Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  Marceline told her sister, Sharon, that Jones was “very sick,” raising her hopes that the family troubles might end with Jones’s death. Marceline said Jim was feeling closed in, and stayed in his cabin most of the time. It was harmful emotionally, she said, because he had been accustomed to the road, organizing bus caravans, driving or flying between cities. Now he was afraid even to go into Georgetown.

  Marceline still believed in the cause and in the people, but no longer in her husband. “He’s like one of my children, now,” she told her sister. Jones was both her scourge and her charge. She feared him and dreaded what he and his sometimes vicious mistresses might do, yet felt protective and motherly toward him at the same time.

  In his mad fantasies and his deliberate cruelty toward his wife, Jones had bragged of seducing Sharon. Now Marceline needed to know for sure. She pulled her sister into the bathroom of their parents’ house. The question was unbearably difficult.

  “Did Jim ever ask you to sleep with him or touch you in any way?” Marceline asked.

  “No.”

  Marceline’s thoughts evidently leaped back to Guyana. “I can’t bear the thought of any children being harmed.”

  Sharon picked up immediately on Marceline’s multiple meanings: Jones had degenerated so far that Marceline could not be sure that he had not molested her own younger sister, nor that he would keep his hands off the children in Jonestown.

  “Marceline, you’ve got to get out of there,” Sharon pleaded. “You’ve got to get out of there.”

  In another conversation, Marceline admitted to her mother that she and Stephan were watched in Jonestown because they challenged unfair discipline. She said that Jim depended on drugs and saw enemies everywhere, that every time she tried to intervene, his aides derided her “emotionalism.”

  “I wish you’d gotten out of this years ago,” Mrs. Baldwin said.

  “Oh, mother,” Marceline cried. “Please don’t say that. I have suffered so much for so many years.”

  The Baldwins’ grandson, Jimmy, Jr., met their plane when it landed at Timehri Airport on October 26. The group spent the weekend at Lamaha Gardens to allow Walter Baldwin, who had undergone surgery in May, to rest from the arduous flight. During the layover, they went sightseeing and heard Marceline speak at a church.

  Monday, the thirtieth of October, the Baldwins flew into Port Kaituma on a government plane and rode into Jonestown by tractor. They had flown, unknowingly, into the eye of the storm. This Republican former city councilman from Richmond, Indiana, and his wife were about to be given the royal tour in the socialist sanctuary of Jim Jones, who within days would openly advocate the assassination of a congressman and make secret preparations for mass murder. For nearly thirty years, they had pushed aside their doubts about Jim Jones, unwilling to intrude in their daughter’s marriage. This would be the final deception.

  They received first-class treatment. Their guest cabin was well outfitted—a king-size bed with mosquito netting and bright-colored pillows, highly polished wooden floors with hand-woven throw rugs, a stereo, a sunny enclosed shower and bowls of fresh cut flowers and fruit.

  In the musical program planned that first night, their grandson Lew sang his first solo with the band. Jim Jones made a special trip to the pavilion to greet his in-laws, but the sight of him appalled the Baldwins. His face and body were badly swollen with edema, his hands almost twice their normal size. He could barely walk. In the month Marceline was away, his health had worsened.

  “Jim,” his wife said. “Are they giving you any medication?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied.

  The Baldwins would not see their son-in-law for the next ten days, though they would hear his voice over the loudspeaker, his words tumbling out, almost garbled.

  On their first full day in Jonestown, they received an upbeat tour. But Marceline talked to her parents in private. “Since I have arrived,” she confided, “things have gotten out of hand, and I have to do something about it. I have come back to something that displeases me very much, and I won’t get to spend as much time with you as I would like. But we’ll eat our evening meals together and spend whatever time together we can.”

  The Baldwins told her not to worry. Just being near her was enough for them. Whenever they walked past her cottage, they saw her talking and counseling people on her porch. By the end of every day, she was exhausted. Finally, Marceline confided that while she was gone, Jones had put almost twenty people on tranquilizers for causing unrest. So far, she had gotten all but seven off the drugs and out of the Extended Care Unit.

