The date was Sunday, June 12, 1949. On that perfect Indiana spring day, two wedding parties gathered at the Baldwin family home. Marceline and her nineteen-year-old sister Eloise were dressed in white gowns of identical material but different design. Jim and Eloise’s fiancé, Dale Klingman, looked dashing in their matching white dinner jackets. Each bride had her own attendants. Little Sharon was a flower girl. Marceline’s nursing school roommate, Evelyn, served as her maid of honor.
Though happy for their two oldest daughters, the Baldwins fretted that Eloise was too young to take such a step, and that Marceline’s groom was too immature. Yet those last minute doubts fell away when the wedding party moved on to Trinity United Methodist Church, site of Marceline’s parents’ own wedding a quarter century earlier and only five doors from their home. On this day, it was filled to capacity, with the mayor and City Council members among the guests.
It was a straightforward ceremony, but doubled. When Eloise and Dale were pronounced married, Dale kissed his bride suavely. When Jim and Marceline were wed, however, he grabbed her in a bear hug and let her have a breathtaking kiss. The family members smiled at Jim’s boyish enthusiasm. His inexperience was evident.
The Joneses fell immediately into the hyperkinetic lifestyle that would dominate their marriage. Without so much as a honeymoon weekend, they took up residence in Bloomington. Their first home, located across the street from the hospital where Marceline worked and not far from the I.U. campus where Jim attended summer school, was one room’, aptly known as a “convenience apartment.” For his part, Jim continued his education and looked for part-time jobs. Marceline took courses in nursing education at the university and worked nights in surgery at the hospital in town. She sacrificed to help pay for Jim’s schooling, believing he some day would make a mark, perhaps as a hospital administrator or a lawyer, certainly helping the disadvantaged.
Perhaps Jim sensed his bride’s need to maintain her close family ties, because, time permitting, they made the hundred-mile drive to Richmond to see relatives and friends. Jim loved to burst into his in-laws’ home, calling, “Grandma! Sharon! I’ll take you to the movies tonight!” And he and Marceline would load Grandma, who was in her eighties, and Sharon, who was wheelchair-bound, into the car and take them out on the town.
Jim’s relationship with little Sharon was special. He treated her as a little sister, and she, in turn, looked up to him as a big brother, respected him for his compassion and intellect. He told her what was happening in the world and what was wrong with it. Minorities were mistreated, he said, and hypocritical churches contributed to the problem with their segregated congregations. When no one else was around, not even Marceline, he used to sing George Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” to Sharon, especially the line “The things that you’re liable/To read in the Bible,/It ain’t necessarily so....” It seemed to the little girl that her brother-in-law must be losing sight of his God.
Back at the Jones apartment in Bloomington, Jim’s irreverence took on stronger manifestations. Always unorthodox, Jim now even dropped his evangelistic mouthings. His views became a source of friction with his bride. While Jim expressed atheistic views, Marceline clung to her Methodist faith. Jim’s sacrilegious talk hurt her badly. But Jim could not be silent, could not allow his wife to nurture religious delusions like those that he had cast off gradually when he left his hometown and was exposed to suffering. He felt duty bound to tell her what he had discovered intellectually: that there was no God. He knew it from hospital experiences, from seeing the poor on city streets; no merciful God would allow so much earthly suffering. And no churches could serve mankind if they hypocritically screened people according to skin color.15
Despite Jim’s attitudes, Marceline continued to practice her religion. She knelt down at night to pray, as she had all her life. Her praying infuriated him; he said he could not stand to see his wife kneeling before an imaginary deity. Finally, he demanded that she stop praying altogether. When she resisted, he threatened petulantly to throw himself out the window, to put his death on her conscience. Whether Jim meant his childish threat or was bluffing, it deeply troubled Marceline. Jim had demanded that she deny her faith and accept his will in its place.
Because they loved each other, because Marceline was willing to bend and forgive, the religious conflict was shoved aside most of the time. In any case, they must have been distracted by financial pressures. Despite their simple lifestyle, the Joneses were forced to move into a trailer outside Bloomington. Jim was even posing as an art class model at the university to pick up extra money. When Marceline’s parents and Sharon came to visit, there also were signs that he was undergoing a sort of youthful identity crisis, reaching out for new ideas and feeling renewed antagonism toward his in-laws.
