A Thousand Lives

The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown

Julia Scheeres

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781451628968
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

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.

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.⁴

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.

* * *

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 ...