Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  A few nights later, the Ijameses were lounging quietly in a Temple house in Port Kaituma when Rosie began telling her husband about a p.c. meeting in Redwood Valley. She said Jim Jones had asked for volunteers to kill Archie. Several who had raised their hands that night had abused the Ijameses on the boat trip from Florida—and now they were living right next door. “Honey,” Ijames softly exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I was afraid to,” she said. “Jim got me to believe that you weren’t trusted and that if I told you, I’d be in trouble myself.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ijames assured her. “I’m not afraid to die, but I’m not going to stay here like a sitting duck waiting for it to happen, either. I’m getting out of here, and I’m taking the money. I’m getting it to pay for our house. Let them try to put me in jail.”

  The morning that Ijames and Chaikin were to make another search for the money, Ijames got up ahead of time, crawled under the house in darkness and hit the packet of money with a screwdriver with his first stab. He laughed to himself: How could Chaikin have been so blind as to miss it? He dug up the treasure, took it into the house, unwrapped it and counted out $45,000 in $100 bills. Ijames then walked across a bend in the road and hid the money in a bush.

  Later that day, after he made his excuses to Chaikin, Ijames retrieved the money, rewrapped it and addressed it to himself in care of Georgetown General Delivery. Then he tucked the package under his arm and walked down the road to the tiny Port Kaituma post office. He had the clerk register and insure the package for the maximum. He had been in Guyana long enough to know that nothing was reliable.

  When Archie Ijames dug up the money from under the house, he felt he had taken an irreversible step. Within a few days someone would notice the money was gone. He decided to act first by calling a meeting with Charlie and Joyce Touchette, Chaikin and a few others.

  “This is not what we’ve given our lives for, the way we’ve been treated here,” he told them, speaking for Rosie, too. “We’re leaving.” He already had guaranteed a police escort to Georgetown by going to the constable in Port Kaituma, saying their lives might be in danger.

  The loyalists tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Ijameses to stay, though they did convince Archie to cancel his police escort. The couple flew back to Georgetown, where their daughter Debbie met them at the airport and took them to a hotel in town near the Central Market on Water Street. As soon as she left, they checked into another hotel a few blocks away, under another name. But when they returned there after dinner, they discovered that someone from the Temple had traced them there already. They moved again, this time to a private home, where Guyanese acquaintances harbored them. They bought airline tickets home with money Rosie Ijames had saved from her rest home, but could not get a flight out for a week.

  A few nights later a knock sounded at 2:00 A.M. Jim Jones and a church member had found them. Ijames was embarrassed but not surprised.

  During that meeting, Ijames broke into tears: “I’ve lived in a racist society,” he said. “I’ve looked long and hard to find a group of people with whom I could live without having to deal with racist attitudes. The church is supposed to be integrated, and yet it has racist attitudes. I felt you were the last hope. And the way I see it, that’s not real either.”

  “I’m sorry if you feel that way,” said Jones. “I’m sorry if you think I’m a racist.”

  “I don’t know how else you can interpret it,” Ijames replied.

  There was nothing left to say. There was no longer any point in even talking. Saddened, the Ijameses finally boarded a Pan American jet and returned home. Jones flew into Port Kaituma to check the progress of the settlers, then he too returned to California.

  The first thing Ijames did in Ukiah was to put the $45,000 in a safe deposit box. Despite the Temple’s wealth, Ijames’s bundle was no pittance to Jim Jones; it equaled the take from a good weekend of preaching all over California. Jones was determined to get back that money and shrewd enough to realize that Ijames really did not want to leave. He decided to give Archie what he wanted: a public apology at a general meeting.

  Within a few days of the apology, Archie resolved to return the money. “Now if we’re really going to work with these people,” he said to his wife, “then we’ve got to trust them.” When Ijames brought back the money, Jones turned to him and sneered, “You should have died in Guyana.”

  Despite his humiliations, Archie Ijames could not bring himself to fully leave Peoples Temple. Making a clean break would force him to admit to himself that he had been deceived all those years. He felt he was too old to start over. The Temple was his life and identity.