He told Marceline’s family how impressed he was with a campus speech by Eleanor Roosevelt, who was sensitive to the plight of American blacks. On at least one occasion, he made sympathetic statements about communism—this during the Korean war. It was ridiculous that people treated communism like a disease, Jim said, authoritatively. Later Jones would claim he had been an avid communist since childhood.16 If so, there is no evidence he ever presented himself as such. Nevertheless, Jim’s somewhat admiring defenses of communism disturbed little Sharon. She fantasized that any day the FBI might bang on the door of her house because of her brother-in-law’s controversial views.
Once, after a few hours’ visit with Jim and Marceline, the Baldwins found that their car would not start; the repairman was certain someone had tampered deliberately with the engine. Though the Baldwins were never suspicious people, they shared a gut feeling that Jim had done some sabotage under the hood. The suspicion deepened after two other odd incidents in that first year of the marriage.
A similar hostility manifested itself another evening when Jim began reading Marceline a newspaper story about a horrible automobile accident while she was cooking dinner. Going down the list of the dead, he ticked off the name of one of her dearest friends. Stricken, Marceline burst into anguished tears while Jim watched her, stolidly, measuring her love for her friend. Finally, he admitted he was kidding. Marceline was probably horrified at the time, though later she would minimize Jim’s cruelty and even almost laugh it off. At the time, this and other incidents evidently were eclipsed by love. Jim wanted Marceline’s love whole. Friends were rivals, and so was family. In his insecurity, Jones needed to constantly test others’ loyalty, sometimes sadistically.
Marceline, out of love and trust, usually submitted. She dreamed of someday having children with Jim, raising a family like her parents’. Overall, Jim seemed to be the most decent man she had met. His kindness and his age allowed her to dismiss the disturbing elements in his personality, perhaps to write them off as youthful rebellion.
In 1950, for instance, Jim responded in characteristic fashion to the plight of one of Marceline’s cousins. Ten-year-old Ronnie Baldwin, placed in an unfamiliar foster home because of his father’s premature death and his mother’s incapacity, had been suffering severe stomachaches. Alerted to the symptoms by Ronnie’s brother at the Baldwins’ home, Jim and Marceline jumped into the car, fetched Ronnie, and raced to Reid Hospital with him. As they had guessed, Ronnie’s appendix had ruptured. The emergency surgery probably saved his life.
Ronnie soon became the Joneses’ first foundling. Through him they could put into practice their talk of helping the weak and disadvantaged, and prepare themselves for parenthood. The summer of 1951 was an opportune time to bring Ronnie into their household. The boy, of course, was between school terms, as was Jim. After completing his third semester at Bloomington, Jones had shifted his emphasis from business to social sciences and was pondering a career in law. So the three of them moved to Indianapolis, where Jim could continue his studies at the I.U. campus there and enter I.U. Law School as an undergraduate if he wished. In fact, Jim did everything else but study in Indianapolis.
Events in the fifteen months Ron
nie Baldwin spent with the Joneses came exceedingly fast. Life was a whirlwind of jobs, ventures, near-nightly outings. Driven by a worrisome force, Jim Jones led an almost nomadic existence, searching for the proper direction in his life, no longer certain that higher education would provide the answer.
The Joneses first lived in an apartment behind a Shriners Temple. But their stay in the downtown area apartment ended quickly, because they acquired too many pets. Keeping a menagerie was nothing new to Jim, but in addition to the standard pets, he graduated to more intelligent life, a chimpanzee. The chimp, however, died mysteriously of strychnine poisoning—the first of a string of poisonings in Jim’s life. Blaming the death on a neighbor, he replaced the chimp with a monkey when he purchased a house on the north side of town.
Probably the move increased the financial strain. Deferring law school, Jim worked a number of unsatisfying jobs, often more than one at a time.17 As a night watchman, he slept during the day, though rarely a full eight hours. Like his father in Lynn, he seemed proud of the gun he carried—and once fired it, loaded with blanks, in the house. Remarkably, he almost could do without sleep.
