Leon could see the penalty was worse than the work, even though the crater in his shoulder was the size of a half dollar. When Leon went back to work that day, Johnny Brown paid him special attention, brandishing a club and telling him, “I might wanna use this if you get out of line.” Leon’s only reply was to retch his last meal all over the ground.
Even more dreaded were the meetings when Jones presided from a chair on the stage at one end of the pavilion. “Get up there, Leon,” they would shout. “Run, Leon. Double time.”
Broussard would lumber up as fast as his fat legs would carry him. Jim Jones, his face white, black hair glistening under the generator-powered lights, prodded him with snide condescension, designed to stimulate venom in the others. “I heard you didn’t want to work,” he would say.
“I was sick,” Leon said.
“You’re not a sick man,” Jones said. “Get back to work. There’s important work to be done here.”
Feeling the hostility and the ponderousness of his own tongue, Broussard could not summon the courage to argue. But he resolved that he had been abused long enough. They were discriminating against him: no one else was beaten up. He suspected his food might have been drugged. He longed for that muddy red clay road to Port Kaituma.
One morning about two weeks after his arrival, he woke up in darkness shortly before 5:00 A.M. He heard not a noise other than the whirring of jungle insects and the restful breathing of his roommates. He pulled on his rubber boots and khaki pants.
Tiptoeing out, he slipped past the pavilion, past the lodgepole cage where Muggs the chimpanzee lived, past the playground. Then he ran in the deep jungle, parallel to the road so he would not become lost. He did not care anymore whether the monkeys, snakes and tigers grabbed him in the darkness. He was beyond that sort of fear.
As day broke at about six o’clock, he encountered an Indian near Port Kaituma. “Hello,” Leon called weakly. “I need help.”
“What kind of help you need?” the Indian inquired.
“I need help to get back to the United States.” There he was, in a clearing in the middle of the South American rain forest talking to a man who probably made less than $500 a year. “I’m from Peoples Temple.”
The man took Leon to his home in the town. It was a simple place for the man, his wife and their two baby children. One room was for sleeping, one for sitting and eating, and one for a pig. Hospitably, they put the pig out of its room and put down a mattress there for Leon. Though exhausted, he told them that the Temple would not allow him to leave and would not give him money for travel. “I was sick, but they forced me to work,” he said, telling them about the hole.
Later, a tall, brown-skinned policeman came to the house. He carried a pistol and a long-barreled gun as well. When Leon said he wanted to go home to the United States, the policeman asked him why.
“Because I didn’t like Jonestown,” Leon replied. “They are cruel to me.” Leon showed the hole in his shoulder, told about the beating and mentioned the pit in the ground. He looked a mess after his marathon run through the thick jungle.
Later that day, three policemen transported Leon by jeep to a hospital thirty miles away, presumably Matthews Ridge. Leon did not know where he was. A woman came to his room and treated his wounds.
Then a white man came with a little boy. The white man wore a khaki shirt jacket which was the national men’s attire. With him was Johnny Brown Jones, without his club. Leon became frightened.
The white man asked Leon whether he would prefer to go back to Jonestown or to the United States. Leon said he wanted to fly back to America. But he was too upset by Johnny Brown’s presence to get to the part about the hole in the ground.
The white man assured Leon, “I’ll get in touch with Jim Jones and come back tomorrow.”
The next day, Johnny Brown Jones brought Leon’s plane ticket and his passport. He told Leon to keep his mouth shut and never to talk about the Temple. He assured Leon that Temple people would meet him at the airport in Miami and give him $200 to $300 cash and some food so he could get back to the San Francisco area.
After Leon flew back to the United States, he waited and waited in Miami, but no one came to meet him with food or money. After hours of begging and hanging around the airport, an airline, seemingly out of pity, gave him a ticket to San Francisco. Actually, the Temple had paid for it.
The departure of Leon Broussard, the only person ever to escape Jonestown successfully before the final day, had touched off an extraordinary sequence of events:
The unidentified white man in the Leon Broussard story was U.S. Consul Richard McCoy, the boy his son. The forty-three-year-old consular officer provided services to Americans in Guyana—registering births, marriages, deaths, offering help with passport difficulties and the like.
