Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  Temple members had been taking down the names and addresses of Macedonia members—even in Bedford’s vestibule. Surreptitiously the Temple contacted Bedford’s members and invited them to Temple services. At these services, Jones condemned the “mercenary” Baptists and portrayed himself as an antimaterialistic friend of the poor, a minister who banned fur coats and stoles, and who did not demand a dime of anyone. In the worst affront, Jones alleged that Bedford had tried to seduce the two young white women who spent the night at his house.

  Though the allegation was patently false, Bedford and his wife Estelle—who had been with him that night—swallowed their outrage. They never confronted Jones; they believed justice would be served, if not in this life, then the next. In the meantime Jones, on the basis of such lies and manufactured miracles, enticed away many of Bedford’s congregation members. Some eventually found their way back; still, an estimated 150 to 200 of Bedford’s people joined the Temple for life.

  Jones committed “sheep stealing” on other black congregations in San Francisco, though not always so brazenly. Several other black ministers lost substantial numbers of members to Peoples Temple too. Jones viewed these practitioners of what he called “the opiate of the masses” as Temple enemies; indeed he made them so. To measure the extent of their antagonism, he had top aides pose as pollsters and newspaper reporters and call the ministers to ask what they thought about Peoples Temple. To try to intimidate his apparent enemies, he arranged anonymous phone threats, in which the language was ambiguous enough for a legal out if anyone were caught. At least one minister, Rev. Hannibal Williams, reported to police a death threat that he believed had originated within the Temple.

  In their complaints about Jones, the black ministers could not avoid the appearance of jealousy of a white preacher who had been pulling members out of the pews of black churches. Some of their own community leaders brushed aside their grievances about the Temple breaking up families and fleecing Christians of property, businesses and income. By strategically selecting his friends in the black community, by building an image as an activist church leader, by infiltrating the Council of Churches, Jones left the traditional black ministers with little recourse. They could not deter the Temple aggression without sounding petty or racist. Those who dared fight him were intimidated one way or another. The approach typified Jones; he conquered those he could conquer, and befriended, deceived or compromised those he could not.

  For his most ambitious raiding attempt ever, Jones loaded his followers aboard their fleet of buses one day in 1971 and rolled them day and night toward the City of Brotherly Love.

  In late July, more than two hundred Temple members piled out of the buses at the late Father Divine’s Woodmont estate. Many had never seen such splendor. The thirty-two-room mansion was set like a gemstone amid formal gardens, fountains and lakes on a high point of land overlooking the Schuylkill River. Compared to the Redwood Valley church, Woodmont qualified as an empire, the epitome of the materialism Jones attacked from the pulpit.

  The Temple members had been housed at the Peace Mission’s downtown hotels, where all had proceeded harmoniously until they aggressively began to stalk the buildings, jotting down the names of Mother Divine’s followers. The longer they stayed, the bolder they became.

  When the Temple contingent arrived at Woodmont for a tour of the shrine housing Father Divine’s body, Jones executed stage two of his assault. Through sculptured bronze doors, the visitors entered a burial chamber with 24-karat gold tiles on granite walls. Two bronze angels spread their wings atop a limestone sarcophagus: the resting place for the millionaire god. Jones and his hostess paused to read a gold-inlaid inscription memorializing the words of Divine: “... Father coming to the country that is supposed to be the country of the free....” Jones sarcastically repeated, “Supposed to be the country of the free.” This irreverence offended Mother Divine, but she let it pass. Then, as the others cleared out, Jones informed Mother Divine that his five-foot-ten white body was in fact the reincarnation of the cherubicly black Father Divine. Jones was staking his claim to the Kingdom of Peace.

  Mother Divine, a gentle and pretty blond woman of forty-five, handled the matter delicately. “Well,” she conceded. “Father is supposed to be in every one of us.” When Jones twice insisted that he was Father Divine in a new body, Mother Divine informed him, “No one can take Father’s place.... You’re no more [special] than anyone else.”

