On another tape, Jones was considerably more charitable toward Garry’s rival, Mark Lane. He told the people that Lane had called him a saint. Jones would talk rapid-fire, run out of words briefly, then fire another burst. He would drop subjects, then resurrect them. It was clear Father was not feeling well:
“Dr. Lang [sic], Dr. Mark Lang said he would make every person who entered this community go naked, and he would look in their vagina and in their penis and in their mouth. You know damn well [that] private messages are not supposed to go out. They’re supposed to be read by censors.... They know how little words can be taken wrong and used by the CIA.”
Jones was ensuring that his closed universe stay closed by controlling all access to the outside world, by body searches and censorship. It was not enough that he regulated letters and phone calls home, availability of newspapers or periodicals or anything else that would contradict his own insane vision. He lambasted his people for writing home at all: “Some of you break my heart. Here I sit with a 105 temperature, and some of you won’t do so much as to try to save a stamp on an envelope by writing some suckle”—he stumbles over the words—“son, hump, damn! I haven’t got the words for it, I haven’t got the damn words. It’s just low down and unthankful....”
Then his gratitude for his conspiracy theorists gushed out: “The next children born here should be named after Mark Lane and Don Freed. That is the good diplomatic sense. Whoever happens to have the next child, if it’s a boy—or you can fix up a girl version—name it after Mark Lane and Don Freed.”
As in the past, the emperor realized that his subjects, given time to think, would compare notes and catch him in his lies. So he riveted their attention on his version of reality, on his amplified voice:
“All departments should be talking about the news. I don’t want to hear chit-chat. And you should be practicing Russian together. We should be above our brainwashing....”
And then, more craziness was spewed:
“Nursing staff, you should be kind to our seniors. You must smile. You must be warm when you pick their body up. It is a fearful thing to be sick. Let me tell you, I’m sick much of the time, but I’m not in the nursery. I have work to do. My temperature is now over 105. I’ll be all right whenever I take whatever they put up [pause] this depository....”
Any escape from this madness, from that voice was welcomed. And not surprisingly, the Jones boys and their friends found more diversion than most inhabitants, one that would save their lives. Basketball came to Jonestown one day when it occurred to some of the young workers, including Stephan Jones, that the hardwood floor of an unfinished building would make a good half court. A stout pole was sunk into the ground, a standard erected and a floodlight trained on the court for night play. Jones was receptive to the idea once it became clear he could use a Jonestown basketball team for propaganda purposes, as he did with the band or the karate and drill teams. He even let team members leave work a half hour early for practice.
Stephan Jones and Lee Ingram, who became the coach, picked the team with help from Tim Jones and Johnny Cobb. Emmett Griffith, a big, fast hustling player, bulwarked the defense. Jimmy Jones, Jr., at six feet four an inch shorter than Stephan, played center, while Stephan played power forward. Johnny Cobb and Tim Jones started at guard. Mike Touchette, a former high school athlete, became trainer. About sixteen young men tried out, and eleven made the team.
When the broadcaster for the Guyanese National Cricket team came to Jonestown, the basketball team put on a show—warm-up drills where they dunked the ball, and a scrimmage with flashy passing. It was the creative basketball style found on U.S. ghetto playgrounds, but not on Guyanese courts. It so impressed the announcer that he decided to arrange a tournament between the Jonestown and Guyana national teams. People would pay to watch the American wizardry, he said.
For a group of young hoopsters who wanted to have some fun and escape the endless community meetings, this indeed was welcome news. The prospect of a tournament in Georgetown gave them incentive to polish their skills. And now if anyone questioned their “frivolous” pastime, they could justify it more easily. Friends and family respected the boys. Other residents, however, noticing that three of Jim Jones’s four sons were starters, considered the team another example of special privileges for the elite. And many feared them. After all, the same young men buttressed Temple security.
