Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  Through his position, Jones gained access to new forums for his views—on radio and television and in public appearances. He capitalized on the highly newsworthy topic of race relations—and increased his own visibility tenfold. He even traded in his 1949 Ford for a used black Cadillac limousine (to take old ladies to church, he said). Jones made himself a public personality and integrationist by lifestyle, often using a picture of his “rainbow family” as a prop. He demonstrated an aptitude for the catchy quote. “The Negro wants to be our brother in privilege, not our brother-in-law,” he reassured his white audience.

  After less than two months on the job, the mayor and some commissioners ordered Jones to slow down on his “journalistic efforts.” Jones, they thought, showed a counterproductive appetite for publicity in a delicate area. But with a crusader’s bent, he continued to shout his principles, often with rhetoric more militant than his actions.

  One night, Ross Case accompanied Jones to a meeting of civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the Urban League. At this time, the South was boiling, and these local leaders wanted to discuss the tenor of their own struggle against discrimination. At the outset, everyone seemed to favor a conciliatory approach, which would bring less danger of backlash. Then Jones took the microphone, for what people felt would be an endorsement of the city’s behind-the-scenes tactics. Instead, the new human rights director built up into a long harangue about the evils of racism and the centuries of abuse of blacks. He urged his listeners to be aggressive and militant, to struggle and fight. As if from his own pulpit, Jones marched the audience along to the cadence of his voice. At the climax, he screamed, “Let my people go!” The gathering responded with a deafening outburst of applause, as if they had just heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., himself.

  Jones’s public position was a source of real pride within the Temple; after all, not every church in Indianapolis could boast a pastor who made the headlines. Naturally, Jones’s assistants felt a part of something larger than a church—a nationwide fight for social justice. In their common cause the Temple ministers established a camaraderie and shared responsibility for running the church. No one disputed Jones’s dominant role; his fundamentalist Christian aides did not threaten his leadership in any way; their humanitarian aims, thinking and personalities either meshed with Jones—or could be molded to his programs. The church revolved around him, yet he kept them happy, with his public and private praise and flattery, with titles and responsibilities, with a sense of mission. As with each member, Jones made his assistants feel important, letting each share in the aura of his success.

  As fellow crusaders and friends, they grew close, intertwining their social, religious and personal lives. They asked favors of each other, and called each other “Brother.” When Jones was occupied with human rights business, he did not hesitate to call on Wilma Winberg to write school papers for him, or on Ross Case to take class notes at Butler University, where Jim was a senior in the night school division. His aides did not begrudge their time; he had inspired them to make great personal sacrifices to keep the church expanding.

  Russell Winberg—though he kept more to himself and though the others considered him less staunchly committed to social goals—nonethe—less filled an important function. Aside from Jones, he probably had the most effective Pentecostal preaching manner—and he enjoyed a small following of white fundamentalists from Laurel Street.

  Crew-cut Ross Case, though schooled in the intricacies and snares of the Bible, lacked the showmanship to hold the attention of the Holy Roller types. His highly structured sermons, in the tradition of the Disciples of Christ, relied on a fine storytelling ability rather than on the emotionalism and rhythms of the Pentecostalists.

  Jones always assigned Archie Ijames, the only black ever in the pulpit, a highly visible if not always significant role. Articulate and expressive, Ijames was a great asset, a sensitive and emotional man whose eyes would water at the thought of something spiritually beautiful. Perhaps more so than the others, he represented a living symbol of the Temple; this well-meaning hard worker would rather improve church property than build his own house; he would treat outsiders with no less caring than his own family. Whenever he was called upon, he would preach in his fast-talking style. He began to realize that Jones was using him as a figurehead black but accepted the role.

  Though Jack Beam possessed neither the education of Ross Case nor the style of Russell Winberg—nor the sincere manner of Archie Ijames—Jones gave him a key role and let him preach in his bombastic shouting style. In return, Beam—who could be as jolly as he was fiercely righteous—gave Jones absolute loyalty. Beam, the model of a “joiner,” enjoyed the light cast on him by Jim Jones’s rising star. The thickly built, hardworking Hoosier would turn over his last dollar to a friend like Jones.