  That night, during a banquet in the Crystal Ballroom of the Divine Lorraine Hotel, as Peace Mission people sang praises of Father Divine, Temple members raised their arms and swayed in rapture, channeling their adoration directly at Jones. Mother Divine sat horrified. Temple member after Temple member stood to give testimonies to Jones. These little spiels were so ludicrous that Temple members had chortled among themselves during rehearsal. Still, the Temple gained control of the banquet. Finally, Jones arose and, puffing himself up, declared, “Father Divine has conferred his mantle on me. We are from the same celestial plane and are messengers. His spirit has come to rest in my body.”

  Feeling like an outsider in her own church, Mother Divine was beside herself. Vibrations told her this man not only was making a false claim to be Father Divine, but was in fact the “other fellow”—the Devil. Anger seized her followers. She told Jones, privately, that he should leave in the interest of peace. The Temple contingent departed abruptly, without violence, but also without its coup.

  Though no longer welcome, Jones did not bow to defeat or abandon his idea. After the return trip to California, he began a new campaign. He told Temple members that Mother Divine had rejected him only because he refused to have sex with her. She had torn open her blouse, he said, and thrown herself upon Father Divine’s sarcophagus, pleading, begging for him—but he would not stoop to it. (Actually, he and Mother Divine were never even alone together.)

  The Temple then wrote letters to those whose names were procured in Philadelphia, impugning Mother Divine’s purity and repeating Jones’s claims. In June of 1972, several nearly empty Temple buses returned to Philadelphia; room had been left for Peace Mission defectors. Temple recruiters invaded Peace Mission hotels and restaurants with armloads of leaflets. Confrontations between the two pacifistic groups sometimes became physical. One woman slapped someone. Some Temple recruiters got doused with water. Having been tossed out of the Peace Mission establishments, the Temple contingent took to the buses and circled the blocks. Leaning out windows, they shouted through megaphones: “Welcome. This is Peoples Temple. The pastor is Jim Jones, the great humanitarian. We are leaving on Sunday at three P.M. You’re invited to Redwood Valley.”

  As membership thefts go, the Temple invasion was petty. Only some dozen Peace Mission members climbed onto Temple buses for California. Jones gained no more than a handful of sweet old ladies who would need housing in Temple nursing homes. Further, to make the defections stick, he needed to substantiate his claim to be a renovated Father Divine. To make them feel welcome, he had the Temple choir learn Peace Mission songs, with appropriate substitutions of his name for Divine’s. And he had his followers call him “Father,” and Marceline “Mother.”

  As a further accommodation, the Temple held banquets, though with more of a California potluck flavor than the Woodmont touch. At one, many elderly former followers of Divine were seated together. Suddenly, without warning, Jones hollered at Jack Beam’s wife. “Rheaviana, you lied to me! Drop dead!” Rheaviana Beam fell to the linoleum floor.

  A young black man leaped up, saying, “I can’t believe this.” Jones flashed angry eyes at him. “You too!” A second body toppled to the floor. When a white man leaped up to protest, Jones yelled, “You too!” Same effect.

  The old ladies were petrified. Father Divine had never dropped anyone dead, except maybe the judge who sent him to jail. However, Jones soon showed his forgiveness. He resurrected the “dead” one by one, and each issued a warning to the crowd, lest the message be lost on them. Said Rheaviana
Beam: “You better believe Father. You should never tell a lie because he will strike you down.”

  In return for housing in care homes, the Peace Mission people gave the Temple everything they owned, including their shares in Mission properties in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. Temple attorneys actually drew up papers transferring title to the Temple, but Jones ran into a legal tangle: Father Divine had set up joint tenancy for all property. Many members owned only minuscule shares of each mission property, and upon their deaths, the shares reverted to the mission. There was no value in pressing the claim. It was the final disappointment for Jones. His instant dynasty had been denied him.