Although Marceline wished for a family of her own, Jim insisted that she work too. In fact, he bought a typewriter and taught her to type so she could get a school nurse job. She also worked in the children’s ward of the hospital, and together they operated a short order café next to a factory.
Though the Joneses pushed themselves to near exhaustion, they did not neglect their young charge or begrudge him anything. They treated Ronnie like their own son, and had him call them “Mom” and “Dad.” Because he was small for his age, they immediately put him on vitamins. They bought him a Pomeranian dog, a bicycle, nice clothes. They even paid for tap-dancing lessons at one of the best dancing studios in Indianapolis, although Jim had holes in his shoes and Marceline washed out her single uniform every night.
In return for their sacrifice, they expected the best of Ronnie—they pushed him to get better than average grades, and they punished him when he did something wrong. Ronnie learned about his cousin Marceline’s righteous anger once when she spanked him furiously for forgetting to feed the animals—dog, monkey, coatimundi and hamster. When the boy threatened back with his fist, Marceline suddenly restrained herself. Perhaps she had overreacted, she admitted. They talked out the problem, and as a sign of understanding, she treated him to an ice cream cone. “We won’t tell Jimmy about this,” she said. It was a role she would play in the coming years: the good and gentle wife of her more wrathful husband.
Jim had promoted himself consciously as a replacement father to Ronnie, but Jim’s overbearing personality made Ronnie wary. Jim, who never had much of a paternal role model, emphasized moral leadership rather than companionship. At the dinner table and in the car, Jim, though only about twenty, philosophized and jabbered nonstop. Communism is not so bad, he said, and black people are just like you and me. Jim tried to indoctrinate the boy through these lectures and by deeds, as when he helped out some poor immigrants in the neighborhood. Jim showed no interest in Ronnie’s religious upbringing and omitted grace at meals, but he wanted to make sure that the boy knew the facts of life. To supplement his rather explicit lectures, he gave the boy books; as a result Ronnie had a better sex education than his school pals.
The Joneses always delighted in their pets. The three of them laughed to tears when the monkey learned to open the window, then escaped, ransacked a kitchen next door and eluded everyone for a few days, until the fire department knocked him out of a tree with a highpressure hose. Despite such antics, Ronnie feared the monkey—because Jim had trained the animal to attack on command. Once or twice when Jim let out an odd noise and pointed at Ronnie, the monkey would leap after the boy as he scampered to safety atop the bathtub. As the monkey held Ronnie at bay, Jim chortled until Marceline, watching with mounting concern, called a stop to the “game.”
Such episodes passed quickly—at least for Marceline. Unkind one minute, Jim could turn almost saintly the next. He could counsel and expound on the most serious subjects, then suddenly behave like a mischievous little boy.
The Joneses had few friends, but they seldom stayed home. When not working, sleeping or eating, they would hop into the car and cruise around the city, talking, looking at people, noting changes in the neighborhoods. Usually, Jim drove. But once, with Marceline protesting, Jim gave the boy the wheel, until they nearly got in an accident.
Jim took Ronnie along to movies—particularly those on the bomb —and to political lectures he attended. During a meeting at a churchlike auditorium, it seemed communism was being discussed. At one point, someone came up and whispered something in Jim’s ear. Hurriedly, they slipped outside. FBI men evidently were keeping the place under surveillance. Maintaining his composure, Jim bade “Good evening” to one of the G-men and kept walking.
The family packed up and went on summer vacations in their old Lincoln. The first summer, they spent a week at Indian Lake resort in Ohio. One day, while Marceline rested at the cottage, Jim and Ronnie rented a motorboat and stopped in the middle of the lake for a swim. While Ronnie still was in the water, Jim climbed into the boat and restarted the motor. Ronnie hung onto the side while Jim towed him in circles. “Let go,” Jim said. Ronnie refused; Jim insisted. “No,” cried out Ronnie—he was afraid he would be sliced up by the propeller. Jim dragged around the frightened boy until a lake patrol official motored out to them and chewed out Jim for endangering the boy.
