TWENTY-SIX
Escape Valve
As the tropical sun beat down, Emerson Mitchell interrupted his pacing for a moment to wipe perspiration from his brow. He was waiting for an airplane to touch down on the narrow patch of dirt that was the airstrip for Matthews Ridge, a tiny jungle community about 130 miles from the Guyanese capital of Georgetown. As he waited, Mitchell could not help but fret about his recent track record. He had a mission that was not being accomplished. He had been sent by his government to somehow convert remote jungle terrain into habitable productive farmland. After two years of false starts and disappointments, he was frustrated. But perhaps this new group of Americans that Georgetown was sending him would prove helpful. It was late December 1973.
This region was commonly called the Matarkai area—acronym for Matthews Ridge, Arakaka and Port Kaituma, an even tinier outpost some thirty-five miles northeast of the Ridge via a bumpy dirt road or by railroad.
With the aim of settling people there, Mitchell had come to the area under the orders of Dr. Ptolemy Reid, Guyana’s deputy prime minister and also minister of agriculture and of economic development. As the government representative, Mitchell was to get houses built, help clear the land of the thick jungle and virgin timber, and provide food and farm implements until the settlers could fend for themselves. In 1972 the first government project brought about fifty national youth corps settlers to the interior. As they cleared the jungle and built more roads and houses around Port Kaituma, Mitchell was encouraged. But later the youths found the local Amerindian girls more attractive than the farming. Within two years, the youth corps was gone.
Also in 1972, a group of about eighteen jazz musicians came down to Guyana from New York for a Caribbean festival of the arts. They soon learned that the government was encouraging settlement in the interior and decided to take up the offer. As time went on, Mitchell discovered that the musicians were most interested in playing music, lying around and drinking. And their only successful crop turned out to be marijuana. Within two years of their arrival, they were kicked out of the country. Another failure for Mitchell.
As these thoughts and bitter memories floated through Emerson Mitchell’s head, the plane he had been awaiting finally arrived. Out stepped Jim and Marceline Jones, their sons and a dozen trusted aides. Mitchell knew immediately this group was different. They were serious. They seemed well educated, they had money, and they struck him as enthusiastic about developing the land and making a life in the jungle.
Mitchell was a sophisticated man, but he had more than met his match in Jim Jones. When Jones showed him the photo albums and press clippings that legitimized his movement, Mitchell could not take his eyes off the pictures of costly Temple buses. As he studied photographs of senior citizens whom the Temple had transported across the country for vacations, he remembered Time magazine exposes about America’s neglected old people. He saw what Jim Jones wanted him to see, and he liked it.
In any case, he was predisposed to like Peoples Temple. Unlike the previous attempts at settlement, this would not cost Guyana a penny. Jones said that he had $5 million Guyanese, the equivalent of $2 million U.S., to spend at the start.
Furthermore, Mitchell had received instructions from Georgetown to make these people comfortable and welcome. For centuries a border dispute had been simmering between Guyana and Venezuela over the western two-thirds of the country, mostly unsettled jungle. A town of a thousand or so Americans less than thirty miles from the Venezuelan border would help Guyana maintain its tenuous foothold and would lessen the possibility of a Venezuelan invasion or seizure. They would hardly want to provoke an international incident with the American government. There were other benefits as well for Guyana Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, who viewed himself as an important Third World leader. His status would be enhanced by the very fact that a predominantly black, socialist group of Americans voluntarily had chosen to emigrate to his country. Furthermore, the Temple’s wealth would help ease Guyana’s critical balance of payments problems. But most of all, Peoples Temple would develop resource-rich but untapped hinterlands, as the Guyanese government had been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to do for years.
There was something else Emerson Mitchell liked about Jim Jones: he was a midwestern minister talking and living integration. Mitchell had lived in Chicago from 1944 to 1949; he knew the storefront churches of black Chicago and the Father Divine types. So, when a man from Indiana appeared to be motivated to help black people and establish a multiracial settlement, Emerson Mitchell was ready to believe him.
