at the receding brightness, then ahead, to where his father waited.

They drove into a large clearing. Here were a few rustic buildings, and beyond them, rows and rows of plants. A dozen or so settlers stood along the entry road, and the two groups shouted joyfully to each other. Tommy didn’t immediately see his dad. He was disappointed, but unsurprised; his old man was probably nose to the grindstone, as always. He lifted his duffle bag onto his shoulder and jumped onto the red earth, happy to have arrived, at long last, in Jonestown.

Chapter 2

Church

The power of the church seized Jim Jones from a young age. Like many, he found an acceptance in the church that otherwise eluded him.

James Warren Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in tiny Crete, Indiana, the only child of an unhappy couple. He later described his father,³ a disabled WWI vet, as a bitter, cynical person. His mother, who supported the family as a factory worker, was a scandalous figure about town: She drank, smoked, cursed, and was a vocal member of the local union.

Not only was the family untraditional, it was guilty of a notable transgression in a midwestern town—the Joneses were churchless. The young Jim Jones, who spent much time alone and unsupervised, felt like an outcast on many levels.

When Jones was a small boy, the family moved to the slightly larger town of Lynn, five miles away. There, a neighbor brought Jim to the local Nazarene church,⁵ where he was transfixed by the preacher. Everything about the man behind the pulpit awed him, from his regal satin robe to the deferential treatment given him by the congregation. Here was a role model for Jim Jones, something to aspire to.

He sampled other denominations—the pacifist Quakers, the somber Methodists—before finding his way into the Gospel Tabernacle at the edge of town.

Pentecostalism has always belonged to the marginalized. Its adherents practice a very physical devotion to God that is reflected in glossolalia (speaking in tongues), ecstatic dance, and faith healing. A conservative Christian would view the sheer exuberance of a Pentecostal worship service as unsophisticated, perhaps even unbiblical. Pentecostalism is warmth and catharsis, a fizzy soda to Calvinism’s sour water.

Because I was never accepted, or didn’t feel accepted, I joined a Pentecostal Church, Jones would tell his followers in Jonestown. "The most extreme Pentecostal Church, the Oneness, because they were the most despised. They were the rejects of the community. I found immediate acceptance,⁶ and I must say, in all honesty, about as much love as I could interpret love."

While other children liked to role-play teacher-student or doctor-patient scenarios with their friends, Jones chose preacher-congregant games. By age ten, he was holding pretend services⁷ in the loft of the barn behind his house, a white sheet draped over his shoulders for a robe as he read from the Bible or pretended to heal chickens. A woman who belonged to the Gospel Tabernacle discovered Jones’s gift for oratory and started grooming him as a child evangelist. But when he started having nightmares about supernatural phenomena, his mother, Lynetta, made him stop attending services.

But she couldn’t stop him from preaching. By sixteen, he was shouting the gospel of equality under God in the black neighborhoods of Richmond, Indiana, where he moved with his mother after his parents separated. He slicked back his dark hair with the comb he kept in his back pocket, staked out a spot on a busy sidewalk, and quickly drew an audience.

Richmond, a city where almost half the adult male population had once belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, was still deeply segregated in 1948, and Jones’s message of Christian inclusion fell sweetly on the ears of African American passersby. Here was a white teenager who was vociferously, publicly, arguing for equal rights in a place where blacks were pushed to the fringes of town. They couldn’t believe it.

The experience was a turning point for Jim Jones: He’d discovered his platform.

  *  *  *  

At age twenty-one, while majoring in education at Indiana University, he became a student pastor at Somerset Methodist Church in Indianapolis. He attempted to integrate the church,⁸ but several families walked out when the first black visitors were ushered in. It was one thing for white believers to nod in passive agreement when their preacher said that all humans were created equal in the eyes of God; it was quite another to stand shoulder to shoulder with a black person, sharing a hymnal.

In 1954, Jones decided to open his own church. He chose a neighborhood forced by court order to desegregate, and went door-to-door inviting African Americans to his church, which he called Community Unity. He championed racial equality and began doing faith healings. His performances were so popular in Pentecostal circles that he was forced to buy a larger building in 1956 to accommodate the Sunday morning crush. He named the new church⁹ Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church.

  *  *  *  

The question of faith healing is a question of faith: Either you believe God has the power to cure you, or you don’t. Most Christians believe God does have this power, and they deliver their petitions for relief to him as simple prayers: Dear Lord, please heal me from x, y, or z. Most Christians also believe that if you enlist other believers to pray for you, your chances of being heard, and healed, increase. Get a preacher involved, and your chances at bending God’s ear skyrocket. Who, after all, has a more direct line to the Almighty than God’s intercessor on earth?