  At last, after over a decade of dreaming about it, Jim Jones’s Latin American haven was established, in the middle of tropical rain forest, miles from the nearest outpost. But Jim Jones exaggerated what was in reality a notable achievement. He could have told his Redwood Valley congregation that the Temple settlers were doing backbreaking work, clearing the bush and trying to grow food in the middle of a jungle. Instead, Jones had to claim that Jonestown was a Caribbean paradise with ripe fruit bursting from every tree, that food was so plentiful you could just sit back and let it fall in your lap.

  During the summer months of 1974, Peoples Temple Agricultural Mission became more than just a nice phrase on a piece of paper. The new settlers built a trailer to haul supplies, made arrangements to install a generator in Jonestown and built an open-faced banana shed there, the first structure. The pioneers commuted to the site at first from Port Kaituma, close to seven miles by road. Assisted by Amerindians paid six and eight dollars a day, they cleared land and erected the first buildings out of jungle hardwoods—the kitchen, a cage for Mr. Muggs the chimp, and a recreation room for the seniors next to the kitchen. They gathered huge mounds of vegetation into piles and torched them—the “heap and burn” method. And they planted the first corn.

  Jonestown was designed to be the place where Jones would make a fresh start, abandon the mistakes and deceptions of the past and be free to live openly the true socialist principles of the church. But people close to Jones soon realized that this was false billing, too. Within six months of the groundbreaking, Jones staged a faith healing service in Georgetown that left heads shaking....

  On a sticky August day in the capital, Paula Adams and five other Temple members had rung the bell at Brickdam Rectory. They asked to see Father Andrew Morrison, a Jesuit born in Guyana of English parents. A thin, hollow-faced man in his mid-fifties with eyes that lit up in excitement, Morrison served as church rector and as editor of the Catholic Standard, a small, mimeographed weekly started as a parish newspaper. The Standard had become the most reliable source of political news, an alternative to government-owned dailies that were propaganda sheets for Burnham’s regime. Morrison had remained in Guyana despite the turbulence, poverty and government efforts to suppress him.

  On this particular day, Paula Adams asked Father Morrison if Peoples Temple could use Sacred Heart Church for a service. Adams had done her homework. She knew that both Morrison and his parish council were strong believers in ecumenicism. For his part, Morrison found these Temple members to be emotional Christian idealists who believed strongly in integration and in helping to develop Guyana. He told the group he would need to speak to the parish council.

  Months slipped by. Then one day in November, the group suddenly reappeared at a 5:00 P.M. mass, demanding an answer. Then, at Father Morrison’s invitation, the Temple representatives made their presentation. to the council. They said there would be a prayer service and a little healing, which Father Morrison thought normal for an evangelical group. No one on the parish council voiced any objection. And the Temple picked a date and left.

  In late December 1974, a large chartered plane carried Jim Jones, his top p.c. aides, female staffers and a new contingent of settlers to Georgetown. Archie Ijames swallowed his pride and came along for the ride. After touchdown at Timehri International Air
port, Jones exited smiling and holding Mr. Muggs on a long chain. As the others followed happily, Mike Prokes filmed the arrival.

  The group then took several small planes into Port Kaituma. During a week’s stay, they took daily trips to Jonestown. Little John Victor Stoen, a dark-haired toddler nearing his third birthday, played on a small red tractor while his mother Grace posed for the camera and ate a grapefruit. This was for home consumption, as was a brief shot of Jones, with a hint of a smile on his lips as he fed a bird from his hand, then freed it.

  For further promotional shots, Jones drew on his stagecraft. Unfazed by the fact that Jonestown had grown no fruit, he spread the store-bought fruit on the ground before him as the camera whirred away.

