Raven

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Raven Page 14

by Reiterman, Tim


  It seemed to Malmin that the integrationist probably had a subconscious need for the very conflict that terrified him. Malmin was also troubled by Jones’s tendency to constantly invoke the Holy Spirit, so much so that he finally warned: “Demons can transmit voices [too] on the wavelength of ESP.”

  When Jones brought up matters that perplexed him, Malmin would supply biblical references as answers. At first, Malmin was reluctant to instruct a minister who had swayed crowds and built a large church. But Jim Jones showed little insight into the Bible and seemed to gratefully accept Malmin’s sincere and direct counsel. Probably some of his seemingly naive questions were designed to test Malmin, to determine safe topics for discussion. He talked only casually about the apostolic communal lifestyle and never of Castro or Marx. He never assailed the churches but acknowledged wistfully sometimes: “I wish I had your faith.”

  Malmin sought to bring him closer to the Protestant community in Belo and invited him to his own Sunday church services. When Jones attended, he often sat in the last row, seeming uncomfortable and detached, as Malmin preached and occasionally attempted to exorcise evil from some practitioners of the voodoolike cultism abounding in Brazil. The Malmins tried to involve the Joneses in their social life, too, by inviting them to monthly missionary gatherings at their home. But Jim seemed stiff and awkward around his fellow ministers, and they found him odd and unapproachable.

  After each contact with Jones, the Malmins began to experience a strange sensation. They felt unclean, as though they had sustained some spiritual contamination. One day in particular, as they left the Joneses and got back to their car, they felt the power of darkness come over them; they held hands and prayed to break the spell, to get back the “clean” feeling.

  Marceline, for all her Charleston dancing, lived with the same old problems in Brazil. Even her subconscious told her that she would never get the family life she wanted: in a recurring dream, the face of Jack Beam intruded, parting her and Jim.

  The dream was not unrelated to reality. At the time, Jack Beam was preparing to leave Indiana with his family, as the second stage of the migration to a safe place. Beam had first to sell their house and obtain his passport. By telegram Jones directed Beam to falsify his passport application, to say the Disciples of Christ were sponsoring the family’s missionary work with impoverished Brazilian children. In fact, Beam, like Jones, had no training at all to be a sanctioned Disciples of Christ missionary.

  When Jack, Rheaviana and their two children joined the Joneses in Brazil in October 1962, the poverty devastated them. Saddened, they could hardly believe the numbers of children starving and dying of intestinal diseases in hovels with no sanitation. They helped the Joneses buy clothing for children and set up a food program for two hundred of them. Seeing seven-year-old beggars and children eating garbage day after day, they recognized their own impotence in fighting the poverty. It pained them to be using up church resources for themselves when there was not enough money for the needy. Like Jones, Beam found it nearly impossible to make a living in the country, especially without speaking Portuguese. In June 1963, Jack became tired of “freeloading,” as he called it, of being supported by Jones and the Temple. There seemed to be no future for the church in Brazil. The Beams headed home as Jones abandoned the mass migration plan.

  By mid-1963, the Joneses had packed up and moved from Belo Horizonte to Rio de Janeiro. The change in scenery and social conditions from the inland industrial town to the magnificent port city was striking. Uncharacteristically, the Jones family wound up living in one of Rio’s most prestigious neighborhoods, in a rented seventh-story apartment three blocks from Copacabana Beach. Jones later would say that the family’s days sunbathing and swimming among the bronzed bodies at the sandy beach were perhaps the closest thing to freedom from worry in his experience. As a part-time English instructor at a university, he had put the family on a firmer financial base. Problems, if only for a short time, could be forgotten.

  Soon the Joneses began working with the poor who lived on tier after tier of shanties in the steep ravines and cliffs behind the city. While living among the rich, the Joneses fed children at an orphanage and in these hillside favellas. They asked for more and more money from Indiana, but in Jones’s absence the church had fallen into debt and could not meet its own operating costs, let alone finance the pastor’s missionary work.

