Life may not be fair, but when you have someone to believe in, life can be managed, and sometimes, even miraculous.
There were several parallels between Jonestown and Escuela Caribe. Both places used isolation to control a large group of people and censored their communication with the outside world so their loved ones wouldn't know about the rampant physical abuse and misery of the residents. I think the worst fallout, in both cases, was the living in constant fear, witnessing other residents get assaulted and worrying that you'd be next. That's where Post Traumatic Stress Disorder comes from.
My parents subscribed to both Time and Newsweek and in 1978, I remember the covers of both that December were of the bodies in the jungle. The fact that many of the people who drank the cyanide - as well as Jim Jones himself - were originally from Indiana, that stayed with me. I wanted to know why they did such a baffling, horrendous thing, why they would kill their children.
What better way to control your kid than by sending her to a compound on an island in the middle of the Caribbean, confiscating her money and passport, where she will be forced to comply with the program if she wants to leave?
I didn't fit into the Christian college my parents sent me to. I felt tarnished by tragedy, between my brother's death and Escuela Caribe, and everyone else seemed so carefree and happy and praising God. I couldn't stand happy people for a long time, and was plagued by chronic migraines and stomach aches. I'd say between age thirteen and twenty-three was the most miserable time of my life. I wrote Jesus Land because I wanted there to be a record of David's life. I was surprised that so many people read it, and felt moved by it.
To be honest, I didn't want to get inside Jones's head. Every time I wrote about Jim Jones I practically had to tie myself to my chair to force myself to do it; I hated him so much. He wanted to go down in history and he did. He's had hundreds of books and articles written about him. I was much more interested in the stories of the rank-and-file members of Peoples Temple, what drew them to Jones, and what they did once they were trapped in Jonestown and realized Jones was intent on killing them.
In California, Jim Jones even staged a shooting of himself. The lesson of this was two-fold. One, that he was a god - he could heal himself. He had these magic powers. A large segment of his congregation came from a Pentecostal tradition that believed in faith healing and already believed Jones had the power to cure others. And two, the "shooting" made him seem important. Civil rights leaders were being gunned down - MLK, Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X - and he longed to be considered as heroic and important as they were.
As kids, my brother David and I longed for acceptance. We were desperate to belong. We would have been thrilled to see the pews of Jones's church in San Francisco, with blacks and whites sitting side by side. And Jim Jones's sermons on social justice and equality would have had much greater appeal to us than the soporific morality tales we were accustomed to hearing. Jones promised real racial equality. He promised to create a truly equal community in the jungle in Guyana.
I remember one of my writer friends asking me, "Jonestown? Everyone knows the ending. What's new or surprising that you can say about it?" I told him that although people may know that almost one thousand people died in the massacre, they don't know what happens to my five people. Some escaped, some did not.
I only wish my brother David had survived to experience Berkeley as well. No one would flinch here if we were to walk down the street together, whereas in Indiana we were constantly met with hostility. I don't believe in heaven, but this is about as close to heaven on earth as I imagine getting.
Jim Jones started out as a civil rights crusader in Indianapolis. As a young preacher in the mid-50s, he used members of his congregation to integrate lunch counters and all-white churches in rich neighborhoods; they'd just march in and sit down at the pews and see what happened. Often they were received with racist insults, and once with a bomb threat. But the fact that you had this charismatic, white man, aggressively promoting racial equality, was a huge draw for African Americans, many of whom felt the Civil Rights Movement had stalled by the late 60s.
I think the folks who joined Jim Jones's church did so because they truly believed in his stated ideals of racial equality and social justice. That's why he was able to convince one thousand of them to immigrate to the jungle of Guyana. Although history has stigmatized Jonestown residents as the people who "drank the Kool-aid," I'd argue that they were noble idealists. Furthermore, they were murdered. They didn't willingly drink poison - they were forced to do so at gunpoint. They sought the ideal, only to have their leader horribly betray them.
In Berkeley, California is no sense of the "white way being the right way." Parents also come in every variety - mixed race marriages, gay partners, divorced moms. We all love our children and want to do right by them, and that's what matters most.
I choose now to live in Berkeley, California, which is a progressive refuge, despite the fact that I can't afford to buy a house here. It's important to me that my children grow up in a place where everything is questioned, examined and debated.
I was pregnant with my youngest child at the time, writing about mass death while I'm growing this precious little life inside me. Here I am, worried about everything I eat and drink and whether I walk past a smoker, and meanwhile I'm writing about an event where almost three hundred children were slaughtered. Most were never identified and are buried in a mass grave in Oakland. It was surreal. But it felt good to give Jim Jones's victims a voice, especially ordinary church members.
Jim Jones wanted his people to believe the establishment was trying to kill him because whites were threatened by his message of racial equality. He used the incident to close ranks and turn anyone who disagreed with him into a menace. He warned his congregation that a would be assassin might try to infiltrate their church, so they had to prove their loyalty to him by never questioning his orders. Dissenters became traitors.
I was working on a satirical novel about a charismatic preacher who takes over a small Indiana town. Then I remembered Jim Jones was from Indiana and Googled him. I learned that the FBI had recently released all the documents that agents collected from Jonestown after the massacre - over 50,000 pieces of paper and almost 1,000 audio tapes. I started reading the files and couldn't tear myself away; I find "true" stories inherently more powerful than fiction.
That's why I think it's important to revisit the story of Jonestown. I hope readers come away with a greater compassion for Jim Jones's victims, a third of whom were minors. To get a feeling for what it was like to be in their situation.
Before I went to Escuela Caribe, my parents showed me the school's brochures featuring smiling kids at the beach or on horseback. The propaganda was greatly appealing to a kid from rural Indiana who hated her high school anyway. I also got reassurances that I could return if I didn't like it. But shortly after the gates closed behind me, I learned I'd been deceived; the beach was far away and I couldn't return home until I'd completed the program.
Jim Jones used highly-edited videos and photos of Jonestown, showing what a supposed Eden it was. People were interviewed smiling and working in the fields, telling other church members to hurry down and join them. These interviews were staged; the people were told exactly what to say. Truth is, Jonestown never even produced enough food to feed everyone, and people were going hungry.
Jonestown was supposed to be a great socialist experiment, a place where all the evil "isms" would be eradicated: racism, sexism, elitism. This appealed to blacks and white progressives alike. Fed up with racist "AmeriKKKa," they were going to start their own society, on their own terms.
Reading Gypsy Boy, I felt invited into a secret society. I've always found Gypsies mysterious and even slightly dangerous, and Mikey Walsh does an excellent job describing the cloistered lifestyle and fascinating traditions of the Romani people. Moreover, Mikey's personal story of being a misfit among misfits is both compelling and universal. I cheered for him every step of the way.
I spent so much time at Escuela Caribe denying my true emotions and avoiding conflict that I became unsure of what my feelings really were. This is something that affects me to this day. I feel extremely uncomfortable during arguments, to the point of shutting down and not saying anything, like a turtle retracting into its shell. I can't stand conflict.
In my view, the problem with many conservative Christian parents is that they won't allow their children to have a different worldview from their own, and they don't forgive normal teenage experimentation, which they consider rebellion.
Escuela Caribe preyed upon parents' fears of secular culture to recruit students. Parents could send their kids to a place where they'd be sheltered from evil secular influences - sex, drugs, alcohol, and a questioning mentality. A place where children would be forced to become good little clones of their parents.