  The settlers had been ordered in advance by radio to avoid saying anything negative about jungle life. Everything was to appear perfect. Jones had already told his fellow visitors that the trees grew fruit the flavor of ice cream. To cover for him, Mike Touchette was supposed to say that these trees had been ordered, but had not yet arrived. Likewise, he was instructed to say that the settlers had not yet planted crops or built houses in Jonestown because of difficulties getting equipment. One visitor who took Jones at his word expected to find lush tropical fruit growing wild everywhere and more nuts than he could eat. When he got to Port Kaituma, he asked Charlie Touchette where the bounty was. “There ain’t any,” came the reply. “You could go into the jungle and starve.”

  For a whole week, work came to a stop. Several tractor-trailer loads of settlers and visitors bumped along the road to Jonestown, marveling at the cleared land and the few primitive structures. People walked into the bush and swung on the jungle vines. Everyone laughed at the antics of Mr. Muggs as he was introduced to the cage built for him.

  Meetings every night lasted until three or four in the morning. The first was devoted exclusively to catharsis, with emphasis on the settlers —Jones was afraid they had grown lax in his absence. In subsequent meetings, Jones mostly expounded on the state of the world or his plans to develop Jonestown. Jones and his top aides told the settlers they should feel privileged to be allowed to work in paradise, while the rest slaved away back home, “in the belly of the beast.”

  Overall, the visit was a happy get-together, though the early settlers were irritated that many new arrivals were troublemakers. Mike and Charlie Touchette had been begging for workers, not juvenile delinquents. Still, progress was good, and the reunion gave everyone a chance to get caught up on gossip from back home. It also allowed Jones to bring a respectable-sized contingent to nationwide celebrations for the tenth anniversary of Prime Minister Burnham’s election. The Temple sent a delegation to the festivities at Matthews Ridge, and some church members met Burnham personally.

  Back in Georgetown, Father Andrew Morrison was very worried. With the December 30 church service fast approaching, he noticed half-page advertisements in the Guyana Chronicle attesting to Jim Jones’s supernatural healing powers. THE BLIND SEE! THE DEAF HEAR! THE CRIPPLED WALK! screamed the box in the center of the ad.

  About a week before the service, Morrison told a contingent of Temple aides that he felt deceived: they had asked to use the church mainly to describe their agricultural mission—not to demonstrate healing powers of Jim Jones.

  The Temple group pleaded innocence: “Our advertising department must have slipped up, Father. We’ll fix it.”

  But on the following morning, the Chronicle carried an even larger ad for the healing service. It pushed Morrison and the parish council into a dilemma: should they cancel a publicly promoted event, or be used by this newcomer Jones? In the end, they decided that they would get more criticism if they stopped the service.

  Long before the 11:00 A.M. service, the people began streaming past the large white sign for “Sacred Heart National Shrine” and the three windswept palm trees in the front courtyard. Soon the spindly whitewashed wooden church was packed from the main floor to the organ loft. Most were black Catholics; some were simply curious, drawn by the advertisements.

  Wearing a white suit, a black shirt with white tie and his ever-present dark glasses, Jones opened the service slowly. He sang American hymns and talked briefly about the agricultural mission. Then he began the healings, with Marceline assisting at the altar. “Someone in the middle of the church has trouble with his legs.” Jones scanned the audience. “Yes, it’s the knees. Put your hand up.”

  When a tall black man raised his hand, Jones walked down the aisle, flanked by assistants. “You are going to be healed. Bend your knees and squat,” the preacher ordered. The man squatted and came up again.

  “Do you feel any pain?” Jones asked. The man shook his head. “No.” As the man did deep knee bends, Temple assistants led the crowd in applauding Jones’s miraculous powers.

  Jones did several more healings, one involving a young white woman with breast cancer. At the conclusion of the spectacle, Jones softly called people to the front. In a single file line, they passed along the communion rail, murmuring thanks as Jones touched their shoulders.

  Father Morrison watched the service with mounting horror. At first he thought to himself, “Either this man has enormous healing powers or this is an enormous hoax.” As the service wore on, his uncertainty fell away. The slick well-dressed American was not talking about Jesus Christ, but about himself—how he devoted his life to helping others and wore secondhand clothes. The performance left Father Morrison red-faced.

