A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  Skeptics dismiss faith healing as psychological, not biological. They reduce such claims to the power of positive thinking. If, say, a woman who suffers from chronic chest pain due to a heart condition or stress believes in faith healing, she will feel the pain dissolve when a healer lays hands on her. Science may attribute her sudden relief to a rush of endorphins, but for her, the experience has a self-authenticating power that defies logic: God healed her, and that was the beginning and end of it.

  Hyacinth Thrash believed Jim Jones had the gift.

  She first heard about Jones in 1955, when she was fifty.

  At the time she was childless, twice divorced, and living with her younger sister, Zipporah Edwards, in Indianapolis. They women were raised Baptist, and had later converted to Pentecostalism, but in 1955, they were between churches, having quit their last church after a new preacher arrived and immediately demanded a larger salary from his working class congregation.

  The sisters watched church television instead. Televangelism was brand new, and although some people criticized it as a poor substitute for indolent believers, it was the perfect solution for Hy and Zippy, who revered God but couldn’t say the same for his pitchmen. If a TV pastor offended them, they could just turn him off.

  When Zip saw Jones preaching on a local television channel, she thought Jones was a fine speaker, but what excited her more, that Sunday, was his choir. There they stood in matching satin robes, blacks and whites side by side like keys on a piano, singing her favorite hymns. Zippy had never seen the likes of it.

  “I found my church!” she shouted. She got up and pulled Hyacinth into the room. As they watched the service, a longing bloomed in them.

  Born in a whistle-stop town deep in Alabama, the sisters had grown up in a close-knit family. Their father had steady work as a train cook, and their mother cleaned houses for white people. (Hyacinth was named by one of her mother’s employers.) Although they wore flour-sack dresses, they never went hungry.

  Their household was harmonious, but Hyacinth noticed from a young age how things shifted the moment she stepped off their yard. The sign outside a neighboring town read: “We don’t allow no niggers in this town. You better get out before the sun goes down and if you can’t read, better get out anyhow.” Only landholders could vote, perpetuating white power. She sometimes ran into former slaves who bore the name of their erstwhile master branded on their backs.

  When she was in grade school, a family friend was lynched. A group of white men followed him through town, taunting and trying to incite him. When they kicked him in the buttocks, he could stand it no longer and lunged at his assailants. They strung him up from a tree as a warning to other so-called insolent blacks.

  “Papa, isn’t there a better place?” Hyacinth kept asking her father. He was reluctant to leave their farm and heritage, but the lynching persuaded him that no African American was safe in the South. In 1918, the family boarded a train to join the Great Migration of two million blacks who left the Jim Crow South searching for better lives. As Hyacinth later wrote, “After the Civil War, we was freed but we wasn’t free.” Their train was segregated all the way to Kentucky. Among the family’s possessions was a cherished biography of President Abraham Lincoln.

  They settled in Indianapolis with the help of relatives who’d gone before. Although Hyacinth, thirteen, was eager to reap the North’s promise, her subpar education held her back. In her Alabama town, black children only attended school in the winter, so that they could work the fields during the growing season. She was ashamed of her learning deficit, and rather than be stuck in a class with younger kids, she dropped out of school altogether after ninth grade. She held a series of unskilled jobs: baby-sitting, cleaning, operating the elevator at the Indiana State House, and married twice, to unfaithful men. She was heartbroken to learn she couldn’t have children.

  In 1951, when Hy was forty-six, and Zip, who’d never married, was forty-two, they’d saved enough money to buy a modest two-family home in the Butler-Tarkington neighborhood, an area recently forced to integrate, and took in boarders to make their mortgage payments.

  Indianapolis was less overtly racist than the South, but it was by no means an egalitarian city. As soon as black families started moving into the neighborhood, for-sale signs lined the streets. By the time the sisters arrived, the lone white holdouts lived next door. The middle-aged couple refused to talk to the sisters. If they happened to be sitting on their porch when Hy or Zippy came out to sit on theirs, they’d abruptly go back inside.