  The financial squeeze gave rise to a new legend. Jones, frustrated that he could not wring more money out of Indiana, was soon looking elsewhere. According to his probably apocryphal story, Jones turned gigolo in order to save “his” orphans from starvation: a diplomat’s wife, while visiting the orphanage, took a shine to Jones and offered to donate $5,000 to the orphanage if he would give her three days of sexual bliss. Loathsome or not, the deal was the only sure way to provide for the hungry children, so Jones went through with it, having asked for permission, of course, from Marceline. True or not, Jones would repeat this parable to thousands of followers over the next two decades. It probably is the first and most dramatic demonstration of the Jones maxim—the ends justify the means—and also gives a glimpse of Jones’s changing sexual mores.

  In Rio, Jones became more and more distraught over the major question confronting him from the day he arrived in Brazil: Do I return to the United States or not? His flight to Brazil had been no escape at all. Jones almost certainly was tugged by guilt for having left the civil rights struggle at an important time and by new fears that he would lose all he had worked to build in Indiana. Also, history itself was catching up with his phobias—the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 must have stimulated new spasms of fear. Finally his religious interests took a bizarre turn that both harkened back to past interest in spiritualism and Father Divine, and signaled his future drift toward deification.

  Jones explored some of the Brazilian cults, as Marceline later would tell Bonnie Malmin. Macumba, a voodoolike religion practiced by millions of South Americans, could not have escaped his attention. Certainly he noticed the lighted candles on the beach at night, and the Macumba women, with their heads wrapped, with statues before them, vending candles in front of Rio’s churches. Macumba, an amalgam of West African religions, South American Indian spiritualism and Christian names, had the mystique of magic. And although its adherents included all classes and colors of Brazilians, the descendants of African slaves most strongly embraced it, and it was considered a lower-class phenomenon, like Pentecostalism in the United States.

  Jones probably found some rather obvious similarities in the dynamics of Macumba and Peoples Temple. Historically, Macumba contained an element of benevolent deception and pragmatism; so their masters would not put a stop to their rituals, slaves had pretended to pray to Christian saints while actually praying to their African gods. Macumba also provided a powerful extended family to protect the true believer, to wash away feelings of abandonment and loneliness, to simplify the complex world. Like Holy Rollers surrendering to the Holy Spirit, Macumba followers became entranced, and sometimes fell, with their limbs trembling. They came forward to give testimonies or to ask for help. And sometimes, like a Pentecostal preacher with a gift ministry, the Macumba leaders issued warnings and prophecies. Like Jones, these leaders gave credit to the spiritual forces when illness or death befell congregation members. And as one of them, Maria-Jose, “The Mother of Gods” of a popular Rio congregation, summed up: “What you feel is more important than what you think.... As long as your God is with you, you have nothing to fear. But you must be careful not to offend him....”

  In Rio, Jones displayed some renewed willingness to claim powers in the realm of the occult, though he preferred to call it ESP. During one visit, he called the Malmins to the window of his apartment and pointed below to three women waiting on a bench for a bus. “Would you like to see how I can make one of them get up?” he asked. “I’ll make the middle one....” The women in the middle stood. “I’ll make her sit down.” And sit she did. “And she’ll get
up again.” He went through the routine several times as though he were pulling a marionette’s strings. The feat left the Malmins flabbergasted. In fact Jones had managed similar stunts with chickens as a boy in Lynn, and he was certainly capable of paying off a woman to stand up and sit down a few times at a bus stop.

  That same year, the Malmins decided to end their Brazil ministry and return to the United States. During a day-long flight layover in Rio, they killed time with the Jones family. To hear Jones tell it, their visit and their intended return to the States were great coincidences. He had just received another of his messages from the Holy Spirit—this one telling him that Rev. Malmin should go to Indianapolis to act as caretaker of the Temple until Jones could return. The young minister confessed he was not yet equal to the task himself: coping with racists, nuclear war, failing finances and a mutiny by his stand-in pastor would give him another breakdown, he maintained.

