Parker had acquired his wealth in lumber mills in southern Indiana, but when the timber ran out, he turned with less success to grain speculation. Lynetta respected him because he blended business acumen with a big heart—and she blamed his financial downfall on his generosity and humanitarianism.
Extraordinarily headstrong and frugal, Lynetta aspired to follow in Lewis Parker’s footsteps. She attended Jonesboro Agricultural College in Arkansas for two years before dropping out in 1921. A few years later, she enrolled at Lockyear Business College in Evansville, Indiana, where she also stayed for two years. Then, in 1925, her mother died of typhoid fever. Somehow this death reversed Lynetta’s thinking about marriage and motherhood.
Even before Lynetta’s engagement to a Hoosier road-construction worker named James T. Jones, she resolved that she would bear a single child, a boy, and he would resemble the most admirable man she knew—Lewis Parker. Although in doing so she denied a part of herself, Lynetta married James T. Jones in the late 1920s. He was sixteen years her senior.
Several years later, after her own bout with typhoid, she became pregnant. The baby boy, though he had Lewis Parker’s brown eyes, did not quite measure up to her other expectations. From his looks, the olive-complexioned child might have been a conglomeration of every nationality in the world. His eyes were slanted, almost Oriental, his face round, his hair shiny, black and straight like an Indian’s. She thought he resembled most a baby Eskimo, and an ugly one at that.
When money threatened to run out, the Joneses were forced to sell their farmland, and the Depression overwhelmed them. James T. Jones dropped in tears to the living room carpet and beat the floor with his fists. “I gone as far as I can go,” he cried. Bending over his body, Lynetta comforted her husband. “You cry, my love,” she said with gentle determination. “But I’ll whip this if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
James T. Jones was a native Hoosier with family ties to nearby Lynn, a community of about nine hundred where his father was living out his final years. His family were Quakers, with a reputation for intelligence and decency. Though there was a black sheep in the family—an alcoholic who would eventually jump to his death from a bridge in nearby Richmond—most of the children had done well for themselves. James T. Jones was also known as a good man, but his life had taken a sad turn.
A road-construction foreman before going to France to fight in World War I, he had returned home with lungs scarred by mustard gas. With no more than a grade school education and cursed with bad health, the forty-five-year-old Jones had become a semicripple in the land of the work ethic. He collected government checks, and when his coughing spells subsided and his strength was up, he still worked on the railroads or bent his back on horse-assisted highway construction crews. In an area of small farms of sixty to eighty acres, he and his wife worked for wages.
By 1934, the Jones family had picked up and moved several miles to Lynn, about eighty miles east and slightly north of Indianapolis. They were not the only ones arriving in financial straits. Farmers who had forfeited their land to banks and mortgage companies were resettling in town. They hoped to get jobs in a casket factory or to take advantage of seasonal work at the tomato cannery or to join car pools to factories in Richmond sixteen miles away, Winchester ten miles away, or Muncie thirty-two miles away.
In 1934—as today—Lynn was a drowsy, comfortable town. People there did little more than earn a living, raise children, attend church on Sunday and cultivate vegetables in small gardens. In that sort of conservative midwestern town, Prohibition had had little impact. Even after repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933, not a single bar popped up. The menfolk generally drove across the Ohio line, eight miles away, to buy liquor. Dancing was prohibited at the high school as immoral. A total population of less than a thousand sustained a half-dozen churches, most on Church Street. Porch-sitters lolled on their swings and rockers on hot summer days, sipping lemonade. There were no blacks to speak of, few Catholics—and no reason for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan to raise their sinister white-sheeted ranks there. Crime was rare.3
The landless people in town sat at the low end of the economic scale. Above them were the owners and managers of businesses along Main Street—Chenoweth dry goods, Citizen’s Bank, the barbershop and the rest. Also comfortably situated were retired farmers who had surrendered backbreaking work to their children and had chosen to live out their years with town conveniences and Lynn’s meager social amenities —the pool hall-card parlor, the croquet courts, high school athletic events and music recitals, and an occasional Main Street parade or outdoor picture show on one of the side streets.