Although he recognized the propaganda value of the basketball tournament, Jones was unsettled by the team’s sudden plans to play in Georgetown, away from his reach. But Marceline, realizing how important the sport was to her sons and their friends, smoothed the way. When Jones wavered, she promoted the tourney behind the scenes. And to avoid jeopardizing it, she insulated her husband from any rules infractions committed by team members.
For many years, Jim Jones had advertised his movement as an alternative to the fascism he predicted for the capitalist United States. He defined fascism as “when capitalism gets mean.” He even posted the words—more or less—of American philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana’s words stand as a terrible reminder in the Dachau memorial outside Munich. Yet Jones had crafted a concentration camp of his own, complete with armed guards, an elaborate system of informants, and special places where people were disciplined or fed powerful drugs to subdue them. Punishments seldom fit the crime. For example, Mike Lund’s write-up of Vincent Lopez: “Last Monday night about ten, Vincent went into the banana shed and stole three bananas in front of my and Wesley Breidenbach’s eyes. He obviously didn’t think we’d report him.” Lopez was sent to Public Service Unit (PSU) then—and later for stealing a boy’s flashlight.
Alleane Tucker was reported because she refused to authorize sale of her 102 acres of U.S. land without first talking to her brother. Barbara Simon was put on PSU for two days, her second time, because she took ice from Jones’s water pitcher after a meeting.
In a sort of “brownie point” system, two “praises” canceled out one warning. Three warnings a month resulted in PSU punishment—which Jones found inadequate for some cases. By late summer, he had established an ECU or “Extended Care Unit,” for unmanageable people such as captured escapees. Their keepers sedated and drugged them under twenty-four-hour observation.
Jones, concerned that investigators somehow could confirm Debbie Blakey’s stories of Jonestown corporal punishment, had turned to the ECU as a replacement. Overseers at the eight-bed ECU had access to enough behavior-controlling drugs to equip the city of Georgetown. Among the drugs later recovered from Jonestown were: 10,000 injectable doses and 1,000 tablets of Thorazine, an antipsychotic; 20,000 doses of the pain-killer Demerol; 3,000 liquid doses and 2,000 tablets of Valium; 200 vials of injectable morphine sulfate; and thousands of doses of other powerful drugs, such as Quaaludes, Vistaril (for management of anxiety and tension), Noludar (habit-forming sleeping aid) and Innovar Injection, a tranquilizer normally used for surgery and diagnosis.
These behavior-altering drugs can cause hallucinations, blurred vision, confusion and speech disturbances, involuntary movements, suicidal tendencies or other emotional upheavals. They were sometimes administered in dangerously high doses to ECU patients, though there is no indication they were given to the general Jonestown population through food or other means.
Jones seemed obsessed with the ECU. In “instructions” he read over the loudspeaker on October 20, 1978, he said he believed people were feigning mental illness so they could get into ECU and thus escape work. He vowed to put a stop to it. It was difficult to imagine why anyone would want to con his way into the ECU. As Jones specified: “They’re going to get there and hear Russian and news and they’re going to do push-ups and down. If they’ve got constipation, instead of taking a laxative, they can break it up their ass with their finger.”
The instructions Jim Jones read over the loudspeaker on October 16 were neatly typed in capital letters, seven pages in all. for the
hundredth time, Jones told his people about their many enemies among the defectors. He told them that the Russians had promised to protect Jonestown’s people from any invasion by the Guyanese and would offer university scholarships in the Soviet Union. And he told them that the “little detective”—Joe Mazor—had revealed that class enemy Tim Stoen had been in the CIA for eight years.
Father issued other instructions: security was to roam constantly and no one was to talk to them. People were to drink lots of water because the full moon was coming. People, he explained, are 98 percent water. So they, like the tides, are affected by lunar motions.
