A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (17 page)

It happened that way with Dale Parks, one of the men who tried to leave with Congressman Ryan. He had quit the church for some months, but Jones’s wife, Marceline, had convinced him to come back and give Jonestown a try. He was given a round-trip ticket, which he was required to turn over, along with his passport, “for safekeeping.” Almost immediately, he was “forced” to write letters to his family about how wonderful it all was. “I saw the guns around,” he told me, “and I didn’t want it to come to that.”

Parks’s family believed the letters and followed him to Jonestown. Soon after arriving, his father, Gerry, who had a stomach condition, mentioned that the food didn’t agree with him. During the night’s Peoples Forum meeting, in which “problems” were discussed, Gerry Parks was called
up “on the floor.” Jones humiliated him in front of the community, gathered in the pavilion. “How can you complain about food,” Jones raged. “You, with a full belly, when two out of three babies in the world go hungry.” Dale then watched his father being beaten.

When Jones called people on the floor, Dale Parks said, relatives were expected to confront them first. Defending a father, mother, or child could result in a beating. The family itself was expected to dispense the most vitriolic criticism. When the Parkses found themselves together (as when they were forced to write glowing letters home), they would whisper furtively: “You know I have to do it. If I’m on the floor, you do it too. I still love you.”

“Every citizen … could be kept … under the eyes of the police.…—1984

There were informers everywhere. They got time off, extra food, extra privileges, sometimes even a pat on the back from Father. Children informed on their parents, parents on children. Senior citizens were prized as informers. In rare moments of privacy, one resident might express “negative” opinions to the other. It was unwise to reply with anything but criticism of such ideas. The person might be an informer, and any agreement would put you on the floor and result in a beating.

The aftermath of a beating used to be called “discipline,” but the name was changed to the more euphemistic “public service.” People in public service were transferred to a dorm patrolled by armed guards. They did double work duty, and food might be withheld if they didn’t give their all. Security people would stop by the dorm to administer a beating. Often people in public service were allowed to sleep for an hour or two, then were roughly wakened and made to do some tedious chore, such as washing walls.

The only way to get out of public service was to express regret for your previous attitude, to pretend to like the work, to display a “good attitude.” It did something to a man’s mind, public service.

“Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting operation, like having an enema.… It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control … sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship.”—1984

It had been pretty rough for Stanley Clayton in Oakland. He started stealing at the age of eight, and the only presents in the house on Christmas were the ones he stole. Clayton was originally attracted to the Temple because the women he met there were warm and “foxy.” Later, he came to share a vision of economic and social equality. On the boat from Georgetown to Jonestown, he met a young, female Temple member. They talked about how they were home for the first time: home in a socialist country with black leaders. They were finally free.

The woman expressed her freedom by sleeping with one of the sailors. The boat’s captain told Jones about it, and the second night Stanley was in Jonestown, the woman was called on the floor. The question was put to her: “Why did you do it?” She answered, “Well, because Stanley said I’m free.” The community turned on him, shouting invectives. He was knocked to the ground, where security guards, trained in martial arts, shoved him and shouted at him and threw punches.

According to Stanley, Jones frequently railed against sex in marathon meetings. He said it was unhealthy and shortened the life span. When a married man was discovered having an affair, the two were called on the floor and made to strip to their underwear and pretend to make love—there on the floor in front of the man’s wife. “Look at them,” he said. “They’re like animals.”

When Stanley had sex with an older woman, both were called on the floor. “They beat the shit out of us,” Stanley said.

At Jonestown, you didn’t have a lover, you had a companion. One day Stanley’s longtime companion told him it was over. “The way she told me,” he said, “I knew it was put upon her.” At one meeting, Jones’s wife told Stanley’s companion
to sit by the doctor. “At that time,” Stanley said, “Jim Jones tried to humiliate me, calling me all kinds of names. ‘See what sex can do for you,’ he said. ‘Your companion is off somewhere else.’ He even tried to humiliate her by saying all she wanted was a dick. He said, measuring a small space with his hands, ‘Stanley’s dick ain’t no bigger than that.’ ”

“[
A Party member
]
is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors … the discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards.
”
—1984

The public-address system was sometimes on all night, the survivors explained, so that people could learn in their sleep. At six
A.M.
, someone knocked on the door. Breakfast consisted of rice, watery milk, and brown sugar. Promptly at seven, a typical resident reported to work in the field, which might be as much as a mile and a half away. A supervisor took his name, and the list was given to security. It seemed as if the weeds grew back to choke the crops in a single day, and workers were required to do heavy weeding in temperatures that often rose well above 100 degrees.

There was a half-hour break for lunch. Most often, midday meal was a bowl of rice soup.

The workday ended at six
P.M
. A resident had less than two hours to walk back from the fields, shower, and eat dinner, which usually consisted of rice and gravy and wild greens. At 7:45, the public-address system began blasting out “the news.”

Jim Bogue took an adult education course from Jim Jones in Ukiah, California. At the time, Jones didn’t believe in tests. In Jonestown, he gave one or two tests every week, and if you did poorly, you might end up on the floor. Sometimes Jones would read and interpret the news, sometimes another voice would supply his interpretation. The news outlined repressive measures taken by the South African government, and it implicated the United States. Tortures in Chilean prisons were described.

Jones became more and more radical in his opinions.
Charles Manson was misunderstood. The Red Brigades, who kidnapped and eventually murdered President Aldo Moro of Italy, had done a good thing. People took notes, dreading the tests.

About nine
P.M.
, it was time for Russian class. Such phrases as “Good day, comrade,” were practiced for an hour and a half. People paid attention, because supposedly they would someday visit Russia, a “paradise on earth” where the government “helped liberation movements.”