The town was not marred by any slums as such, but the prominent people occupied larger homes along Sherman Street, known as “Millionaire Street” among the less fortunate. The Jones house, on the other hand, was located at the south edge of town in one of the scruffiest sections. Behind its outhouse ran the railroad tracks.
Moving to town hardly eased the Joneses’ financial condition. Mr. Jones, with high cheekbones, average height and gaunt build, would always suffer from his premature infirmity. He was a gray, brooding man whose stints at work and periodic stays in Veterans Administration hospitals were mere interruptions in his forlorn routine: each morning at about nine-thirty or ten, he shuffled the one and a half blocks downtown to the pool hall-card parlor on Main Street. A smile rarely crossed his face; he was too preoccupied with his next breath. People made allowances because he was a war victim, yet he was so retiring that after a while most people did not bother to say hello.
By contrast, Lynetta steamed through town like a little locomotive, puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette, clouds of smoke in her wake. The skinny and undernourished-looking woman with a pretty face and flat black hair that stirred rumors of Indian blood literally wore the pants in the family. And while she was personable enough, her appearance, her feistiness and her habits caused some of the proper town ladies to raise their eyebrows. She seemed loud, foul-mouthed and manly to some. Rarely did she wear a dress. Her language was colorful. She drank beer at home and made no attempt to hide her smoking. Ladies were supposed to hang up their coveralls when they came to town. But those were Lynetta’s work clothes, and work was about all she had time to do.
Though far from the only working mother in town, Lynetta was a different breed. She was educated and earthy, independent in her ideas, ambitious and frugal, eccentric. She considered herself a humanitarian and thought her husband’s family bigoted. In those days, she was better schooled than most men—not to mention women—in Lynn. Her ambitions were frustrated by her marriage and by where she lived. She had been trained for business and finance, but she had to take the only jobs available : mostly seasonal work in canneries, and later, factory jobs in Richmond, where she observed firsthand the dreary lot of the workers. Unions eventually became her cause, and she did some organizing, though it could have cost her job. By the late 1940s she would be regarded as a troublemaker by other workers and plant management.4
Despite the tedium of her routine, Lynetta found time to dream, to read, to write—and to pass on her verbal skills to her son. In her grandest dreams, Lynetta Jones would have become a professional writer in the Mark Twain mold. But self-expression was a luxury for which she had little time in the years of the Depression.
Being the breadwinner absorbed so much energy that her home-making suffered. But that, after all, was secondary. What Lynetta wanted was for her son to be a success, not a slave to the rich. She was determined that life would not be a disappointment to him. From her earnings, she scrimped and saved a few dollars for Jimmy’s college education. The price exacted on the mother-son relationship was great, however. While Jimmy was left with others or by himself, she boarded a Richmond-bound bus each morning, put in a day’s unsatisfying work, then returned by bus in the evening to put together a dinner for her family. There was little prospect of change, not till Jimmy grew up.5
If there was an afternoon Cincinnat
i Reds baseball game, her husband reemerged from the card room and made his ponderous journey back to the gray two-story house. He would collapse into a wooden rocker facing the lone living room window, with shades pulled low. In the near-darkness, he would rock and hum and listen to the Reds on a crackly old crystal radio set. Lynetta sometimes tried to fire his spirit, but he would have none of it.
As though the infant sensed he would be on his own soon, Jimmy learned to walk very early, using a red wooden cart the way some children use the supportive hands of their parents. One day when Lynetta was at work and Jimmy was playing by the railroad tracks behind his house, he was nearly mowed down by a passing train; his cart went riding out of Lynn on the cowcatcher. When his neighbor Mrs. Kennedy, who was a religious woman, heard about it, she took Jimmy’s escape as a sign of the Lord’s grace.6
Even before he was toilet-trained, Jimmy would toddle around unsupervised with a dirty face and bare bottom. At times, he was seen walking around unattended with dried excrement on his bottom. Mrs. Kennedy or other neighbors cleaned him up a little, sometimes clucking about what a neglectful mother Lynetta was.