This night, Jones again took a stand against “nonrevolutionary” suicide. A few nights earlier Ricky Johnson, eighteen years old, had run into the bush, distraught that his girl was sleeping with his best friend; the next night he tried to kill himself by drinking gasoline, and his guilt-consumed girl friend tried the same. The affair deeply offended Jones’s concept of self-destruction; he did not want his people dying for selfish reasons, such as homesickness or “sick” love affairs. He himself wanted to choose the time, place and manner of their destruction.
Verging on incoherence, his digression covered everything from Tim Stoen to the girl who had allegedly left her panties on his desk in high school because he would not make love to her. “The next person I revive from suicide,” Jones said, “I will see that medication will not be spent on you.... Think what you could do if you would not internalize that violence by self-destruction and [instead] think towards the enemy. Don’t forget that Tim Stoen’s still walking around.”
As an alternative to suicide, Jones suggested that despondent people come to him to be sedated. “We can give you assistance that will enable you to walk about. But you will be for a while sleepy and drowsy”
Stephan Jones cringed when he heard his father talk like that. It also renewed a thin hope: maybe people soon would recognize his words as nonsensical orders from a madman and would stop dancing to his whims and fantasies. However, the growth of any rebellious seeds was retarded by mistrust and paranoia, the inner circle of protective aides and Jones’s growing isolation.
Rarely did Jim Jones venture out of his own house and talk to people one to one. Rarely did he encounter anyone who would tell him anything he did not want to hear. His fears could run unchecked and unchallenged: there was danger everywhere. Danger from mercenaries in the bush. Even danger from the Guyanese government, which had shown itself ineffectual in handling Temple enemies. And most of all, it seemed, dangerous forces threatened him inside Jonestown, where people were displaying their unhappiness by trying to escape even from life itself. All it would take was one more talkative defector....
The next day, October 17, Jim Jones warned his beloved people that the Guyanese had been instructed to shoot escapees in the heart and that Temple guards would not hesitate to use crossbows and guns to kill them. “If you try to cross that border you’ll get shot from either side,” Jones emphasized. “It is illegal to cross that border, so just face some facts and grow up.”
Escape from Georgetown was portrayed as equally difficult. Jones falsely said the Guyana Tax Board promised to notify him of any Temple member who applied for a tax clearance. And runaways would need passports from the U.S. Embassy, where officials also had promised to tip off the Temple, he lied. One would-be escapee had come down with a rare disease, he added.
Jones also told the suicidal in vivid detail about the perils of drinking gasoline: “It causes instant death. The very eyeballs turn until you see the whites of their eyes and they die an agonizing death. The one who took gasoline [Ricky Johnson] shit fire and his mouth was on fire for six hours.” If anyone realized that a person could not “shit fire” for six hours and “die instantly” at the same time, no one said so. People no longer responded to the content of Jones’s messages, but to his emotional cues, key words and body language, and to their own fears.
As morale plunged, Jones tried to buoy up his people with an odd hard sell. People eschewing the move to the Soviet Union would be sent back to the USA, to rot in fascist concentration camps, he said. “Some of you don’t hate that system enough. You’re still in love with that goddamn system ... you’re always griping about some little old damn thing you don’t have. I don’t miss all those white faces I don’t see. To me, if we never got further than this, it would be heaven.”
And for people who worried that their chronically ill Dad might depart this earth in their time of travail, Jones added one last reassurance: “I will long outlive you. It is quite obvious that I have gone through the valley of the shadow and returned ... I did not bring you to this point to leave you without a future, without someone who loves you, who will plan and care for you.”
In his tyranny, Jones was turning more and more to his Extended Care Unit to throttle malcontents, and it was becoming obvious to many people. Anyone with eyes could see Vincent Lopez or Shanda James staggering around the compound after they had emerged from the ECU. Lopez had been drugged to unconsciousness because he ran into the bush; when he woke up, groggy, he told Stephan Jones, “I know I been drugged, but that food sure is good.” He remained in ECU two weeks.
The drugging had begun with Barbara Walker, a tall volatile woman who kept attacking Stephan for resisting her advances. She thought people were telling Stephan not to go with her because she was black. After she jumped young Jones three times, once with a farm implement, his father decided to have her drugged on a more permanent basis, despite Stephan’s objections.