  Two days later, Father Morrison was able to confirm that those “healed” were members of Jones’s congregation. But when he went to confront Temple leaders at their residence, he was told everyone had gone to Jonestown. The priest complained about the fraud to Christopher “Kit” Nasciemento, a high-ranking government official in Burnham’s cabinet. Nasciemento sympathized, but said he was helpless. So Father Morrison decided to keep his own file on Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. It would grow substantially over the years.

  Many inside the Temple were likewise disappointed by the healing service. Though tame by stateside standards, it proved that Jones was importing the same cheap, theatrical deceptions used in American ghettos. His settlers had hoped he would leave home the religion and concentrate on the church’s social and political goals. Several aides had advised him against the healing service—and they were right. It became a public relations disaster. A January 10, 1975, article in Father Morrison’s Catholic Standard emphatically disassociated Sacred Heart Church from “the alleged healing service” and asked embarrassing questions about Jones’s orchestration.

  Jones responded by organizing his public relations aides into two-person teams and sent them to patch things up with officials, priests and ministers all over town. The teams succeeded to some extent in downplaying the healing service, but the incident shook Jones.

  In a moment of candor, he took Tim Stoen aside and confessed that he had horribly misjudged the public reaction. He wondered aloud whether he had lost touch with the masses, whether his years living in Redwood Valley and making whirlwind healing tours had not eroded his ability to read people. Jones told Stoen that he had decided to regain his feel for the people by shifting the Temple’s U.S. emphasis almost entirely to the big cities.

  PART FIVE

  PARADISE, GAINED AND LOST

  It’s two steps forward,

  one step back....

  Sometimes you can’t win

  for losing.

  JIM JONES

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Communalists

  During December of 1973, Joyce Shaw languished on the upper bunk of her Redwood Valley commune. She was sick with the flu and so depressed that she wondered whether she would die. She had endured enough of provincial Ukiah.

  For a year, she had worked full time in the church publications office. This was considered a privilege, but Joyce was getting tired of getting only two or three hours of sleep a night and competing with others who bragged: “Oh, I only got one hour last night.” Once, to get out an issue of the
church paper, she and Bob Houston went for four or five days at a stretch without sleep. Worse yet, it was becoming obvious to Joyce that some tasks were contrived by Jones.

  Living conditions began to seem oppressive, too. Joyce had forfeited her own rented house in 1973 when she accepted the position as full-time publications worker. Like other full-time workers, she went “communal.” At first, she slept in a bed in the hallway of a little house on Road K. Later, she camped in the publications offices in her sleeping bag, and borrowed showers elsewhere. When she finally complained, the church council let her and other workers occupy a member’s vacant house. Archie Ijames installed triple-decker bunks, improved the garden and erected a pen for some dogs. The commune was called West House; another one was known as East House.

  Joyce still was unhappy with her lot. Ill in her upper bunk, she wrote Jones a letter saying she did not believe that full-time church work was the optimum utilization of her talents. She requested and was granted permission to find an outside job.

  Soon, she and Bob were summoned to a meeting of the full planning commission. They were asked to get married, for missionary duty in some vague African project. These lovers were hesitant. Their relationship had bounced over rough shoals. Joyce was not anxious for a permanent tie; at the time, their relationship mainly revolved around church duties. And Bob resisted the idea of divorcing his wife Phyllis, largely because of their two children.

  With church permission, Joyce and Bob spent some time off by themselves discussing their orders. It was unusual for Jones to allow a marriage of two white middle-class, college-educated lovers. So Joyce and Bob assumed that Jones mistakenly thought there was no romantic love between them. After some deliberations, they decided they would wed on the basis of intellectual and ideological compatibility, and warm feelings for each other.

  Actually, the determining factor behind Jones’s order may have been his fear that Shaw would leave. He apparently acknowledged the stress she was under by telling the couple to move to San Francisco. “Hallelujah!” Joyce thought. She was overjoyed to escape the rural Ukiah area that reminded her so much of her Ohio homeland.