Jimmy’s nudity was perhaps his first attention-getting device. Once he did it in front of cattle drivers, with his mother chasing him. Another time, he marched into a church bottomless, accompanied by a troop of dogs, and presented the minister with a bouquet of flowers.
Animals provided security to the isolated little boy who wandered like a stray pup. To entertain himself, he played with his dogs and cats and the neighbors’ dogs, adopting animals right and left, even picking up sacks of kittens thrown out of cars. In fact, so many dogs tagged along with Jimmy that his mother wondered if she could spank him without being bowled over by them. He could go nowhere without them, just as he later could not travel without an entourage of people.
Not long after he began to talk and walk, Jimmy Jones discovered deficiencies in his life. He learned that he was different from other children : his mother did not care for him during the day, his father did not work, and his parents did not attend church, or share a bed. And he began to yearn for something seemingly beyond his reach—conventional family life according to the norms of Lynn.
Jimmy’s earliest glimpses of community standards may have come from Myrtle Kennedy, the Joneses’ neighbor. During the day, Mrs. Kennedy’s house, across the way from the Joneses on Grant Street, often served as his house and she was for all purposes his surrogate mother.
Mrs. Kennedy was also Jimmy’s spiritual mother. What Myrtle Kennedy saw underneath the grime was a sweet little boy, affectionate, smart as a whip and precocious with words. Mrs. Kennedy had set about saving Jimmy’s soul right from the outset. When he was old enough to understand, she spent hours rocking on the porch telling him about the affairs of God and man. On Sundays, she and her handyman husband would walk Jim to the nearby Nazarene church, where he joined the respectable people for an hour. The Kennedys made sure he went to Sunday school, and they took him to revival meetings before he was old enough to go to the public school.
Lynetta did not mind entrusting Jim’s religious upbringing to Mrs. Kennedy. The two were fond of each other, though Mrs. Kennedy disapproved of some of Lynetta’s sinful habits, and Lynetta sometimes teased her with occasionally colorful language.
By the time he was four, Jim became friends with another four-year-old, Donald Foreman, who lived with his family across Main Street. Sometimes the boys would drop by the car garage, a stone’s throw away from the Jones house. There the local men—“the loafers,” Lynetta called them—congregated, a few working on cars, but most just passing the time with breezy conversation and a cold soft drink.
Jim Jones went there for soda pop. He seldom had spending money, but he knew how to get what he wanted. Don, the fair-haired, fair-skinned son of a railroad worker, would hang back as Jim did his routine. Holding out nickels, the middle-aged men would ask Jim to say a few words for them. Jimmy would cut loose with a stream of cussing that would delight them to the point of knee-slapping. He called them dirty bastards, sons of bitches and other epithets that would have given Mrs. Kennedy heart failure. The sight of a little boy spouting foul language struck the men as so hilarious that they kept paying. It soon became a routine. Two or three times a week Jimmy Jones cussed for his soda, exhilarated at the power of his own voice.
One morning in the fall of 1937, Jim fell into step with his friend Don as he came up the block. They turned up the unpaved alleyway behind the Main Street stores. Bursting with curiosity and anticipation, they were on the way to their first day of school—the first grade at Lynn Elementary. Over the years, they would make the same hike hundreds of times, sometimes playing with tin cans and rocks as they went.
Both Jim and Don quickly developed into good students, receiving mostly Bs in a tough grading system. In his early school years, Jim was sometimes a discipline problem, often talking in class without permission. His deportment improved as he fell in love with the printed word. He was a fanatical reader. By third or fourth grade, he spent his spare time behind the glass doors of the school library, devouring volumes intended for seventh and eighth graders. He lugged home several books a night in a strap slung over his shoulder. The books were not for show: his inquisitive mind required tremendous amounts of fuel.