It was an accident of timing that McCoy had stumbled onto the Leon Broussard escape. En route to Jonestown for his first visit, McCoy was met at Matthews Ridge by a district official who told him a Jonestown escapee had been hospitalized at the Ridge. The official said Broussard was telling disturbing stories about mistreatment. The official was vague about what offenses might have been committed there.
McCoy went to the dispensary—without Johnny Brown Jones, according to McCoy’s version—and questioned the bedridden escapee for about a half hour. Identifying himself, he asked, “What’s happening? ... I understand that you made a complaint you were mistreated.”
Broussard denied the mistreatment and said simply that he could not adjust to Jonestown life. When McCoy asked him about ugly-looking cuts on his shoulder, Broussard said he incurred them carrying rough-hewn lumber. Finally, after trying to assure Broussard that he could speak freely about any abuse, McCoy promised to make sure the Temple sent him home if he wanted.
Although Broussard had told the two Port Kaituma constables about forced labor and other mistreatment in Jonestown, McCoy felt he could act only on the basis of what Broussard told him personally, not on hearsay. Besides, McCoy prided himself as a smart questioner with the ability to speak the language of urban blacks, and this caused him to think he had probably coaxed Broussard into leveling with him.
Later, when McCoy went into Jonestown, he confronted Jim Jones about the escape. “A member of your organization is in Matthews Ridge. His name is Leon Broussard.”
“Oh, that’s where he is,” an aide replied. (Stephan Jones and Albert Touchette already had gone into the bush looking for Leon.) Aides then began to impugn Broussard’s character, calling him a drug addict. That did not sit well with McCoy, though he already had pegged Broussard as an uneducated derelict.
“I don’t care what he is,” the U.S. official replied. “As consul, I serve all Americans in this country. You brought him here and you are responsible for getting him back.”
McCoy wanted to establish the precedent that the Temple, not the U.S. Embassy, would pay for repatriating unhappy communards. Seeming embarrassed by the whole affair, Jones agreed to pay for Broussard’s return and sent Johnny Brown Jones to get his passport and personal effects. Jones also seemed apprehensive about what Broussard might be saying. But because Broussard had not made any accusations of mistreatment to him directly, McCoy felt he could not broach that with Jones. He knew, too, that Broussard could be easily discredited.
Even if he had the inclination, Broussard had little opportunity to expand on his story to McCoy. The presence of Johnny Brown Jones next to him on the plane flight to Georgetown must have been inhibiting. When the consul asked Broussard if he had any objection to returning to the Temple house in Lamaha Gardens with Johnny Brown Jones, Broussard said no. Then, less than twenty-four hours later, Broussard left for Miami —and McCoy confirmed his departure with a friend in the immigration office. Jim Jones had passed the test: he had let Leon Broussard leave, and paid his fare.
McCoy’s original mission had been to establish ground rules for consulate-Temple contacts during the quarterly visits he planned to make, and to see Carolyn Looman. Her parents f
eared that Carolyn— whose brother had roomed with New West reporter Phil Tracy—was being held against her will. They based that upon a phone call she had made from Georgetown before being taken into Jonestown; they said she did not want to go.
In Jonestown, McCoy wanted to check into the concerns of parents in the United States and to bring out anyone desiring to leave. After dealing with the Broussard business, McCoy established ground rules for consular visits and “welfare and whereabouts” inquiries such as the Looman case. People must have their passports with them so that he could be sure of their identity, he said. They would talk alone in an open area, where they could not be intimidated or overheard. McCoy would conduct interviews near the pavilion, so that if people wanted to leave, they could cut diagonally across a nearby field to a waiting vehicle, before anyone could interfere.
McCoy told Looman that she was free to leave immediately with him, that Jonestown was under Guyanese law and that a Guyanese official was waiting with a vehicle and driver. Moreover, he said, he had an airplane ticket for her from her parents.
McCoy, of course, could not know how thoroughly all Jonestown residents had been conditioned by fear. He could not know that the Temple was aware of Looman’s failed escape plan, that she was under suspicion, that Jones, with advance notice of the visit, had had plenty of opportunity to work on Looman’s attitude.