  In their fellowship, Jones, Ijames, Beam and Case became as close as brothers. They talked for hours on end about the church, race relations, the Bible and practical Christianity. Sometimes they dined together with their wives, and the Cases once attended an outdoor concert with the Joneses. The true fraternizing occurred among the men alone, often in a car, driving aimlessly, as Jones liked to do, or heading to a service someplace. After they had dispensed with church business, the conversation would drift—or be steered by Jones—to cult leaders, particularly Father Divine or Daddy Grace, a black San Francisco evangelist who opined publicly that Divine had died in 1957 and who himself passed away in 1960. They also talked of sex. With his sometimes coarse humor and natural ability to evoke laughter, Jack Beam played court jester to Jones. Ijames, Beam’s boon companion, philosophized but steered away from expletives, and Ross Case, the new arrival, found himself embarrassed when Jones started to speak more openly about sex; he was the sort who would spell out the word “screw” rather than speak it. Though ill at ease, the four were drawn to the subject almost like schoolboys comparing notes. They talked about how they had resisted the temptation of extramarital sex. Another time Jones agreed with an assistant who confessed that he felt dirty following sex with his wife. And Case was flabbergasted when, as the foursome’s car passed the house of a sweet, white-haired lady who always embraced her guests, Jones mocked: “You know what she really needs? Someone to throw her down on the bed and screw her.”

  Peculiar statements by Jones hardly distracted the Temple ministers from their social work. In May of 1961, the city’s human rights director spread the message of integration on foot. After the homes of two black families had been painted with swastikas and racial tensions were high, Jones walked door to door in the Butler-Tarkington area, comforting blacks and telling whites not to sell their homes and trigger a white flight. “Instead of running away, integrate.” Adopting a conciliatory tone, Jones blamed juveniles outside the neighborhood for the vandalism. The minister’s campaign for brotherhood got results: community leaders and about twenty students from Butler University lent support to the blacks and helped repair their homes; the white neighborhood association asked blacks to join.

  Jones went around town like a hired gun, taking on any injustice called to his attention. Sometimes he put the Temple’s human resources to work for him, such as the time a black man complained that a lunch counter had barred him. Jones set up a plan: on the appointed day, Ross Case and Russell Winberg were seated at the counter when the black man sat down and tried to order a meal. “You mean you want a lunch to go?” the waitress said. “Or do you want to be served out back?”

  “No, I want to be served here,” the black man insisted.

  “We don’t serve Negroes.”

  Having witnessed the crime, Case filled out a police report and indicated his willingness to testify against the owner. The manager knuckled under and started serving blacks.

  The minister integrated a downtown movie theater and placed blacks in jobs with previously all-white establishments. Though he used behind-the-scenes persuasion, conservative white businessmen in the downtown area complained to city officials, mai
ntaining they had the right to choose their own clientele.

  By summer of 1961, the attacks on Jones had taken a different tone. Perhaps Jones’s publicity and his actions had antagonized bigots. Perhaps Jones exaggerated—and even orchestrated—opposition to his efforts in order to make his integration crusade more dramatic and courageous, or to justify his own fears of being attacked. Perhaps it was a combination of these things. He went to the newspapers and told of hate letters and phone threats—over seventy-five crank calls. “They seem to fluctuate in direct proportion to the importance of the race problems we handle,” he told the Indianapolis Times. “I’ve only been getting about four letters a day and haven’t had a call for a week now. When we had the incidents of vandalism to Negro homes on the North Side, I got a dozen letters a day and the telephone rang around the clock.” As in the future, the culprits eluded everyone. Authorities could not trace any letters turned over by Jones, not even the blatantly bogus antiblack letters sent to integrationists over Jones’s signature.