At about eleven
P.M.
, the community could knock off and fall exhausted into bed. Unless there were problems (and there were problems on the average of three times a week), at which point Jones would sit on his “throne” and ask leaders to describe them. Complaints about the food were always dealt with harshly. There were maggots in the rice, and you either ate in the light and picked them out or, if too exhausted, sat in the dark and ate a lot of maggots.

Jones’s answer to the problem with the inferior rice had something to do with the CIA. They couldn’t allow an interracial socialist experiment to flourish. And to complain about the food was to fall into the CIA’s hands, to be in league with them, to be a traitor.

Beatings were often severe enough to require a stay in the infirmary. People wept uncontrollably on the floor as they confessed their crimes and negative attitudes. Some were whipped with a leather belt. Jones encouraged senior citizens to strike others with their canes. Victims lay unconscious on the ground until coming to, at which time they were expected to apologize to the community at large.

The Peoples Forum meetings might last until three
A.M.
Undernourished and exhausted, people took their three hours of dead, dreamless sleep.

“In her opinion, the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily … were probably fired by the government … itself, just to keep people frightened.”—1984

Jim Jones said he was in constant danger. And he felt it was necessary the community know this. Once, he informed
them that a curse had been put on his life. He confiscated all the children’s dolls and later, burned a passport onstage. He said the passport belonged to the traitor who put the curse on him. The next day, an old man was found dead. Some of the survivors believed the old man died the day before and that Jones took the opportunity to display his omnipotence.

Sometimes, Jones would stumble and slur his words onstage. He’d go back to his cottage for an hour, somehow collect himself, and return full of fire. One day he stumbled out of his house in pain. He’d been poisoned. An infiltrator, a traitor or the CIA, had gotten to his food. Jones managed to heal himself.

In September 1977, shots were fired at Jones from the bush. They were real shots. Tim Carter, who was standing with Jones at the time, swears to it. The shots were said to come from mercenaries, mercenaries hired by the Human Freedom Movement (the Berkeley group of Temple defectors). The Human Freedom Movement, Jones told the community, was funded by the CIA. They were out there, in the bush. He could hear their military vehicles, could see white men in uniforms at the tree line, hear them on the shortwave radio.

It seemed absurd on the face of it. Mercenaries, hired by the shadowy hand of the CIA, make their way to Jonestown, level their sophisticated weapons, take one shot, and miss? Jim Bogue and Harold Cordell concluded that the shots were “self-inflicted,” that they were fakery and theater.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere of fear was such that people rose in the morning, checking the tree line for mercenaries. Jones said there were sophisticated bugging devices on the trees. There weren’t enough children’s shoes because, as Jones explained, the customs department had broken into a shipment on the docks in Houston and taken them. The rains came early, and Jones told the community that the CIA had seeded the clouds. He reminded them of the time he was driving in California and a driverless car tried to run him off the road. Who has a device
that
sophisticated?
The answer was obvious. And now there were mercenaries in the trees.

Jones despaired of defending the town. Originally, during alerts, people were to ring the perimeter with guns, crossbows, pitchforks, and hoes. But what could they do against trained mercenaries? Jones began to talk of revolutionary suicide as a final statement. The early suicide drills, most people felt, had been loyalty tests. But now he was talking about reincarnation, about how death was only a step to a higher plane. Suicide was tricky. If you did it selfishly, by yourself, you’d revert five thousand years to the Stone Age. But killing yourself for and with Father, that would be a glorious protest against repression.

Medically, paranoia refers to extreme cases of chronic and fixed delusions that develop slowly into complex, logical systems. A paranoid system may be both persecutory and grandiose. “I am great, therefore they persecute me; I am persecuted, therefore I am great.” True paranoids sometimes succeed in developing a following of people who believe them to be inspired. An essential element in the paranoid personality is the ability to discover “proof” of persecution in the overinterpretation of actual facts
.

In the past, Jim Jones
had
real enemies. They were, for the most part, louts, bigots, and segregationists: the kind of people who referred to him as a “nigger lover” and who spat on his wife when she appeared on the street with one of their adopted black children. Sickened by racist attacks, Jones moved his ministry from the Midwest to Brazil, then to northern California, where the hostilities began anew. Vandals shot out the windows of the Redwood Valley temple, and dead animals were tossed on the lawn. In August 1973, a mysterious blaze devastated the San Francisco temple.

Legitimately harassed, Jones began making connections between events, part real, part delusion. In 1976, Unita Blackwell Wright, a black woman and mayor of Meyersville, Mississippi, spoke at the San Francisco temple. Two men were seen holding a satchel outside the temple. When approached, they got in a car and sped away. The
license plate was traced to a Sacramento rental agency, and the names to a Mississippi air force base. Jones concluded that Mississippi Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was spying on him. The story was released to a newspaper. The fact that no one would print it seemed to confirm the awesome power of the senator.

“All our troubles,” one of Jones’s aides tried to convince me, “stemmed from taking on Stennis. After that, the attacks on us seemed more coordinated.” The temple was being bugged. A couple of reporters started nosing around for information for a smear campaign. One of the reporters was named George Klineman, and, according to Jones, he came from a big-time German “Nazi” family.

(George Klineman is a freelance reporter, a former student activist whose parents were born in America. He got wind of the story through the man who was to become his father-in-law, David Conn. Conn was an elder in the Disciples of Christ, a loose confederation of churches that included the Peoples Temple. In the early seventies, Conn heard strange rumors about Jones: guns at the Redwood Valley temple, beatings, fear in those who left the Peoples Temple. Klineman interviewed temple defectors and took the information to one of his sources in the Treasury Department, which encompasses the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Klineman had simply asked his source if he knew anything about a northern California religious organization that was arming itself.)