  PART THREE

  THE HEAVENLY EMPIRE

  Campaigns have been launched promoting kindness [to animals], and yet we have among us those who painstakingly wrap the lethal dose in tempting tidbits....

  LYNETTA JONES

  “The Poisoner”

  FIFTEEN

  The Hair of the Raven

  It was Sunday morning in 1971, shortly before eleven o’clock. Clouds of dust billowed over the Temple parking lot as car after car pulled off Road E. Soon the metal folding chairs were filled. The microphones were in place, the long cords in order. The musicians fussed with their instruments, then an impatient hush exploded into applause as Jim Jones took the stage wearing satiny red robes over a white turtleneck sweater. A swath of hair angled across his forehead. Sunglasses with fashionable dark wire-rims masked his eyes. He took a position behind the pulpit where a high barstool-like padded seat made him appear to be standing.

  Upon receiving the proper cue, Loretta Cordell, plain-looking and pinched-faced, dipped her head in an imaginary downbeat and started to pound on the organ. Others played guitars and wind instruments. Bob Houston, with his trombone, stood tall among them.

  With his arms keeping time, Jones led the singing, his baritone voice rising and falling to the tune “Amen.”

  “We live and die for free-eee-dom.

  We live and die for free-eee-dom!”

  Then a sweet chorus, dominated by women and children:

  “Free-eee-dom. Free-eee-dom. Free-dom.”

  Peoples Temple was becoming a nation unto itself. It could claim its own president for life, its own unique mix of people, its own institutions, its creeds and liturgy, its dietary and sexual practices, its justice and educational systems. Jim Jones had fashioned his Temple with input from many: Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Father Divine, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fidel Castro; also Lynetta Jones, Myrtle Kennedy, Marceline Baldwin, and a Pentecostal lady from Lynn, Indiana. For Peoples Temple was in essence a reflection of what he thought best.

  The church and many of its people had been bonded permanently to an extraordinary man who was a victim of his own experience. He swallowed whole his environment and personal history, and spit out bits of it every time he spoke. His single greatest ache was the loneliness and lack of acceptance he felt as a child. It was no great mystery why communism and communalism appealed to Jim Jones. People were his labor of love, his hedge against loneliness, and ultimately against history.

  From the pulpit, Jones bombarded his people with almost impressionistic messages. Because the catch words of love, brotherhood, unity and equality defied challenge, his contradictory messages defied analysis. Sexual and family identities were dashed. “Break down the barriers,” Jones cried. “Lose your ego. Become selfless. Don’t establish superficial relationships on the outside.” As he kept track of the personal lives of hundreds of members, he not only showed them he cared for each of his “children,” he also located the wedge that would alienate them from family and society. They confessed to each other, and criticized each other openly, purging old values. They lived together, worked together in love, and when it was in the interest of the Temple, informed on each other.

  The exhilaration of having a family and a cause that could save the world kept them going around the clock, giving until they were spent. But it was Jones’s personal magic—above all the black magic, webs of ideas and disguised threats—that weaned people from their pasts and tied them to the Temple’s future.

  Total commitment was demanded piece by piece. As he declared in a 1970 newsletter: “One must not worship things. Treat heat and cold alike. Pain and blessing are just alike.... Have firm convictions. Don’t vacillate!” Only thoughts existed and mattered, he said. “If your mind is negative in attitude... it will produce disease and likewise if positive, there is a great deal of information to indicate that one can almost obtain eternal youth, the cessation of cellular death....”

  Jones promised essentially eternal life and protection. And he buttressed his promise with the concept of reincarnation. It helped explain the deification of Jones, the presence of a God-force in his body. It also allowed him to borrow from the auras of great historical and religious figures—pharaohs, Christ, Buddha, Lenin among them—and claim to be their reincarnation. But most significantly, he used the concept to comfort those members who might have to suffer and give their bodies for the cause. Death was not final, he told them. And in so convincing them, he grasped control of individual lives that went qualitatively beyond that of any world leader in history.