  Jones invited controversy by writing letters to American Nazi leaders and leaking the responses to the press. One leader whom he had challenged to a debate declined the invitation, saying, “It does not surprise me that an integrationist would attempt to annihilate his opponents with love. The trouble with all your beliefs is that they are unnatural.” It would not be the last Nazi hate mail he would publicize; the letters always appeared when Jones was being criticized by more moderate forces. By implication, he tried to portray those who opposed him as Nazi-like—and by so doing, cause them to back off.

  At this time, the Jones family commune and the Temple itself took on a siege mentality. Unknown parties painted a swastika on the church door, placed a stick of dynamite in the church coal pile, threw a dead cat at the Jones house, made call after threatening phone call. A woman spit on Marceline as she carried her black adopted child, Jimmy, Jr. The accumulation of these incidents stirred a climate of fear felt even by little Stephan. During one especially tense period, Lynetta Jones accidentally blasted a hole in a closet floor with a shotgun.

  There seemed to be no denying some incidents, especially the spitting incident. But others came with such frequency and under such strange circumstances that the Winbergs—and once, Marceline—began to wonder. For instance there was the time Jones found glass in his food at a Sunday afternoon potluck dinner. Jones jumped up from his plate of chicken, crying that someone had planned to kill him. Jones’s ruckus put everyone but Winberg into a lather; he had served the food and seen nothing in it. Over the years glass would appear in Jim Jones’s food again and again.

  The Winbergs also doubted the validity of two bomb scares that had prompted church evacuations. They thought that Jones, prone to exaggeration as he was, overstated the harassment. But the couple themselves began receiving crank calls every night at two or three o’clock. They got so fed up with this sick “breather” who would say nothing that they hired a lawyer who planned to put a trace on the line. When the Winbergs told Jones about their little trap, his face turned crimson and he said quickly, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” The crank calls stopped abruptly.

  Marceline also suspected her husband of generating some of the attacks. One evening, as they visited with some of Marceline’s friends, a crash startled them all. The others found Jim alone in a room, with a broken window and a rock on the floor. One of his racist enemies had tried to injure him, he said. But his hosts noticed that the window glass had broken outward and accused Jim of shattering the glass himself. Marceline backed up her husband’s indignant denials, though it cost her a friendship. But deep down, as she later told her son Stephan, she knew that Jones had staged the attack. He seemed to need to prove to those around him that he was not overreacting, paranoid or crazy—that, indeed, people were out to get him.

  As she grew more worried about disturbing changes in Jim, Marceline confided in their friends Rev. Edwin and Audrey Wilson. By degrees, her domineering husband was himself becoming dominated by his fears and worries. The Wilsons, she thought, might prove a stabilizing influence. Edwin and Audrey Wilson knew of Jim’s absorption in his ministry and his insensitivity to his wife’s needs. They knew he was foundering among Christian beliefs, agnosticism and leftist political views, openly admitting his struggles with his own mind and with the world. Then, little by little, he also exposed the Wilsons to the fearful facets chiseled into his personality.

  From the start of their friendship in the 1950s, Jones had seemed far too insecure for a promising young preacher whose hands and voice supposedly directed the power of the Holy Spirit. When he came to visit their Cincinnati church, Jim sometimes broke out in hives, evidently from the strain of his healings. Putting aside the demands and postures of leadership, Jones revealed his frailties. In private, Jones presented not the certitude of a visionary, but rather insecurity and an inferiority complex. Although he seemingly had psychic powers such as foretelling license numbers of cars and reading playing cards by touch, Jim doubted himself, just as he doubted the existence of an Almighty. Negativism and undercurrents of paranoia swept him. Rev. Wilson, a survivor of the Battle of the Bulge, recognized the pattern of fear. No single phobia, no single set of circumstances, provoked Jim’s overreactions. Incapable of identifying his enemy, Jones was equally incapable of surmounting it. The fears lingered or returned quickly, assaulting him again and again. He submitted to them—and they became a part of him, like a chronic injury. When he could not shake them, he used them to his advantage or tried to get others to share them, so he would not face them alone, so others would not think him cowardly or excessively fearful—or mentally ill.