  So, on that Sunday morning when Zipporah turned on the television and saw a white man inviting believers of any color to visit his church, she was both astonished and thrilled. Reverend Jones described Peoples Temple as a church whose “door is open so wide that all races, creeds, and colors find a hearty welcome to come in, relax, meditate, and worship God.” Soon afterward, the sisters donned their finest dresses and white cotton gloves, and took a street car to Jones’s church.

  They discovered the television had not lied. Not only was the choir integrated, but the pews were, too. The usher marched them up the center aisle to the front, where the white congregants greeted them warmly. It felt like a homecoming. The joyfully serene atmosphere was redolent of their girlhoods: Here were the same tidy pews, the soulful organ voluntary, the wafts of perfume and hair pomade, the children dolled up and peering over the seat backs. Here were the hymns they knew by heart. Here was a handsome young white minister preaching the word in a gospel cadence, afire with the Lord.

  The scene from the pulpit was no less thrilling. It must have been slightly intimidating for Jones, a callow twenty-four-year-old, to look down at the rows of faces before him, each expecting a private miracle. His early sermons, which were rambling, disjointed, and filled with stilted King Jamesian English, such as “verily” and “doeth,” reflected his inexperience. Perhaps he thought the affectation gave him an air of sophistication. After all, his college degree was in education, not divinity. A line lifted from a church newsletter printed in April 1956, two months after he was ordained by Assemblies of God, is exemplary of his strained composition: “The fullness of him that filleth all in all who is in you all and through you all and above you all.”

  During his sermons, the young Jim Jones mimicked the Pentecostal flourishes that mesmerized him as a kid: the dramatic pauses, shouted words, the pulpit fist bangs for emphasis. His dramatic healings moved the room to wonderment and reverence.

  After the service ended, Jones strode up the aisle to stand at the entrance to the sanctuary, shaking hands and sharing a few words with worshippers as they filed out. He grasped each sister’s hand in his own and looked them in the eye, according them a dignity and respect that few whites had for them.

  Despite being impressed with Peoples Temple, the sisters got lazy. It took effort to dress up, catch that street car. They reverted to TV church. After a few weeks, they found a flier on their doorstep. It said that Pastor Jones and twelve of his members would be on their block that Wednesday evening and planned to stop by. He’d not forgotten them. The sisters, excited, tidied up and prepared refreshments. As promised, Jones arrived with his disciples and sat in their immaculate parlor, listening wholly to them as the sisters spoke of their history, aspirations, and heartbreaks. Then, he laid soft hands on their shoulders and prayed for them. By the time he left that night, Jim Jones had gained two more followers.

  The sisters would become part of the church’s largest demographic: black women. They spent most of their Sundays at the peak-roofed church at 1502 N. New Jersey Street. After the morning service, they helped run the soup kitchen in the church basement before attending vespers. They also volunteered in the Temple pantry, which distributed kitchen staples and used clothing to needy families. The outreach programs fostered relationships between Temple members as they drove through Indy together looking for donations of stale, expired, or overripe food. Hy and Zippy were equal partners with their white counterparts in a commo
n cause; race was beside the point.

  Jones kept pushing boundaries. The subject of his sermons—improved rights for women, blacks, and the poor—was heady stuff back in the 1950s. He didn’t use ambiguous parables about mustard seeds and lost sheep to instruct his congregation, but became a living example of his message. He integrated his household as he did his church, adopting several nonwhite children, including, in 1960, a black son who became his namesake: James Warren Jones, Jr. At the pulpit, he could now relate his personal experiences with racism and thus gain credibility with his increasingly dark-skinned flock. When his adopted Korean daughter died in a car accident in 1959, he was forced to bury her in a segregated graveyard. As his wife, Marceline, walked down the street holding Jimmy Jr.’s hand, a woman spat on her. He’d later even claim to be a minority himself—part Native American and part African American—although his blood relatives denied this after his death.

