Katsaris gave Anthony one last instruction. Handing his son the silver cross he kissed each morning, he said, “Maria always loved this cross. She said that when I die, she wanted it. If all else fails, give her this cross....”
Like the relatives and Ryan’s aides, we reporters rushed around gathering baggage and making transportation arrangements. Sam, our driver, leaned on his cab out front, ready to go. Once on the plane, there would be no way to call the Examiner again or to file another story until we came out of the jungle wilderness. So I called the city desk and said that if they did not hear from me, it meant that we had boarded the plane for Port Kaituma. The newspaper would have to rely on other sources to confirm that we indeed had reached Jonestown. Just prior to leaving the Pegasus, I filed a story quoting Ryan: “The matter is fluid, and is changing from hour to hour.”
A grim melancholy tinged a hopeful and excited airport farewell. Even those relatives feeling excruciating disappointment came to Timehri Airport to see us off, to give last-minute instructions and requests to Ryan, to hope again out loud that their people might come out with the party after all. The emotion of the moment overcame Grace Stoen. In her shorts, she moved away a few feet and, behind a pillar, cried in privacy. Ryan sadly embraced Clare Bouquet and Nadyne Houston. People who had come far yet could not travel the final distance murmured words of encouragement to the fortunate ones.
As the group waited alongside the runway, a twin prop DeHavilland Otter was readied for boarding. It turned out that the crew needed an extra seat. To make room, Carol Houston Boyd had to be bumped. She stood crying on the apron, among the other unlucky ones.
Inside, the pilot, earphones in place, checked his passenger list on a clipboard. Ryan evidently did not hear him yell, “Sir, do you want any more aboard?” But I yelled back, “Any more room?”
“Yes. One more. Hurry.”
Urgently, I shouted toward the rear, “There’s room for one more.” An attendant sprang the rear door and beckoned Carol Boyd forward. After a moment of hesitation, she recognized the signal. Others pushed her. Tears flying, she sprinted for the gangway. For Sammy’s sake, I was happy she had made it aboard.
FIFTY-TWO
Port Kaituma
From the twin-engine Otter, the hinterlands of Guyana unrolled beneath us like a great green carpet, cut into smooth contours by broad brown rivers that muddied the Caribbean to the east. The land appeared as magnificent as it was mysterious, as inviting as it was forbidding. The sheer boundlessness and inaccessibility were awesome.
“There’s no way to walk through that,” observed Jim Cobb.
After about an hour aloft, the red mud of Port Kaituma airstrip stood out like a rude gash in green felt. Everyone craned toward windows as the plane swooped downward. It was 3:30 P.M. The pilot shouted over his shoulder, “Georgetown said it is unserviceable. They said the strip is in pretty bad shape, but didn’t say what it was. We’ll have a look anyway.”
As we dropped down for a closer view, we could see the yellow Temple dump truck obstructing the middle of the field—and the muddy tracks where it had plowed across the lightly graveled strip. As the plane climbed and word traveled to the rear seats, disappointment darkened our faces. The alternative was landing at Matthews Ridge, the mining town some thirty miles away. And that would delay our visit until the next morning, leaving us with only a single day to answer the question: Was Jonestown a paradise or a concentration camp?
For the benefit of those with cameras, the pilot made a pass over Jonestown and banked to afford a better view. Aluminum roofs threw the tropical sun back at us like tracer bullets. Here and there inhabitants shaded their eyes to watch us drone past. The militarylike uniformity of the buildings and the spartan setup impressed me immediately. The structures looked functional yet not primitive.
Instead of turning toward Matthews Ridge, the pilot doubled back to the Port Kaituma strip. “It looks okay to me,” he said, anxious to land before our Temple transportation left. Eyes rolled at the prospect of landing. I looked beseechingly toward Neville Annibourne, the information officer assigned to us by the Guyana government. “Well,” he shrugged. “He’s the pilot.” Dwyer, the U.S. Embassy’s number-two man, did not seem to care either, though some in the group already were worried that the twenty-seater could not negotiate the tight 2,100-foot strip. The pilot confidently eased down the Otter and reversed the engines, throwing us forward against our seat belts. When we came to rest with a third of the runway to spare, applause broke out.