As if he needed any more convincing, the two days the Jones entourage spent in Matthews Ridge confirmed Mitchell’s impressions. White people there, Mitchell knew, never fraternized with the natives. But Temple people not only fraternized, they treated them as equals. They won the hearts of the village people. Mitchell could not help but feel elation, amazement at the minister’s ease in dealing with people. He wondered whether Jones did not “have a touch of the tar brush in him,” and at one point he put the question that way to Archie Ijames. Ijames tried to disabuse him of that notion but with only partial success.
A member of Mitchell’s staff saw so many adoring women with Jones that he could not figure out if they were all “his.” In Jones’s presence, the man commented: “I don’t think he’s capable of handling all those women. We must give him some capadula to drink.” Capadula, made from the bark of a local tree, was looked on by the natives as an aphrodisiac. Jones did not hesitate. “Yes,” he said, “I would like some.”
Next morning they served it with breakfast and Jones drank it with relish. This, too, was well received. Instead of bringing in his special foods from America, he would eat the eddoes, cassava, plantain and morocot, a local fish caught in the Barima River and preserved in salt.
After breakfast, Mitchell took Jones around to the proposed development sites. Traveling to Port Kaituma by train, he showed Jones the land cleared by the American settlers and the youth corps. And it was soon decided that Port Kaituma was the general region where the Temple wanted to plant its roots. It was a little hilly, but otherwise acceptable. The “agricultural mission” would be called Jonestown. (Jones later would tell his people that the name had been suggested by Emerson Mitchell, but Mitchell knew otherwise.)
After the two-day tour of the Matarkai region, Mitchell sent Jones and his entourage back to Georgetown to nail down the land lease terms with Deputy Prime Minister Reid. Jones was visibly excited. There was so much to do that he wanted somebody to stay behind and get to work immediately. No one had come prepared for more than a three-week visit, yet Jones was talking about many months. They had lease details to be worked out, land to be surveyed, supplies to be ordered. First Jones turned to his old loyalist, Patty Cartmell, but she said it was impossible for her to stay.
Next Jones appealed to Archie Ijames, who had the construction skills and administrative experience that Cartmell lacked—and was black. Ijames, however, did not feel his wife Rosie could get by without him back in Redwood Valley. Besides, he had property in the valley, dentures to pick up, a myriad of things awaiting his return. Jones and his aides assured him they could handle all the little details. When it seemed everyone wanted Ijames to stay, he began to think he had been set up. But he remained adamant.
Then, suddenly, Jim Jones grabbed his chest and collapsed. But before lapsing into unconsciousness, he turned to Ijames and said, “See? If you don’t do what I want, you’re going to lose your leader.” Ijames had witnessed similar collapses caused by other people, and vigilant nurses always had responded swiftly with oxygen. Nevertheless, Ijames was scared to risk his leader’s life this time. When Jones came around, Ijames agreed to stay behind, to lay groundwork, to safeguard the $100,000 initial investment in the Promised Land. Shortly thereafter Jones dispatched attorney Gene Chaikin and Paula Adams to help Ijames.
It was a typically humid day in February 1974 when Ijames and Chaikin walked into the government of
fice in Georgetown to submit their lease application. An afternoon cloudburst had cleansed the air. A young black clerk took their document, read it and asked in the lilting rhythm of the Caribbean, “Who is going to be listed as project director?” Chaikin replied without hesitation, “Archie Ijames.” Archie duly signed.
But as they turned to leave, Ijames turned to Chaikin and said, “Back in the States I’ve signed papers and that sort of thing for window dressing, and I understand that. We’re here in a black country now with a black prime minister, and you want more window dressing. But if I put my name down on this piece of paper as project director, I intend to be just that.”
Ijames had swallowed his pride for years, but now he was extra sensitive: he had just learned that a white man—Charlie Touchette, his daughter’s father-in-law—would be arriving that summer to take command.