Carolyn Looman told McCoy she was fulfilled teaching seventh and eighth grades—and wanted to remain in Jonestown. What her parents told McCoy had been wrong, she said. The consul felt her answers were unrehearsed. He had no choice but to report the bad news to Looman’s parents. But no one would ever know whether Looman was telling the truth or not.
THIRTY-NINE
Siege
The Broussard escape, the Looman inquiry and the Embassy visit had frightened Jonestown. The Temple leadership was worried further when a Ministry of Home Affairs official came to investigate Leon Broussard’s accusations about forced labor in the “hole.” But nothing would shake the fragile community like the custody battle for John Victor Stoen.
The Stoen case was heating up. Grace Stoen’s attorney, Jeff Haas, was currently in Georgetown to convince a Guyanese magistrate that Guyana should honor a California order for the return of the boy. And Jones closely watched every move Haas made. On September 3, Harriet Tropp and Paula Adams, posing as American tourists, had befriended the young lawyer in his Georgetown hotel. They reported to Jones that Haas expected to have the case wrapped up by the end of September. A court date was set for September 6 in Georgetown.
Meanwhile Jones learned that the Temple’s three best friends in the Guyanese government—Deputy Prime Minister Ptolemy Reid, Foreign Minister Fred Wills and Home Affairs Minister Vibert Mingo—were all traveling outside the country the week of the hearing. Could that be mere coincidence? What about the prying visits earlier in the week by the Guyanese official and the U.S. consul? Would there be a CIA-inspired coup to topple the anti-American government and get Peoples Temple at the same time? To a paranoid personality, the possibilities were endless.
The night before the September 6 court date, Stephan Jones, Johnny Brown and several others were with Jim Jones when he pulled out a .357 magnum revolver and ripped off a few shots at a banana leaf. This was the first time that seventeen-year-old Stephan realized there were guns in Jonestown. After they left Jones’s hut and were walking back toward the center of the camp, Stephan and Brown heard a gunshot. Racing back to Jones’s hut, they found him face down on the floor, apparently in shock. Jones told them that he had been standing by the window when he had a premonition. Luckily he had bent down, just as a shot whizzed through the window, narrowly missing his head. Enemies were sniping at him, Jones cried.
Taking a shotgun from the hut, Stephan took off into the bush. He fired two rounds in the general direction of the first shot, then came back. His father, surrounded by aides, placed him in charge of security. Immediately, Stephan stationed himself and another man at Jones’s hut, and others around the compound’s perimeter. The alert was on.
Stephan knew that his father was not above staging such episodes. Still, he felt this attack had been real, though he had detected no trace of bullets or shells. After all, he had spotted a suspicious-looking broken limb on a tree not far from the Jones hut. His father did have enemies. And in the volatility of the past months, it seemed anything could happen. But there were no further disturbances that night.
Early the next morning, attorney Jeff Haas walked into the Georgetown courtroom of Justice Aubrey Bishop with his local counsel, Clarence Hughes. After a brief hearing, with no Temple representation, Justice Bishop ordered Jim Jones to produce John Victor Stoen two days hence and to show cause why a final order should not be issued giving the boy to his mother.
Armed with an interim writ of habeas corpus, Haas accepted the offer of a Guyanese Defense Force airplane and flew into Port Kaituma to serve Jones with the documents. As Haas and Guyana Supreme Court Marshal Billy Blackman waited near the Kaituma airstrip for a four-wheel-drive vehicle, the attorney noticed the Temple’s shrimp boat moored at the port inlet. Locals told him that its radio posted Jones on any arriving planes or boats.
After riding over the bumpy red clay road, Haas arrived at the settlement. Two hundred inhabitants watched his approach, most of them very old or very young. There were more white people than Haas had expected, maybe up to a third. When the jeep stopped, Maria Katsaris demanded to know their business. Marshal Blackman stepped forward and asked to see Jim Jones on official Supreme Court business. Katsaris replied that Jones was “on the river somewhere” and had not been seen for two days.