As we groped down the wire railing of a shaky gangway, a half dozen robust young men glared and postured by a heavy-duty dump truck. In T-shirts and tank tops, they menaced muscular arms and shoulders. Beneath bandannas and angry brows, their eyes pierced us with hostility. Their legs were spread and firmly planted in the muddy earth. Their earth.
Prominent among them were two black men—Jonestown security chief Joe Wilson with a corn-row hairdo, and six-foot-seven former head of security Jim McElvane, who seemed to turn up everywhere since our arrival in Georgetown. Mike Prokes, the public relations man, circulated with a tape recorder running and joined the huddle of Temple members and Temple attorneys.
Within minutes, we were confronted with disappointment: Garry and Lane would proceed on the Temple truck, but the rest of us would stay at the airstrip. Why? Corporal Emil Rudder, a portly black Guyanese policeman with sandals and not a single garment that could be construed as a uniform, announced: “I was informed by a superior officer that Peoples Temple do not request the parties present [to go] into the Peoples Temple.... I don’t know the reasons. I was informed three days ago of this.... You can wait around.”
“I’m Congressman Ryan,” Ryan said extending his hand. “And we are a congressional delegation, and we are here to inquire into the health and welfare of the people here. We intend not to violate any laws.” His voice took on a statesmanlike timbre as he added, “We have great respect for your country and its ruler.”
At that point, another black man stepped forward and introduced himself as Herbert Thomas of the Ministry of Regional Development. He seemed embarrassed and confused as to why the Temple had sought to delay us. “We are neutralists because we don’t know what is going on,” he said, as though war had been declared. “You can’t go to Jonestown, but I am an officer in charge of this port, and if you want to come to Port Kaituma, you are welcome.”
A few minutes later word came from town, apparently from a superior official, that we could not even leave the airport. As we loitered in the parching sun, the Temple truck suddenly raced back, and Lane told Ryan, “You and Dwyer and your aides are invited. This is the first stage.”
To the press, Garry added, “We’ll try to get you in today or tomorrow if we can. But don’t try to come on your own to Jonestown.” Obviously, Jim Jones was having a change of heart about allowing us to visit.
The press and the relatives were left alone with Corporal Rudder, his sad-eyed young assistant cradling a 12-gauge shotgun and some barefoot children gnawing on sugarcane. As rain clouds blew past, the sun grew hot and we took shade beneath the airplane wing. The idea of beer sounded refreshing. After a lecture about the country’s glass conservation program, Corporal Rudder allowed us to send two teen-age boys to town for two cases of Banks, the tart Guyanese beer.
During the wait, I wandered over to the pilot, Guy Spence, who was chewing a sugarcane stick from the children. To my compliments about his flying skill, he said, “If I can’t make a decent landing after so many years, I’d better catch fish for a living.” He went to say that he had landed on many fields in far worse condition. Why the hesitancy then? “Jonestown called the Georgetown tower and said it was unserviceable,” he confided.
As we drank beer and killed time on the airstrip, some ominous bits of information came our way. Corporal Rudder confided that he feared violence in Jonestown if we went in uninvited. And a short time later, when Rudder and Don Harris went into town to talk with Rudder’s sup
eriors by radio, the slim constable with the shotgun engaged in an intense conversation with Beverly Oliver. Abruptly, she called me over. Whispering at first, he reported strange goings-on-airplanes landing in the middle of the night at the unlighted strip to pick up injured Temple members. “It was always, ‘Accident, accident, accident.’ But they were beaten, man.
“If someone asked me,” he seethed quietly, his dark eyes showing fire, “I’d put a bullet in Jim Jones’s head.” His words electrified me; I shuddered. His animosity showed he was not under the sway of Jones, but also bespoke of Jones’s power and perhaps his ruthlessness. Unsatisfied with his conclusion, I asked him more about the alleged beatings.
The constable recounted one man’s escape from the mission and his tales of mistreatment there. “They forced him to work,” he related. “Someone here helped hide this man. He said they beat him.”