In a similar incident on the family’s second vacation, the three of them were standing along the river about a quarter mile above Niagara Falls. The water swept by them toward the deafening cataract. Jim instructed Ronnie to wade into the swift current, promising to hold him at arm’s length. Petrified, Ronnie did not wish to go. Jim persisted, reassuring the boy, but Ronnie refused again. Jim insisted even after the boy broke into tears, but Marceline did not intervene. Finally, unhappily, Ronnie surrendered. The powerful current frightened him, yet Jim held on tight.
On the way home from Niagara Falls, the old Lincoln took them through Canada, then south through the Great Lakes region. It was most likely on this trip or shortly after it that Jim saw a document that would have a pivotal effect on their lives. Marceline had found it difficult to refute Jim’s criticisms of organized religions, yet on this day she convinced him to come to a Methodist church with her. On a bulletin board, Jim Jones found and read with interest a document that underscored the social relevance of the church.
In 1952, the Methodist social creed answered Marceline Jones’s prayers for a resolution to her biggest marital conflict. The five-page creed espoused goals that the Joneses supported: abatement of poverty; a form of security for the aged; collective bargaining; free speech; prison reform; jobs for all. And most significantly, the creed declared, in the decade before the civil rights movement, “We stand for the rights of racial groups....” Although Jones could not bring himself publicly to embrace communism at the height of the McCarthy years, he believed that collective action was the only way, and he knew that he wanted to lead rather than follow. Until now the proper vehicle had not come along.
In April of 1952, during Ronnie Baldwin’s first tap-dancing recital, Marceline leaned over and announced to her mother that Jim was entering the ministry. The entire family was shocked: Jim had seemed to be trying every direction but the ministry. Little Sharon assumed that Jim had a lightning-bolt religious experience; she knew nothing of his childhood evangelism. Explaining his plans, Jim mentioned only that the Methodist social creed had figured heavily in his decision; it showed that organized religion was, after all, compatible with social goals.
Through the ministry, young Jones could synthesize his own ideas, his personal needs and his talents. Given his earlier experience and speaking abilities, the ministry would allow him, finally, to excel. It would fulfill his personal need to lead people and would provide a forum, not to say a cover, for his controversial views.
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nbsp; Characteristically, Jim took action at once. By June 1952, less than two months after his decision, he had accepted a position as student pastor at Somerset Methodist Church in the predominately poor white southside section of Indianapolis. During this on-the-job apprenticeship, he took a correspondence course to acquire standing in the Methodist Conference and fitfully continued his college education, attending occasional classes at I.U. extension school. And for the third time in about a year, the family moved, this time to a tiny bungalow near the church.
For his first sermon, Jim Jones simply pointed out moral lessons taken from the Bible, much as he had done in the loft in Lynn. His liberal colors were showing. He spoke against discrimination and about “living Christianity.” He no longer rejected the ecumenical stance taken by his college roommate three years earlier; he adopted it as his own, using it to attract people from various religious faiths.
At the same time, Jim’s real interests led him out of the white neighborhoods. On the sly, he took Ronnie to various black churches around Indianapolis, where together they experienced the same emotional brand of religion that had captivated Jim as a boy. During this church-hopping, which resembled his experimentation in Lynn, Jim made some friends among black people. He brought them home to socialize—a rarity in those times—and invited them to his own church services, which was not always welcomed by white members.
Though Ronnie was already known around church as the student preacher’s son, Jim and Marceline wanted to make it official. They met a few times with a social worker to begin procedures, but Ronnie feared Jim and resisted the idea of adoption. Jim tried to convince him that he had nowhere else to go, even claiming, falsely, that Ronnie’s mother did not love him, that she had contributed nothing to his support, and that she was a terrible person.
Young Jones’s divide-and-conquer tactics boomeranged. In early September of 1952, while Ronnie was in Richmond attending a brother’s wedding, the boy spoke at length with his mother. He came back to Indianapolis convinced not only that his mother loved him and would take care of him, but also that Jim was lying. When Jim tried to get the boy to sign the adoption papers, Ronnie withheld consent. All that night, Jim argued and cajoled, to no avail. Though very upset, Marceline could not stop the scene; she disagreed with Jim’s threatening methods but wanted to keep Ronnie.
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