Back in a Redwood Valley meeting some time later, Jones, uncharacteristically, began talking disparagingly about Archie Ijames. As a preliminary slap to his rebellious associate, Jones had decided to dredge up a long-forgotten controversy: the Becky Beikman affair. Jones said he had copies of a letter from Ijames to the young Indiana woman Archie had tried to adopt many years before. The envelope, Jones told the planning commission, contained contraceptives. Then, baring his real concern, he asserted that Ijames was building an alliance for himself in Guyana, asking the church to send down only people he could easily manipulate and control. Jones was not about to let that happen. “We’ll fix Archie’s ass,” he sputtered. “We’ll send him down a bunch of people he won’t get along with.”
Jones wanted six people to leave for Guyana the next morning. He tapped Mike Touchette, his uncle Tim Swinney and Phil Blakey, all of whom would obey Jones’s orders to the letter and would take on Archie if need be. The other three had been delinquent kids in the valley; Jones figured it was a good opportunity to shuttle them out of the States.
Touchette had only six hours notice. He was sad to be leaving behind his wife Debbie, Archie Ijames’s daughter, but was assured that she would follow shortly. Still he was eager to get away from the California Temple and to learn new skills, such as operating a Caterpillar bulldozer. Like the Eight Revolutionaries, he detested staff’s holier-than-thou attitude and their special privileges, and he would not miss them or the all-night p.c. meetings.
When the group arrived in Georgetown in mid-March, Mike Touchette instantly found himself in an awkward situation. He was very fond of his father-in-law but not so much so that he still could not spy on Archie for Jones. Moreover, his own father, Charlie Touchette, would be arriving within a couple of months to displace Ijames as project leader.
Within a week, the group chartered a plane into Port Kaituma, where they would base their early operations. From the airplane there was nothing to see but jungle, mile after mile of dense green bush, broken only by the silty brown rivers that cut loops through the trees or an occasional sandy beach with a cluster of small thatched huts.
At an inlet of the Kaituma River lay Port Kaituma with its tiny graveled airstrip, a couple of rum shops and roughly fifty simple houses built on stilts. Several hundred people lived here, most of them Amerindian farmers, government workers or railroad hands. They were dirt poor.
Most of all, the village was remote, thirty-five miles by rough road or rail to Matthews Ridge. There was no direct road anywhere else. The only regularly scheduled flights were between Port Kaituma and the Ridge; direct flights to Georgetown had to be chartered.
The first boatload of Temple settlers was expected in August. The Temple had purchased a seventy-two-foot trawler, the Cudjo, to carry people and supplies from Florida and Georgetown to the interior. Jones had told prospective settlers it was a phenomenal boat. But the boat actually was too small, too crowded. And it leaked too badly to do any serious fishing or to bring fresh fish into the region, as Jones had promised Guyana officials.
Matarkai was not the tropical paradise Jones had promised either, yet from his first day in Port Kaituma, Mike Touchette was happy. He liked the Amerindian children running around naked and free. He felt the thrill of pioneering as he watched a man surveying the Temple’s leased land. All that existed was a footpath into the jungle three and one-half miles long. But soon that would be a road, cut twenty-five feet across.
Over the next few months the group set to work, cleaning and painting the buildings left by the earlier settlers, cutting the grass and planting a small vegetable garden. When they were ready to bring over more settlers, Touchette and the others left Guyana aboard the Cudjo on June 11, 1974. Seven days later they sailed into Key West to pick up Archie Ijames and the supplies he had purchased there. The next day, they sailed into Miami to meet a Peoples Temple bus with the first sixteen settlers bound for the Promised Land.
During his stay in Florida, Archie Ijames went through a crisis. He found that Jones had turned his own family against him for his insubordinate remarks. With Archie thousands of miles away and unable to counter Jones’s allegations, Rosie had been swept along by the stories of her husband’s alleged infidelities with Becky Beikman. Jones then hit Rosie with an old letter in which Archie vowed that his allegiance to Jones outweighed his personal commitment to his wife. Ijames tried in vain to write or phone his wife to patch up things. Then, when he finally reached her through a third party, Rosie felt obligated to report it to Jones.