  “Let me pray about this,” Malmin said. “If this is God’s will, I am willing to do it.” He promised to go to Indianapolis, look over the situation, consult the Lord and render a decision. As Malmin prayed later, the words of scripture leaped out at him. “And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” Malmin interpreted these words from Philippians 2:8 as confirmation; he would have to humble himself to accept an unpalatable project.

  A mountain of bills, a chilly group of ministers and a somewhat resentful congregation greeted him in Indianapolis. Jim Jones had neglected to prepare the Peoples Temple for his arrival; not even the assistant pastors had been alerted that Malmin was coming. Jones had sent Malmin, with his rather conservative Assemblies of God background, to be an administrator, not a stand-in leader. He wanted Malmin to put the church on a secure financial footing again; after two years without Jones—in an environment full of dissent and suspicions—the Temple’s congregation and revenues had shrunk, and the phone and utilities companies were ready to cut off service unless the bills were paid.

  But through no fault of his own, Malmin’s arrival added to existing tensions over Winberg’s pastorship and over the financial problems created by Jones’s absence and his demands for money in Brazil. Because of the way Malmin was installed, Winberg felt unwanted and wounded. Both he and his wife left, taking two or three dozen members with them. And resentment lingered among both the remaining social-service-oriented ministers and the congregation over the intrusion of the outsider with such a conventional religious approach.

  In that downward spiral of deterioration, only about seventy-five to a hundred Temple members now remained in a church where services once had drawn upwards of two thousand people. However, Malmin soon discovered one cause for hope. People around town appreciated the ongoing humanitarian works by the Temple. Newspaper stories about the financial plight of the Temple brought crucial donations from other churches and from the Disciples of Christ.

  While Malmin restored the church to a semblance of financial solvency, Jones put a constant strain on their relationship, meddling by telephone from Brazil, asking his mother in Indiana to promote his private financial interests while pumping Malmin for church financial information. The parishioners constantly looked to Brazil for guidance. The prying and the dual leadership system irritated Malmin. Less than six months after his arrival, he put Jones on notice; the situation was intolerable, and he was bailing out.

  At this juncture, Ijames—who had battled with Winberg and who saw Malmin as little improvement—wrote Jones: “If you’re not coming back, I wish you’d let me know because I’ve had just about all I can take. Brotherhood isn’t going to survive here [without you] and I’m not going to stay without it.”

  Within a week, the Baldwins received a cable from Brazil: the Jones family was returning.

  During his two years’ asylum in Brazil, Jim Jones had observed from afar one of the most significant transition periods in U.S. racial history—from nonviolent to militant. Jones—a moderate by the new standards—had not charged toward the Rio airport, eager to take on the challenges of a changing America. Indeed, he had always collapsed whenever someone introduced the subject of returning. As he escaped this admittedly painful, nonproductive period in his life, he still lacked a sense of direction.

  When the plane touched down at Indianapolis airport in December 1963, more than fifty of Jones’s followers turned out to welcome the family home from their sabbatical. For Jones, the homecoming presented an entirely new set of challenges. Winberg was out of the way. Malmin had squared away most of the fiscal difficulties. But there was a congregation to motivate, building to do—and that seemed awesome to the troubled preacher. Jones confessed his insecurity to Malmin, saying nervously that he did not know whether he could meet the task. Malmin encouraged him to have confidence and promised to stay on so the transition would be smooth.

  The older minister also resumed his role as counselor. Jones asked him to point out any personality flaws or traits indicating mental illness or emotional instability. Yet every time Malmin did point out something, Jones would rationalize his own behavior. On home turf again, Jones exhibited peculiarities that had been largely hidden in Brazil. He deceived and manipulated people; he showed some signs of tyranny; he encouraged his congregation’s adoration.

  The combination of domination and submission, criticism and adulation, was not accidental; Malmin could see that Jones was establishing himself as an oracle. Whenever someone took a position contrary to his, Jones would take the extraordinary step of criticizing the person from the pulpit, of accusing the person of going against God. To support his contention, the minister would say the Holy Spirit told him this or that. And to validate his claim, Jones would perform some bit of psychic phenomena such as revealing a social security number.