“How old was this man?” I asked.
“He was an older man, heavy,” he said. “His name was Leon. He hurt inside, something bad.”
“Was his name Leon Broussard?”
“Yes. That’s him.”
The exchange was chilling. Here on this airstrip in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from that home on Potrero Hill where months earlier I had interviewed Broussard, I was offered corroboration for his story.
At about 6:00 P.M., after a couple of hours of waiting, a red Temple high-wheeler farm tractor sped toward us, with a black man at the wheel, a burly weather-beaten white woman standing behind him with the abandon of a chariot rider. Without dismounting, she said, “Everyone who wants to come out to Jonestown can come, except Gordon Lindsay. The truck is coming now.”
So the Temple had singled out him and not me, I thought. As the Temple truck lumbered up, Lindsay shrugged without protest. Instead, in his polite British accent, he asked me if he could file a story for me with the Examiner. In turn, Greg promised to take some photos for him. It miffed me that the Temple would deny entry to any of us: Why, I wondered, had they banned Lindsay but overlooked me?
At six-twenty the Otter lifted off with Lindsay aboard. Then the rest of us climbed into the Temple truck bed to begin the trip through the little river port then on to Jonestown. As the truck jounced along dirt roads in the rain, Greg and I smiled at each other and shook hands, just as we had after slipping through airport immigration.
On the way out of town, the truck stopped briefly at the Port Kaituma government guest house so McElvane could try to arrange our accommodations for later that night. Moments later, McElvane gracefully pulled his long frame back onto the truck. “There’s room only for the women.”
With the question of lodging unresolved, we resumed our journey in a moderate rain. McElvane and a white woman sat on the paint-bare truck cab roof, legs dangling. Easing over, I wanted to measure McElvane and get a reading about the situation in Jonestown. I was unaware that Jones had called him to Guyana just a few days earlier, because he feared McElvane would be indicted for property extortion in Los Angeles.
“Beautiful country,” I commented as the clouds cracked and released a golden sunset.
“So’s our project. A beautiful place with a lot of love,” he replied in a baritone, gazing from under a sun visor.
Remote. That was it in a word. Every spin of the tires of that six-wheel drive reminded me of the isolation, of our dependence upon the Temple. How easily the big tires could bog down in that deep reddish mud. And it was not even the rainy season.
We passed a Peoples Temple greeting sign and a guard shack equipped with a radio. A chain across the road had been removed by two black men. Beverly Oliver hailed one of them, James Edwards, the tall elderly man whose relatives had told me he was disillusioned, emaciated and eager to escape. Yet he guarded the entrance.
As we moved on, I commented to McElvane, “Must have been a real job clearing this road.” The dark jungle on both sides soared a hundred feet.
“Lots of hard work went into it,” McElvane agreed. “It was done the hard way. Lots by hand, and tractors too.”
“Cut and burn?”
“Yeah,” he said, “And we plow the ashes into the soil. You can grow almost anything.”
“Are those bananas?” I asked, gesturing at rows of broad-leafed fruit trees, which seemed to hold back the jungle some fifty feet from the roadside.
“No, they’re plantain. And that’s cassava along the road.”
My mind traveled faster than the truck could. “Have you heard anything about how Ryan’s talks with Jim Jones have gone?”
“No.”
“When Ryan went to Lamaha Gardens, he was told that he couldn’t come here because Rev. Jones was very ill. What’s wrong with him?”
“Look,” he said, summoning a little anger. “I’ve been around. Don’t try to interview me on the sly.” I had poked an inflamed nerve. Was Jones worse than we had imagined? Or was he not ill at all?
The truck slogged uphill through the last quarter mile of muck. By sunset’s afterlight, we jumped one by one into the sloppy ground and helped NBC with their equipment. As we took tentative steps on the slippery boardwalk, someone made a five-point landing in the mud.
Jones was not among the cheery faces greeting us, but the two attorneys came out to the truck. While Lane helped with baggage, Garry escorted Ron Javers to a large open-air pavilion roughly a hundred yards away. I tagged along, through a playground area with swings and a jungle gym of timbers, then along a short pathway, past a pair of macaws on perches. Hundreds of people under the metal roof, reconnoitering around a stage in front or sitting at long wooden tables and on benches, looked up as we entered. Greeting everyone who met my eyes, I worked my way through gawkers and followed Garry to the center table.