  No one in the position of Jim Jones would want to admit he was losing control of himself. But fears were getting the better of him. Confidants like the Wilsons saw the dark shadows as they passed, some rapidly, others painfully slowly. One night, he would be consumed by fear of being murdered for his racial views. Another he would be paralyzed with worry that he was dying. Other times he would be afraid of flying in airplanes or scared of heights. The Bomb terrified him constantly.

  His fears pushed him to overreaction, which someday would become his most dangerous trait. Once when Jim’s leg cramped while he was swimming in a lake, he panicked, screaming desperately for help though his wife and friends had a secure grip on him. Perhaps he remembered Ronnie Baldwin in a similar situation.

  His worst attacks came for some reason at his own home on Broadway in Indianapolis. On a few occasions, he actually keeled over while emotionally discussing some problem or even while just watching television during stressful times. Thus began a lifetime pattern of collapses, at least some of which were faked.

  Marceline became a veteran of the routine. Jones would gasp, throw back his head and seem to black out. Always she jumped into action, fetching a hypodermic needle and injecting Jim’s arm with what she called vitamin B12. To others she explained that Jim had anemia from a past case of hepatitis. Slowly, Jones would come out of his deep sleep. While recovering, he would complain of extreme sensitivity to sound; the slightest noise amplified in his head like clashing tin pans.18

  Jones acted unembarrassed by his collapses, which lasted only minutes. He would simply say that he hoped to get over the problem soon. But the real source and nature of the problem remained obscure; sometimes he blamed his liver, sometimes he blamed it on “cancer.”

  Faithfully, Marceline provided comfort when he took ill. Internalizing her own emotional suffering, she treated Jim like a fragile child and assumed the role of both mother and nurse. As a nurse, she certainly knew that Jim’s troubles were not entirely physical. But out of love and loyalty, she became the first person to help conceal Jones’s crumbling psyche from a curious outside world.

  In counterpoint to these insecurities, Jones began to build a cult around his own personality. He had seized on the notion of using a tangible personality on which to base the faith of his followers. Wrapped up in that notion was a philosophy that
cut a fine line between atheism—the belief in no God—and a religious view Jones expressed in his earliest tracts—that God is simply the force of goodness and love in each person. In claiming to be the ultimate receptacle of good qualities, Jones began to promote himself as a fountain of faith. Subtly he encouraged his rank and file to see him in Christlike and Godlike terms. Though his aides complained privately, Jones rationalized that his people needed the false illusion of his deification in order to dedicate themselves totally to the Temple’s worthwhile goals. Only decades later—in Jonestown, when he had an unbreakable hold on hundreds of people—would he drop most pretenses of being God himself.

  Jones’s assistants—in Indiana and later—never challenged the self-aggrandizing tendencies of their leader. By not publicly opposing them, they gave tacit endorsement. The early members of his inner circle were not far, for instance, from accepting Jones as a prophet with a special pipeline to God, although Jim’s actions seemed to show he was not God Almighty. Ross Case, for one, reasoned that if Jones were God, his Bible knowledge would not have been so sloppy.

  Case was operating under an illusion of his own—that Jones’s controversial utterances were accidental results of deficiencies in his theological education or mere errors of judgment. Jones ran into most trouble with his congregation when he tore into scripture’s contradictions, or espoused communism without disguising it. During a late 1961 sermon, Jones preached directly in favor of communism, causing one member to stand in defense of free enterprise. Jones handled the objection with poise, hearing the man out. But Rev. Case—who deplored communism as “forced and atheistic”—felt embarrassment for Jones; Jim should have employed a better choice of words, perhaps communalism rather than communism, he thought. To avoid division, Jones would not use the term “communism” so openly again for years.