  “We live and die for free-eee-dom,” they sang.

  “Free-eee-dom. Free-eee-dom. Free-dom. ”

  “No more poverty!” Jones shouted, then led the chorus again. He talked over the singing, through the singing, directing them, bringing them down the home stretch so he could speak:

  “I’m here to show you as a sample and example that you can bring yourself up with your own bootstraps,” he began to approving shouts.

  “And you can become your own God!” he promised. “Not in condescension but in resurrection and upliftment from whatever economic condition, injustice or racism or servitude which you have had to endure. Within you rest the keys of deliverance. ”

  “We ask for no condescending saviors,” he went on, criticizing Father Divine, “that has been pawned off on every breast. And I, God that came from earth of earth, this dust of this toils and fields, hardships of labor, from the lowest of economic positions, from the misery of poverty near the railroad tracks, I came to show you that the only God you need is within you.”

  “Yeah,” they cried, the male voices overpowering. “Right!!”

  “None other!” Jones repeated. “That’s my purpose in being here. When that transition comes, there shall be no need for Gods, any other kind of ideology. Religion, the opiate of the people, shall be removed from the consciousness of mankind. There shall no longer be any need for anything religious when freedom comes.”

  “Yeah.” They nodded heads and waved hands, revived. They were with him every step of the way.

  “I came in the power of God in religion.... All the power you said God had, I have. [I’ve] come to make one final dissolution, one final elimination of all religious feeling. Until I have eradicated it from the face of the earth, I will do all the miracles you said your God would do and never did.” His voice quickened. “I shall heal you of all the diseases, [provide the cures] that you prayed for that never happened....”

  Pausing, he reminded them all how he warned a woman and saved her from fire, how he had had a crippled woman dancing around the room. As he addressed his people, he scanned the faces before him, hundreds of them, his son Stephan in his shirt and tie nearby with the microphones, the rest of his family, his faithful friends Jack Beam and Archie Ijames, Grace Stoen with her arms folded over her bulging abdomen, Bob Houston peering through his black-rimmed glasses, and many more. Even through his glasses, Jones’s gaze could be felt, through the force of his presence and the voice, that tool that kept them in their hard metal seats when their backs ached, their legs went numb and their bladders and bowels threatened to burst.

  “I see some,” he said raising his voice, “are not aware what God is. The only thing that brings perfect freedom, justice and equality, perfect lov
e in all its beauty and holiness is socialism. Socialism!”

  A roar of assent echoed through the church and out the louvered windows opened to pick up a cross-draft. Their hands and voices pushed him onward:

  “I have taken myself a body, the same one that walked on the [ancient] plains ... of whom Solomon said his hair was as black as a raven, and he would shave as Isaiah said, 7:20, with a razor. I come shaved with a razor! I come with the black hair of a raven! I come as God socialist!”

  The shouts—“All right. All right. Yeah”—drowned him out.

  Proceeding more deliberately now, as if clarifying a point, he said, “I shall show you, from time to time, proofs of that, so that you will have no further need of religion because the highest authority tells you. I come to you doing all the things you have ever imagined God to do and you have never seen done....”

  “It’s beautiful to know God is a socialist worker. He is one of the people. He is all that you have desired, all the freedom, justice, all the sensitivity in minds.”

  “And I must say it’s a great effort to be God.”

  There was not a single snicker from the audience.

  For his first miracle of the day, Jones called out a man named John to convince people that nothing, no matter how seemingly insignificant, is lost in the consciousness of a socialist worker God. “My brother John came to me last week,” he said gesturing to the black man. “You were concerned that something was lost. He lost it miles and miles away. Well, my spirit retrieved it for you today.”

  Then, to hoots and howls, Jones held out an object. John came for his miraculously recovered credit card. “God damn!” another man shouted in amazement.