  The following Sunday night meeting, November 5, saw Jim Jones at his most bizarre. Raving incoherently at times, Jones opened the meeting by announcing that enemy infiltrators had made a third attempt to poison his food in Jonestown. But there was a much greater and more immediate danger, he said: “A congressman ... who’s close to the John Birch Society wants to drop in, and my opinion is to tell him to stick it.”

  This reference to Leo Ryan apparently brought Jones back to thoughts of security and defense, because the next subject was the six-day siege of September 1977. He spoke of it often, as the combat experience that proved the mettle of the Peoples Temple army. Now Jim Jones faced a new Leningrad where he would have to hold off “the fascists.”

  “One advantage we have,” Jones said, “is we’re not afraid, some of us, to die. I remember too well how four hundred of you stood up, and didn’t flinch an eye, and honey, if you’re afraid of death the first day, by the third day you aren’t afraid no more.”

  Then the catharsis began. The first victims were two small children Jones bawled out for killing bugs; he threatened to put them on PSU as punishment. Then the basketball team was confronted. He addressed coach Lee Ingram: “I’m interested in socialist conduct. Twenty-nine years I’ve sweated to build a communist movement, and I didn’t sweat to come over here and die in no fuckin’ jungle.”

  That last comment came out of the blue. No one had suggested dying in the jungle, but Jones clearly was pondering responses to the Ryan visit. At the same time, he was thinking of ways to extract public relations mileage from the basketball team when they went to Georgetown the next day. Perhaps they could display socialist consciousness on the basketball court, he said, by clapping every time the other team made a basket. Taken with his brainstorm, he declared: “How many thousands you can lead to communism! If the fucking referee works against you, don’t you dare show it. Go right on and, believe me, that superiority will communize some of those youth.”

  As Stephen got up to defend himself and the team, Jones suddenly flashed back to what was pure fantasy: his days of basketball greatness. He sounded as though he believed he had been something more than just a kid who occasionally sold soft drinks at the high school games.

  “If I had my son’s hands, I’d be a pro. I was a very good forward and played hard. But in the U.S., no one was kind. I quit basketball because I saw them treat one black man wrong....”

  “So when they make a goal, clap for a few seconds.... Don’t do it long,” he warned, “cuz they’ll be passing the fuckin’ ball when you’re under the post. Shit, I forgot the fuckin’ names.... Look humble. Grab them between recesses and give them a hug.”

  “I don’t know if they’ll let me,” said Stephan, whose mind was strictly on basketball. “I’ve done it before and I’ve been treated like I was some kind of fag.”

  “Well, then, shake hands,” Jones replied. “And if they don’t want to shake hands, that’ll make them look like assholes....”

  “As soon as the ball is shot,” said Stephan, “I’ll be snatching it and throwing it as fast as I can. We’re too small to be a slow team.”

  Jones told them to be careful in Georgetown, to get plenty of rest and to avoid urban temptations. There was an incurable venereal disease called “Z,” he warned.

  Then he ended the session by coaching residents once again on how to talk to strangers. The embassy man would be visi
ting on the next day, and Ryan on the eighteenth. There could be no mistakes. “It must be done on the eighteenth,” he said, referring to proper conduct. “If we don’t, we’re foolish.”

  As the sun climbed over the treetops the next morning, all of Jonestown, except Jim Jones, turned out to send off its basketball team. Mike Touchette, who was driving the truck, never had seen such a spontaneous outpouring of emotion. Marceline ecstatically hurried the team into the truck, afraid Jones might change his mind. Just before they pulled out, she went over to Touchette and hugged him, tears streaming down her face. “No matter what happens,” she said, “please take care of my sons for me.” Touchette’s mother cried, too. It was only the second time Mike had seen her shed tears. The whole town, it seemed, was crying in farewell. Did they expect something dreadful was going to happen?