  Perhaps sensing Malmin’s dismay, Jones became increasingly inhibited around the older minister who knew so much about his emotional problems. Jones blatantly sent him out of the church during services on minor errands and business, which probably served a threefold purpose. Jones could do or say whatever he wished—he could heal cancer or encourage adoration. He also made Malmin into a sort of errand boy, reducing him in the eyes of the congregation. And finally, he was telling Malmin, unsubtly, to go for good.

  Jones passed the same message one afternoon in early 1964 when the two of them climbed onto the Temple roof to find where some doves had been entering the upper windows and dirtying the church. As they stood alone on the roof, high above the ground, about seven feet apart, Malmin looked at Jones’s eyes and had a flash of cognition. He thought: Jim Jones wants to throw me off the roof to my death. Almost instantly, Malmin, a good forty pounds lighter, braced himself for any shove; he prepared to take Jones with him over the edge if need be. As though sensing this, Jones relaxed, seeming to banish the thought. Without a word, the tension between them subsided.

  Such things always are subject to misinterpretation—but years later, Jones himself would allude to the incident in terms of his desire to throw an interloping minister from a building.20 And shortly after the rooftop incident, Jones came to Malmin and said, “I am deeply concerned about you. I had a dream. I saw a man jump out of a car and go down a hill, and it was a self-destructive act. And he was committing suicide, rolling down the hill. The face was not distinguishable, but deep inside, I knew it was you.” Having read some Freud, Malmin recognized Jones’s death wish for him. The older minister left the Temple as soon as he could, a month or so after Jones’s return.

  PART TWO

  THE CHOSEN PEOPLE

  October is a fun time

  When time grows short

  When the leaves fall down

  And the witches are flying around,

  When the night grows dark,

  And the moon goes out.

  JUDY HOUSTON, 1973

  EIGHT

  The Prophet

  By 1964, no conventional minister—no Malmin or Winberg—could have displaced Jim Jones inside Peoples Te
mple. No one else could have met the expectations of a congregation conditioned by Jones’s miraculous hoaxes and social evangelism, especially not after he began coaxing them toward accepting his divinity. Trusting no one, Jones jealously guarded his life’s work, taking calculated measures to preserve his position even during his absence.

  By naming Russell Winberg acting pastor when he left, Jones had deliberately split the church: Winberg was unacceptable to the social activists, as Malmin would later be. In any case, Winberg’s position was more titular than anything else, even if a handful of members preferred him to Jones. Jones left the Temple’s moneymaking concerns—the care homes—in charge of his in-laws, and church properties in the hands of his mother. And he commanded Winberg to send every dime of revenue, from collections and elsewhere, to South America. Jones had stacked the hierarchy with loyalists such as Archie Ijames, who wasted no time in embroiling the church in a divisive controversy.

  The controversy, like many Temple incidents, bordered on the bizarre. The Ijameses, a black family, had wished to adopt a white daughter. Blacks adopting whites was rare enough, but, in this case, the prospective adoptee was a young married woman with a child of her own. Her name was Becky Beikman; she was married to an illiterate ex-Marine named Chuck Beikman.

  When Becky, in threadbare old clothes, had come to the Temple to ask for food, Rosie Ijames saw to her needs; and she and Archie took her into their own home.

  The Ijameses took pity on this young woman who was to outward appearances what they considered “poor white trash.” The couple treated her with kindness and loved her like a daughter, and she responded. “You’re more of a mom and dad to me than my own mom and dad,” she told them one day. Then a revolutionary idea seized Ijames: it was racist for the Temple to encourage white members to adopt minority children and not to encourage blacks to adopt white children. After some research, he found only a couple of precedents, including the case of one wealthy black dentist thwarted in attempts to adopt a white child. Ijames decided nonetheless to go ahead.

 

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