So, following this logic, it’s not much of a stretch to believe that when a pastor lays his or her hands on a sick congregant, the chances of healing also increase. This instills a kind of magic in the preacher: God is touching the supplicant through the preacher’s hands. The Bible supports this belief. In Matthew 10:8, Jesus commanded his twelve disciples to Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. The New Testament states that the apostles Peter and Paul performed many miracles, including raising the dead. Even today, some Christians believe mainstream ministers such as Pat Robertson possess a healing gift.

Skeptics dismiss faith healing as psychological, not biological. They reduce such claims to the power of positive thinking. If, say, a woman who suffers from chronic chest pain due to a heart condition or stress believes in faith healing, she will feel the pain dissolve when a healer lays hands on her. Science may attribute her sudden relief to a rush of endorphins, but for her, the experience has a self-authenticating power that defies logic: God healed her, and that was the beginning and end of it.

  *  *  *  

Hyacinth Thrash¹⁰ believed Jim Jones had the gift.

She first heard about Jones in 1955, when she was fifty.

At the time she was childless, twice divorced, and living with her younger sister, Zipporah Edwards, in Indianapolis. They women were raised Baptist, and had later converted to Pentecostalism, but in 1955, they were between churches, having quit their last church after a new preacher arrived and immediately demanded a larger salary from his working class congregation.

The sisters watched church television instead. Televangelism was brand new, and although some people criticized it as a poor substitute for indolent believers, it was the perfect solution for Hy and Zippy, who revered God but couldn’t say the same for his pitchmen. If a TV pastor offended them, they could just turn him off.

When Zip saw Jones preaching on a local television channel, she thought Jones was a fine speaker, but what excited her more, that Sunday, was his choir. There they stood in matching satin robes, blacks and whites side by side like keys on a piano, singing her favorite hymns. Zippy had never seen the likes of it.

I found my church! she shouted. She got up and pulled Hyacinth into the room. As they watched the service, a longing bloomed in them.

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Born in a whistle-stop town deep in Alabama, the sisters had grown up in a close-knit family. Their father had steady work as a train cook, and their mother cleaned houses for white people. (Hyacinth was named by one of her mother’s employers.) Although they wore flour-sack dresses, they never went hungry.

Their household was harmonious, but Hyacinth noticed from a young age how things shifted the moment she stepped off their yard. The sign outside a neighboring town read: We don’t allow no niggers in this town. You better get out before the sun goes down and if you can’t read, better get out anyhow. Only landholders could vote, perpetuating white power. She sometimes ran into former slaves who bore the name of their erstwhile master branded on their backs.

When she was in grade school, a family friend was lynched. A group of white men followed him through town, taunting and trying to incite him. When they kicked him in the buttocks, he could stand it no longer and lunged at his assailants. They strung him up from a tree as a warning to other so-called insolent blacks.

  *  *  *  

Papa, isn’t there a better place? Hyacinth kept asking her father. He was reluctant to leave their farm and heritage, but the lynching persuaded him that no African American was safe in the South. In 1918, the family boarded a train to join the Great Migration of two million blacks who left the Jim Crow South searching for better lives. As Hyacinth later wrote, After the Civil War, we was freed but we wasn’t free. Their train was segregated all the way to Kentucky. Among the family’s possessions was a cherished biography of President Abraham Lincoln.

They settled in Indianapolis with the help of relatives who’d gone before. Although Hyacinth, thirteen, was eager to reap the North’s promise, her subpar education held her back. In her Alabama town, black children only attended school in the winter, so that they could work the fields during the growing season. She was ashamed of her learning deficit, and rather than be stuck in a class with younger kids, she dropped out of school altogether after ninth grade. She held a series of unskilled jobs: baby-sitting, cleaning, operating the elevator at the Indiana State House, and married twice, to unfaithful men. She was heartbroken to learn she couldn’t have children.

In 1951, when Hy was forty-six, and Zip, who’d never married, was forty-two, they’d saved enough money to buy a modest two-family home in the Butler-Tarkington neighborhood, an area recently forced to integrate,¹¹ and took in boarders to make their mortgage payments.

Indianapolis was less overtly racist than the South, but it was by no means an egalitarian city. As soon as black families started moving into the neighborhood, for-sale signs lined the streets. By the time the sisters arrived, the lone white holdouts lived next door. The middle-aged couple refused to talk to the sisters. If they happened to be sitting on their porch when Hy or Zippy came out to sit on theirs, they’d abruptly go back inside.

So, on that Sunday morning when Zipporah turned on the television and saw a white man inviting believers of any color to visit his church, she was both astonished and thrilled. Reverend Jones described Peoples Temple as a church whose door is open so wide that all races, creeds, and colors find a hearty welcome to come in, relax, meditate, and worship God. Soon afterward, the sisters donned their finest dresses and white cotton gloves, and took a street car to Jones’s church.