  Before the team had a chance to unpack its gear in Georgetown on November 7, Jones ordered them back. But Marceline pleaded their case so persuasively that Jones reluctantly reversed himself. Everyone on the team was overjoyed, and thanked Marceline over the radio.

  By then, much of the team had turned dramatically against Jones, some with open derision. The players drove around the capital in a blue van ridiculing Jones’s paranoia. Passing a telephone pole, they would make a wide swing because, they laughed, it could be part of the “conspiracy.” Or someone would joke, “We can’t stop at the next spotlight because it’s bugged.” Not all team members knew what was going on, but they took cues from leaders, such as the Jones brothers, and happily joined in the irreverent humor.

  But then the contradictory orders bombarded them from Jonestown. As Ryan’s Guyana arrival neared, the team was instructed to intimidate the group at the airport. They were relieved when the orders changed. Next, Sharon Amos told them, “He wants you out of the house. He wants you to go to Surinam or hide somewhere.” Coach Lee Ingram pointed out the absurdity of the 180-degree reversal, to no avail. Then the team was told to guard the Jones boys, Johnny Cobb and Mike Touchette, because Ryan’s party might try to kidnap them.

  Finally, they went to the “snake man’s” house to hide. It was easier than leaving the country for neighboring Surinam. The snake man was a stocky East Indian judo teacher and venom salesman. Six team members slept in the van outside while the rest slept on judo mats inside the house, where he kept illegal guns and a basement full of poisonous snakes. Meanwhile, the team continued to work out, practicing at the National Sports Hall, enjoying the luxury of glass backboards.

  On November 7, U.S. Consul Douglas Ellice and his vice-consul-who were well briefed about the Temple case—left Georgetown for their first Jonestown visit. Because of a scarcity of airplanes, the pair shared a flight with Maria Katsaris and another church member. Upon arrival, the Embassy team interviewed many of the fifteen or so people on their “welfare and whereabouts” list, listened to a rendition of “America the Beautiful,” dined on a lunch of pork chops and chicken and met Jim Jones, who had wobbled up to the table in a white gauze mask, a person on each side to steady him.

  One of the people interviewed was Brian Bouquet, whose mother had inquired about his condition a few months earlier and was coming with Ryan. Ellice delivered a letter from Mrs. Bouquet. Brian opened it and read it with no apparent emotion. He said he was happy in Jonestown and would write his mother soon. Ellice also talked to Larry Layton, whose father in Berkeley wanted to know about the death of his wife, Lisa. Young Layton promised Ellice he would contact his relatives shortly to give them the details.

  Overall, the new consul had thought the place primitive, though he understood how residents might be delighted with their accomplishments. If anything, the visit had merely confused Ellice. It had not helped him decide which side was telling him the truth about Jonestown.

  In the week prior to Ryan’s arrival, Jones warned graphically against escaping into the jungle.

  “I want to remind you again,” he said in a monologue, “that there are, within a half mile of East House, quicksand. I’d a gone up to my head if it hadn’t been for a miracle. Stephan can verify we were out there scouting about. Now I can’t imply to you what a tiger can do with one blow of his leg. One blow can break your whole spine and neck. Not to mention, of course, he can eat you. Caymen, larger than crocodiles, the most fierce in the world, can swallow you in one gulp....”

  The uncertainty of Ryan’s visit heightened the tensions. Messages kept going among Georgetown, San Francisco and Jonestown. When was Ryan coming and how? Who was coming with him and what were their intentions?

  On November 8, Jones projected a new fear. Ryan might approach by sea and enter at night. Jones believed that forty people were descending upon him, among them Wayne Pietila of the Eight Revolutionaries. If necessary, the Temple would meet the group by force, he said.