For a moment, I did not see him. Then Garry was introducing Javers to the shrunken man in a pimiento-colored shirt. They exchanged pleasantries, with Javers expressing gratitude and Jones playing host. Garry went on for a minute extolling Javers’s compassion as an investigator of poor prison conditions in Pennsylvania.
Without interrupting, I stepped in to introduce myself to Jones. As he stood, bracing himself against the table, his shoulders seemingly slumped under the weight of his oversized head of straight black hair that fell in a boyish sweep across his forehead. His glasses were not tinted enough to mask the glazed, almost gelatinous cast of his eyes; and they did not cover the hollowness of his sallow cheeks, nor the clamminess that seemed to drip from his body and terminate in an involuntarily feeble handshake. When he heard my name, he said with steady eyes, “I’ve read many of your stories.” He implied his disapproval, but remained cordial. “I suppose you can only write what people tell you.”
“We’ve tried without success to get your side of the story,” I said. “I’m here to see the mission for myself.”
“Good. Many others have found it to be beautiful, a paradise.” He glanced Garry’s way and unwound with words, one thought and one subject after another. In a way, it reassured me; no one would need to pry answers out of the man. But his shaky appearance bothered all three of us, and we encouraged him to sit down.
Jones took a chair at the head of a long table, about forty feet away from a raised stage spilling with musical instruments, amplifiers and loudspeakers. Musicians gathered beneath a black sign with white lettering: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Jones faced the stage; on his immediate right sat Javers; on his left Garry took a bench seat. I sat between Garry and Karen Layton, the second Temple wife of Larry Layton. Jack Beam, Carolyn Layton, Harriet Tropp, Dick Tropp and Patty Cartmell chose places around us at the main table. At the far end, near the stage, Jim Cobb talked with members of his family, the only black members and nonleaders at the head table.
While other relatives seated themselves nearby with their family members, the smell of food filled the pavilion. The Temple served us a delicious meal of pork and gravy on homemade biscuits, with greens and potatoes, while most of their own people—pres
umably they ate earlier—stood around talking or waiting for the entertainment to begin. We washed down dinner with fruit-flavored punch and sweet well water.
Greg Robinson left the table to circulate, to capture on film the faces of Jonestown. From all appearances, the people seemed happy and healthy. Children horsed around, poking each other, tugging the tails of mongrel dogs, as the band warmed up. Among the many senior citizens, teen-agers and young adults stole glances our way. Everyone was dressed in his Sunday best.
In a few minutes, all Temple members stood at attention while a singer on the stage led them in a rendition of the Guyana national anthem. Then, led by the same bronze-lunged black woman, the congregation belted out, “God Bless America,” with no less enthusiasm. The entertainment itself opened with a dance number from a snappy black-suited group called the Soul Steppers, who soon had the entire congregation—from wrinkled seniors to toddlers—clapping, bouncing and boogying to the disco routine.
The mock patriotism and the overall choreography struck me as strained, not to say phony. But where does one draw the line between a staged event and an honest attempt to put the best foot forward?
As the band jacked up the volume, the music drowned out Jones’s ramblings about the project’s achievements, and he stopped talking rather than shout himself hoarse. On my left, a pallid-looking blonde introduced herself as Karen Layton, shouting into my ear as I shouted into hers. “What are your politics?” she asked. “You’ve written negative things about us.”
“I’ve got nothing against your politics. And nothing I’ve written reflects any political bias,” I said.
“Don’t you think we’ve been attacked because we’re socialists and we’ve challenged the system?”
“I’ve taken pains to keep your politics out of my stories. Your politics weren’t the issue. The accusations of former members transcend politics.”
“You know they’re all lying.” She turned the attack on my sources of information. “They advocated violence and when that was rejected, they left and took money.... And now they’re part of a sophisticated conspiracy. They want to destroy us.”
Raven Page 72