The Haas party had no choice but to return to Port Kaituma. Once there, they ran into two immigration officers who said they had seen and spoken to Jim Jones in Jonestown that very day. Jones’s deception merely renewed Haas’s determination. He pleaded with the two officials to return to Jonestown with him to confront the Temple. But they refused, instead promising to report the episode.
Back in Jonestown, a panic was building. The government had let Haas get this far and, indeed, had supplied a plane and a marshal. What other tricks would Haas pull to bull his way in, to “kidnap” John?
By September 7, two days after the “sniper attack,” Jones had blown up the custody business into a full-scale crisis. “Alert, alert, alert,” Jones screamed on the public address system, while sirens summoned the community to the pavilion. It was bedlam. Guards with guns ran through the camp, ordering frightened people to assemble. Juanita Bogue, a nineteen-year-old field worker, was terrified when the Temple dump truck appeared in the field to round up farm workers. “We’re all going to die,” the guards cried as they loaded workers into the truck. Back in camp, the workers were forced to stand with their hands up while guards frisked them. Then they were handed “cutlasses” (machetes), knives, crossbows, hoes and pitchforks and told to encircle the settlement, facing out toward the jungle.
Once they were assembled, Jones addressed his shaky troops, telling them they were about to be attacked by mercenaries backed by Tim Stoen. The Guyanese army would be invading as well, probably by air. Already the enemy had fired at him from the bush, he said. At any minute, they would storm the settlement to take away all their children. Jones swore that he would not let them take John or any of the other little ones. If they come for one, they come for all, he warned.
The whole camp must fight to the death for socialism, he yelled urgently. Smear your faces with mud, he cried; form your line around the perimeter and show them we mean business. Jones told his army they should wave their weapons while scanning the bush for enemies. They would eat and sleep on the line. Deserters fleeing the battle must be killed. Jones, who always had admired the Russian stand against Hitler’s troops, now was defending his own Leningrad. The siege was on.
Jones ordered his son Stephan and Tim Swinney to the front gate to halt every incoming vehicle and conduct a thorough search. A number of Temple immigran
ts were welcomed to Jonestown for the first time this way.
As the two waited behind a barricade of rubber tires, the full impact of Jones’s words washed over them. Stephan wondered why invaders would come boldly down the road when they could approach Jonestown through the jungle. And he wondered how Jonestown could defend itself with an arsenal consisting of Jones’s .357 and a few other pistols, an old M-1 carbine, a couple of rifles and a temperamental sawed-off shotgun with “Boss” painted on it. “We don’t stand a fucking chance,” he commented to Swinney.
On the face of it, the crisis made no sense. There was no sign of enemy aggression. But people conditioned to believe Jim Jones did not doubt his call for the final showdown on the basis of one mysterious gunshot. “We built this place, and we’re gonna defend it,” was the prevailing attitude.
As Jones evoked images of bloodthirsty invaders and the sounds of gunfire, he urgently, even hysterically, deployed his foot soldiers. People brought sleeping bags to the defense lines and ate pathetic rations of rice at their posts. They stood guard for hours, grabbed sleep between verbal sieges. Then the silence would be punctuated once again by the shrill voice of Jim Jones: “Alert, alert, alert!”
Meanwhile, top aides closeted themselves with Jones in the radio room, where they maintained constant communication with Georgetown and, to a lesser extent, with San Francisco. From the radio room, Jones could talk simultaneously to settlers over the public address system and to San Francisco by radio. A tape recorder was running:
“I’m hit. I’m hit. I’m hit. I’m hit. I’m hit,” screamed Jones into the microphone. “Keep calm. Whatever you do, don’t take offensive action. Be sure you don’t take offensive action. We only want peace. We want asylum somewhere. They’re now trying to negotiate, trying to contact a socialist we trust, so don’t do anything rash, I beg you. Out of seven hundred people, it’s easy for someone to make a mistake.... Don’t put that spotlight to my right on anybody’s head. We do not know how many people are on our left.” He shouted at the top of his voice to “enemies” in the jungle: “WE HAVE FIRED NO WEAPONS!! WE HAVE FIRED NO WEAPONS!!” Then more softly to his people: “So keep calm and keep down. Do you copy? Let me hear you.”
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