  Jones offended some and convinced others. He took his message beyond the sanctuary. When he learned that several Indianapolis restaurants discouraged minority patrons by oversalting their food, or only serving them takeout, Jones announced on his television program that he was going to fast until they changed these racist practices, which they did. He also forced the Methodist Hospital to integrate. He chose a black personal physician, and when he was hospitalized for an ulcer, the hospital administrators assumed he was black as well and assigned him to a negro ward. They tried to move him to a white ward when they discovered their mistake, but Jones refused to leave, and took the opportunity to grandstand by giving patients sponge baths and emptying their bedpans.

  In the late 1950s, Jones appeared to be at the forefront of the civil rights movement, but scholars would someday cast doubt on almost every aspect of Jones’s ministry, even suggesting that his adopted children were mere props that he acquired to generate headlines and attract followers.

  Nevertheless, in 1961, his renown prompted Mayor Charles Boswell to name Jones head of the city’s fledgling Human Rights Commission. In an Indianapolis Times story announcing the appointment, Jones addressed miscegenation fears raised by his church. “The Negro wants to be our brother in privilege, not our brother-in-law,” he said. In his first weeks as commission head, Jones convinced three local restaurants to accept black patrons and offset owners’ fears that this would hurt business by bringing carloads of Temple members to fill empty seats.

  His prime targets, however, were Indy’s churches.

  “The most segregated hour in America is the Sunday morning worship hour,” Jones liked to say. After concluding morning services at the Temple, he’d drive a group of black members to a white neighborhood. Led by their fearless pastor, the visitors would walk into a church, politely greet the ushers, and wait to be seated. Jones called this “witnessing to integration.”

  It took individuals to overthrow the system. A middle-aged seamstress from Alabama named Rosa Parks. Four college students in North Carolina who camped out at a whites-only lunch counter for days, enduring hatred and spittle, until they were served.

  Jones recruited Hyacinth and Zipporah to be part of his integrationist efforts. At one church, the pastor started singing “Old Black Joe,” a song idealizing slavery, to offend them. At another, a man opened the windows next to them on a snowy day, attempting to freeze them out. One church leader said he would have roped off an area, had he known they were coming. Hyacinth began to dread these confrontations. Jones told the media he received death threats for his actions, as well as slashed tires and rocks launched through the Temple’s windows.

  For Hy, the last straw came when a white man stood up and said they’d be bombed if they didn’t leave. Jones led his flock into the field next door and preached to them there. The experience terrified Hyacinth; she’d seen what happened to blacks who overstepped boundaries in the South. She had second thoughts about Jim Jones, and told him God should take care of integrating churches himself.

  Her misgivings fell by the wayside, however, when she learned she had breast cancer. Her doctor diagnosed it, and when she pressed her fingers to her chest, she could feel the hard tumor herself. The following Sunday, Jones laid his hands on her and prayed. The lump was gone by Wednesday. Seven doctors examined her and confirmed that the mass had disappeared. One doctor told her it was a miracle, and a nurse danced with her in the hospital corridor. Misdiagnosis, spontaneous remission, or miracle? It didn’t matter. Hyacinth was convinced that Jim Jones healed her.

  She’d follow him anywhere after that.

  CHAPTER 3

  REDWOOD VALLEY

  In the early 1960s, the prospect of World War III loomed large. In the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev repeatedly threatened to annihilate the West while, in the United States, the Kennedy administration warned citizens to avoid looking at bright flashes in the sky and suggested aspirin to treat radiation-induced headaches. American schoolkids practiced duck-and-cover drills that were pointless against nuclear fission but made adults feel better, and families built fallout shelters in their backyards.

  In churches across the nation, preachers used the mounting tension to pressure their flocks to get right with God before the coming armageddon.

  Jim Jones did something far more practical: He made plans to move his congregation to a safer place. He claimed to have had a vision of a mushroom cloud exploding over Chicago and predicted that Indianapolis would also be wiped out. After reading an Esquire article in 1962, titled “Nine Places in the World to Hide” (from a nuclear attack), he moved his family to one of the locations on the top of the list—Belo Horizonte, Brazil—with the idea that he would establish himself there before sending for his church members.