Jim was an unusual sort of loner. On the surface, he did not seem to lack confidence. He was outspoken in class, sure of himself and his ideas. Yet he did not blend in, physically or otherwise. A noticeably handsome little boy with Asiatic eyes, a dark complexion and straight blue-black hair—raven hair, as he would say later—he was conspicuous in a town of fair-haired children, many of German extraction. Like the other students, Jim also was of European extraction, partly Welsh, though he later would claim Indian blood, sometimes attributing it to his mother, other times to his father.
In contrast to his toddling days, now he groomed himself impeccably. Cleanliness became an obsession. He was very proud of his hair, his dominant physical feature. He kept every strand in place, and sometimes in public, even while talking to people, he would sweep a comb across his head. He bathed regularly in the back porch washroom at home. He kept his clothes exceptionally clean and well pressed, and his shoes polished, a habit that would remain with him for life.
Even as a schoolboy, Jim Jones avoided any situation which would dirty him or cause him to sweat. He shunned physical activity, and instead concentrated on cerebral games and pursuits. As other kids scuffled and played tag or horsed around on playground equipment, he often positioned himself to one side, watching. The other children could not understand his standoffish behavior and his smug, almost condescending defiance. Most did not bother with him; a few bullied him, though he could shout up a storm. It took great provocation to get Jim to defend himself physically, yet he found conflict somehow fascinating, and was always around for the schoolyard tussles. Some teachers mistakenly thought he was instigating trouble.
Jim Jones already was playing several roles, a talent he would polish over the years. In the company of Myrtle Kennedy, he was an innocent. At school, he was a playground recluse and a sometimes mischievous high achiever and bookworm. At the car garage, and on the streets, he was a holy terror. And in his small circle of neighborhood friends, he was a roguish little natural leader.
It was outside the institutional framework, in a vacuum of authority where Jim could make his own rules, that he first felt confidence and some power. Outside school, he could control the same playmates who intimidated him at school. He structured the environment to suit himself, using a certain knack that, when full-blown in adulthood, could rightly be called genius. He learned at a very early age how to attract playmates, keep them entertained and maintain a hold on them. To accomplish it, he shifted modes, from playmate and companion to dominator, pushing his authority then backing off.
After school, Jim and Don sometimes drifted down Main Street, where Jim often stung the ears of adults with his random curses, shouted at passersb
y to see how they reacted.
Sometimes, Don and a handful of other children were drawn to Jim’s home. They would troop along the driveway to the left of the Jones house, past the side garden, past the small barn to a small wire enclosure near the back porch. Jim kept all manner of creatures—rabbits, chickens, ducks, a goat and more—confined in the pen, with a small wooden shed for shelter. The shadeless ground was barren—browsed and pecked clean except for the dung.
Some children loved to come to his little menagerie. It was a novelty for town kids, because most families did not keep farm animals. Jim spent many hours talking to his animals, training them and playing with them. He took care of his aversion to dirty tasks by enlisting his visitors to do his chores for him. Like Tom Sawyer, he convinced them that feeding and cleaning was just another form of play. If the kids tired of the “fun,” he scolded them impatiently.
Don never could figure out why Jim wanted animals if he did not enjoy caring for them. The lack of shade, grass and open space seemed inhumane. “Why do you want so many different things and kinds?”
“I just want them,” Jim replied.
“Why not build a better place for ’em?”
Jim was not interested in that. The animals were in part a drawing card, like a roadside gas station zoo of creatures whose imprisonment was the price of the pleasure of others.
Eccentricity was almost an inherited trait. The gap between the ages of his parents set Jim apart. His father’s age and infirmity meant he missed most common father-son activities, physical or otherwise. A further disquieting note must have been the apparent suicide of Jim’s uncle Bill, a drunkard who was living with the Jones family when he plunged from Richmond’s G-Street Bridge.7
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