  “There might be an attempt to enter the mouth of the river without legal permission,” Jones declared in one of his periodic bulletins, “because it has been discussed by this disreputable fascist, Congressman O’Ryan, who has supported the murder of President Allende ... Stoen also is in the number, naturally, and Grace. They are now as high in their salutation to fascism as they were in their devotion to socialism. They are traveling with an astrologer who is guiding them as to the right time to enter our premises. They are filled with hate. They tell the most horrible lies—people chained here to work spots twenty-four hours a day, and women forced to have intercourse with whoever wants them. They whip dreams of madness out of their own nightmares and evil souls. These are wicked people.”

  Jones assured his people that his information was absolutely reliable, because he had sent agents such as Tim Carter to infiltrate them. “We have trained infiltrators to be in every sense like them, to sound like them, to talk like them, to listen to their talk. Our infiltrators are inside their movement entirely....”

  Yet Jones wanted to know the identities of the rest of Ryan’s fellow travelers. He asked his people for a list of potentially hostile relatives, saying the Guyanese foreign minister had requested them.

  “Report any relative that may be hostile, because if any of them approach this community illegally, they will leave it dead ...” he said in his most prophetic voice.

  “No one enters our territory without our approval.... if they come in here by night, they are finished. Thank you. Much love.”

  There was no longer any doubt. Jim Jones would kill to protect his sanctuary.

  Jones always had kept families divided to safeguard the loyalty of individual members. Divide and conquer. But Jonestown, the isolated setting which allowed him tremendous control over people, also put family members in close proximity to each other, some for the first time in years. Some of these people then discovered that their blood ties were stronger than loyalty to a man who had turned monstrous.

  Dale Parks, the hard-working respiratory therapist, reckoned that Jones would snow Leo Ryan as he had snowed every other visitor. He thought any attempt to leave with Ryan or any other government official would reap catastrophe. But at the same time, neither Parks nor his family could take much more of Jim Jones and his pervasive voice.

  Although the public perceived Parks as intensely loyal, his family knew about his disaffection. The Parks family had talked among themselves since arriving in Jonestown in January 1978. Although they pretended to play the good soldiers and criticized each other in catharsis sessions, they proceeded continuously with escape plans, terrified of what might happen if they got caught. Unknown to anyone else, the Parks family had begun to conceal belongings near the piggery, where Dale’s father Gerry worked. They waited for the proper day to break away and hike a trail to the main road to Port Kaituma. They figured that Jones’s sloppiness would provide the opportunity soon.

  The Bogue family—with the exception of nineteen-year-old Marilee —wanted desperately to escape, too. Jim Bogue, one of the original 1974 settlers, had become disenchanted, as had his teen-age son Tommy, Teena, Juanita and their mother, Edith.


  Whenever Jim Jones talked or held one of his increasingly frequent White Nights, Juanita Bogue had become extremely upset. She hated Jim Jones talking about violent death—beheadings with cutlasses or bodies blown to pieces—especially in front of the small children. It sickened her to hear the news, the praise given the Red Brigades for kidnapping and killing Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. She hated the regimentation. She hated the moist climate that turned minor cuts and scratches into swelling sores.

  She thought her weeding work in the cassava fields was pointless, designed to keep the crews busy. But working in the fields had afforded one advantage. She saw her family every day, and in the absence of security guards, they began the laborious process of rebuilding family bonds and trust.

  Their escape plan was born while Teena and Juanita worked together in a field. While comparing notes, they realized that each had legitimate complaints about life in Jonestown. The next step was for the sisters to talk to their father. They were scared at first, thinking that even their own father might report them. But Jim Bogue agreed with his daughters and confided that, for years, he had hoped conditions would improve. Together, a few members of the Bogue family began to plot their escape.

  Others, in some small corner of their minds, guarded the same notions. One of them, eighteen-year-old Monica Bagby, never had joined Peoples Temple voluntarily. When Monica graduated from Opportunity High with seemingly nothing better to do, her mother, an enthusiastic member, sent her down to Jonestown in the summer of 1978. Beset by health problems because of the poor diet and unfamiliar climate, the young woman hated the place immediately. Given an opportunity to leave, she would become the only black to take the dangerous step; she would team up with a young white man named Vern Gosney.