They discovered the television had not lied. Not only was the choir integrated, but the pews were, too. The usher marched them up the center aisle to the front, where the white congregants greeted them warmly. It felt like a homecoming. The joyfully serene atmosphere was redolent of their girlhoods: Here were the same tidy pews, the soulful organ voluntary, the wafts of perfume and hair pomade, the children dolled up and peering over the seat backs. Here were the hymns they knew by heart. Here was a handsome young white minister preaching the word in a gospel cadence, afire with the Lord.

  *  *  *  

The scene from the pulpit was no less thrilling. It must have been slightly intimidating for Jones, a callow twenty-four-year-old, to look down at the rows of faces before him, each expecting a private miracle. His early sermons, which were rambling, disjointed, and filled with stilted King Jamesian English, such as verily and doeth, reflected his inexperience. Perhaps he thought the affectation gave him an air of sophistication. After all, his college degree was in education, not divinity. A line lifted from a church newsletter¹² printed in April 1956, two months after he was ordained¹³ by Assemblies of God, is exemplary of his strained composition: The fullness of him that filleth all in all who is in you all and through you all and above you all.

During his sermons, the young Jim Jones mimicked the Pentecostal flourishes that mesmerized him as a kid: the dramatic pauses, shouted words, the pulpit fist bangs for emphasis. His dramatic healings moved the room to wonderment and reverence.

After the service ended, Jones strode up the aisle to stand at the entrance to the sanctuary, shaking hands and sharing a few words with worshippers as they filed out. He grasped each sister’s hand in his own and looked them in the eye, according them a dignity and respect that few whites had for them.

  *  *  *  

Despite being impressed with Peoples Temple, the sisters got lazy. It took effort to dress up, catch that street car. They reverted to TV church. After a few weeks, they found a flier on their doorstep. It said that Pastor Jones and twelve of his members would be on their block that Wednesday evening and planned to stop by. He’d not forgotten them. The sisters, excited, tidied up and prepared refreshments. As promised, Jones arrived with his disciples and sat in their immaculate parlor, listening wholly to them as the sisters spoke of their history, aspirations, and heartbreaks. Then, he laid soft hands on their shoulders and prayed for them. By the time he left that night, Jim Jones had gained two more followers.

The sisters would become part of¹⁴ the church’s largest demographic: black women. They spent most of their Sundays at the peak-roofed church at 1502 N. New Jersey Street. After the morning service, they helped run the soup kitchen in the church basement before attending vespers. They also volunteered in the Temple pantry, which distributed kitchen staples and used clothing to needy families. The outreach programs fostered relationships between Temple members as they drove through Indy together looking for donations of stale, expired, or overripe food. Hy and Zippy were equal partners with their white counterparts in a common cause; race was beside the point.

Jones kept pushing boundaries. The subject of his sermons—improved rights for women, blacks, and the poor—was heady stuff back in the 1950s. He didn’t use ambiguous parables about mustard seeds and lost sheep to instruct his congregation, but became a living example of his message. He integrated his household as he did his church, adopting several nonwhite children, including, in 1960, a black son who became his namesake: James Warren Jones, Jr. At the pulpit, he could now relate his personal experiences with racism and thus gain credibility with his increasingly dark-skinned flock. When his adopted Korean daughter died¹⁵ in a car accident in 1959, he was forced to bury her in a segregated graveyard. As his wife, Marceline, walked down the street¹⁶ holding Jimmy Jr.’s hand, a woman spat on her. He’d later even claim to be a minority himself—part Native American and part African American—although his blood relatives denied this after his death.

Jones offended some and convinced others. He took his message beyond the sanctuary. When he learned that several Indianapolis restaurants¹⁷ discouraged minority patrons by oversalting their food, or only serving them takeout, Jones announced on his television program¹⁸ that he was going to fast until they changed these racist practices, which they did. He also forced the Methodist Hospital to integrate. He chose a black personal physician, and when he was hospitalized for an ulcer, the hospital administrators assumed he was black as well and assigned him to a negro ward. They tried to move him to a white ward¹⁹ when they discovered their mistake, but Jones refused to leave, and took the opportunity to grandstand by giving patients sponge baths and emptying their bedpans.

In the late 1950s, Jones appeared to be at the forefront of the civil rights movement, but scholars would someday cast doubt on almost every aspect of Jones’s ministry, even suggesting that his adopted children were mere props that he acquired to generate headlines and attract followers.

Nevertheless, in 1961, his renown prompted Mayor Charles Boswell to name Jones head of the city’s fledgling Human Rights Commission. In an Indianapolis Times story announcing the appointment, Jones addressed miscegenation fears raised by his church. "The Negro wants to

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