Meanwhile, Jones had sent a church member to Florida on a special mission to persuade Ijames to deed his Redwood Valley house to the Temple. But Ijames refused to sign, knowing it would provoke Jones’s fury. When Jones heard about Ijames’s obstinacy, he instructed Rosie to call long distance and chew him out. It was the couple’s first conversation in months. So Archie initially thought the woman had gone out of her mind. But when Jones took the phone from her, Ijames saw through it all. “I see now that you got done what you were trying to do, so I’m through,” he declared.
“You’re through?” Jones exploded. “What do you mean, you’re through?”
“That’s it!”
“Who the hell’s gonna run things down there?” Jones demanded.
“You should have thought of that,” replied Ijames. “I’ve been trying to tell you that all along, but you wouldn’t hear me. So get yourself another man.”
However, Ijames’s burst of independence was short-lived. Jones calmed him down. He persuaded him to stay on and meet the bus soon arriving from California.
Among the bus passengers were most of Mike Touchette’s family: his parents Charlie and Joyce, his brother Albert and his sister Michelle, and Mike’s wife Debbie. The reason for the en masse emigration of the Touchettes was simple: daughter Mickey had defected with the Eight Revolutionaries the year before, and Jones wanted her family out of the country. Besides, the Touchettes, especially Joyce, were loyal and had no compunction about giving Ijames a bad time. Neither did anyone else on the bus, including Archie’s own daughter, Debbie. Had not Archie disobeyed the Father to them all?
The harassment began before the bus engine cooled off, and it continued daily. When Ijames brought supplies back to the boat, Joyce Touchette would scream at him for spending too much or buying the wrong things and sometimes would order them returned.
When his wife arrived from California, Ijames failed to break through her wall of defenses. And that night, he slept in the car, rather than in the boat with everyone else. Things seemed hopeless.
Next morning, however, Rosie and Archie went for a walk that saved forty years of marriage. She told him she had been hurt by the Becky Beikman revelations and by his letter of allegiance to Jones. Then he told her the truth, without the intrusion of Jim Jones. They realized that their years together did mean more to them than Jim Jones did.
This did not instantly transform Archie into a rebel, however. Now reconciled with his wife, Ijames signed over the deed to his property. He still desperately wanted to belong and believe in Peoples Temple.
But the rest of the entourage continued to
make life miserable for him. On a rough twelve-day journey aboard the less than seaworthy Cudjo,Archie’s movements were restricted to the cabin and the deck; he was the only passenger not allowed to take the wheel. High seas buffeted the boat, designed for six and carrying sixteen. The psychological punishment battered Ijames: isolation, humiliation, needless verbal abuse. At times, Rosie Ijames objected. But his tormentors would reply, “Well, Father told us to give him hell.”
What had started out as unpleasant was approaching the unendurable for Ijames, a sensitive man, acutely conscious of race. His family and in-laws had been treating him shamefully; the man to whom he had pledged everything had betrayed him. He thought that he had no reason to live.
On one rare day of calm seas, he walked to the stern of the boat. The water looked inviting. It would be an escape from the pain. At sixty-one, he had been in Peoples Temple for seventeen years. “After all these years,” he thought to himself, “all I put into this movement, it’s come to this. We thought we got away from racism in America, but white people are pushing us around this way.”
Archie Ijames contemplated jumping overboard, but did not want to hurt his wife.
Soon Archie found himself an ally aboard the Cudjo. Ironically, Chris Lewis, Jim Jones’s chief enforcer, took the Ijameses into his protection. No one wanted to tangle with Lewis, so the couple enjoyed a little reprieve for the rest of the trip.
When the Cudjo finally eased into its berth at Georgetown Harbor, the Temple public relations crew welcomed the new arrivals—but for Ijames, it meant more trouble.
Paula Adams immediately pulled Ijames aside and asked what had happened to $45,000 entrusted to him. He told her what he had already told Jones by phone from Florida: “I don’t have it. Ask Gene.” Before Ijames had left for Florida, he and Gene Chaikin had crawled under a Port Kaituma house, buried the money and marked the spot with a large rock. Chaikin had gone back looking for the money but could not find it.
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