Others joined Barbara Walker in ECU. One was attorney Gene Chaikin, who had two kids in Jonestown. He had made disloyal noises to Charles Garry during the six-day siege, and Chaikin’s brother in the States had been threatening to get him out of the jungle. As the Temple’s only remaining lawyer, Chaikin knew too much ever to be let go.
Another valuable settler, Mike Touchette’s father Charlie, also found himself feeling woozy at times. Jones feared that his barely repressed negativity would become open defiance. Touchette really was no more negative than he had been for years, but Jim Jones had become more intolerant.
An October 6 report about Christine Lucientes—who had encountered Jones in night school in Ukiah and eventually became one of his lovers—made painfully clear the extent to which Jones was using the ECU.
“Christine Lucientes was at home changing her clothes and said that she just couldn’t believe that she was being put on PSU because she refused to go to ECU and be drugged,” a woman informed Jones.
“I told her if she were really grateful, there would be no reason for anyone to want to drug her. She then replied, ‘Grateful for what? To go to PSU?’ I said, ‘No, grateful to Dad for being here.’ She said, ‘I’m grateful to be here. It’s just that I don’t want to be drugged.’
“She next said, ‘I can’t believe I’ve been lied to, I’ve been tricked.’ ... Her whole attitude was like some injustice had been done to her and the ECU thing had been previously planned.... She said, ‘I refuse to be another Vincent and another Shanda,’ and she named some other names I can’t recall.”
Treatment of Shanda James was not only tragic; it also ended the age of innocence for Stephan Jones’s brothers, Jim Jones’s elite bodyguards. For the first time, they faced up to their father’s monstrous behavior.
Shanda James was nineteen and beautiful. She was married to Bruce Oliver, but Jones wanted her body. Soon he and Shanda were spending time at his cottage under the guise of counseling for her “suicidal” tendencies. People close to the scene began to suspect something more, especially when they saw her assisting Jones back to his cottage after meetings. Soon she had begun to take on airs, a telling sign. Like other mistresses, Shanda—already in charge of Jonestown entertainment —was given new responsibilities. But what was unusual about this mistress was her color. Stephan believed she was his father’s first black lover. In fact, he thought that Jones felt threatened by black women, afraid he could not measure up to black men.
One day Stephan Jones was walking with his father near the medical clinic when Jones turned to him and said, “I’m having sex with Shanda.” Stephen felt Jones was boasting about his success because so many men in Jonestown were attracted to her; all he muttered was, “I know.”
“You know?” said Jones. “I can’t pull anything over on you, can I?”
“No,” said Stephan, coldly.
“I told your mother.”
“You told Mom?!” Stephan was upset. When his father said something about how Marceline had tried to manipulate guilt, Stephan walked away.
As the affair became more public, others began to resent Shanda James. Tim Jones, like his brother Jimmy and some of their friends, still believed in Jim Jones. They blamed his excesses on others, on Carolyn Layton or Johnny Brown or Maria Katsaris. In the case of Shanda James, Tim Jones was so indignant that he came up to Stephan and snorted, “That bitch. She’s making Dad fuck her.”
“He doesn’t mind it that much,” said Stephan.
Fifteen minutes later, the radio blared, “Stephan Jones report to the radio room.” Once there, he was handed the phone hot line to his father’s house. “What the hell did you mean by that?” Jones demanded. “Saying I don’t mind fucking Shanda?”
“Well, you don’t,” Stephan said.
“What do you mean,” repeated Jones. “I go through hell every night for all of you.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Stephan agreed, to shut him up.
Though he silenced his son, Jones felt some guilt over the affair—and needed reassurance. He took the matter to his small circle of advisers, among them Harriet Tropp, Carolyn and Karen Layton, Maria Katsaris. Tim Carter happened to be hanging around when the subject came up.
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