  But he didn’t speak Portuguese and struggled to find work and feed his family. During his nearly two-year absence, his associate ministers managed the church but, without Jones’s showy performances, Temple membership dwindled. Where services once attracted more than two thousand people, they now drew less than one hundred. Hy and Zippy started church shopping again. Faced with the Temple’s extinction, Jones returned to Indiana, and his presence at the pulpit again filled the pews.

  But his nuclear paranoia did not subside. He predicted Russia would launch missiles at the United States on July 16, 1967, and again warned his congregation of the need to find a safe haven. This time, he picked northern California, which was also named in the Esquire piece, and was more palatable to his flock; he wasn’t pressuring them to leave the cozy Midwest for a politically unstable third-world nation, he was just asking them to take a two-day drive across the country.

  As schools let out for summer vacation in 1965, dozens of families piled their possessions onto their cars and rode westward in a long caravan, with Jones in the lead vehicle. The migration split families. For some, church was a Sunday affair, more social club than a lifestyle. They’d rather take their chances with the bomb than forsake everything to follow an eccentric preacher into the unknown. He’d failed in Brazil; there was no guarantee California would be a success. Relatives of the migrating members wondered how their loved ones could fall for Jones, whom many saw as a crackpot, while those who left Indiana worried about their kin’s safety.

  The move was an acid test: Only those who believed Jones was a seer—endowed with a paranormal ability to predict the future—would uproot themselves from all that was familiar and follow him. All told, about one hundred fifty people followed him to California that summer; these would become his core membership. Most of these original Hoosiers would also follow him to Guyana, and die there.

  The move also divided Hyacinth and Zipporah. Zippy wanted to go, but Hy was reluctant. She enjoyed the life they’d forged in Indianapolis, and took great pride in their hard-won home. She’d finally found that better place she’d asked of her dad fifty years earlier.

  Then she became lame. What started as a strange numbness in her leg turned into trouble walking. X-rays revealed a spinal cord tumor. She had it surgically removed, but was left with permane
nt nerve damage that forced her to walk with a cane and made it impossible for her to keep her cleaning job. Meanwhile, Zip kept bugging her to move to California. Morning, noon, and night, she pleaded. She worried Hy with the impending nuclear holocaust one minute, and reassured her that Jones would cure her leg—just as he’d cured her breast—the next.

  Jones also called members who didn’t join the caravan. He used different ploys to goad his old congregants to join him. He told Jerry Parks, who was ill, that he’d die if he didn’t move to California, so Parks went, bringing his mother, wife, and three children. For Hyacinth, he painted an idyllic picture of the small town where the group settled. He told the sisters he’d find them employment; the local mental hospital was closing, and many Temple members had set up government-subsidized care homes to take in displaced patients. It was easy money: Care-home operators didn’t need experience; they just needed room for boarders. The offer appealed to Hy, especially given her limited mobility. For the past ten years, she and Zip had volunteered at a psychiatric hospital, helping organize picnics and clothing drives; she found caring for the patients rewarding. Toward the middle of 1967, after much late-night contemplation, Hy told her sister she was ready to go.

  They packed up their memories: age-curled photographs from Alabama, mildewed books, treasured mementos from their deceased parents, and left Indianapolis in high spirits on an early summer morning. That year had heralded several victories for civil rights. The Supreme Court overturned state laws banning interracial marriage, and President Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall to be the first black justice in the high court. Nonetheless, the sisters were wary about running into local bigots and whites-only cafes as they drove cross country for the first time, so they planned accordingly, packing a cooler with enough sandwiches and tea cakes to last the entire trip. They drove most of the way on Route 66, through seas of grain, over narrow steel truss bridges, through ghost towns and deserts. They were sightseeing America. The feeling of movement rejuvenated them. There was still excitement left in them. There was still life.