A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  Moscone acknowledged his debt to the Temple in several conversations that were surreptitiously recorded by Jones’s lieutenants, and showed his gratitude by giving several Temple members city jobs. He named Jones head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Crucially, when the church was later accused of being involved in criminal activities, neither Moscone, Milk, nor Freitas would heed calls to investigate the charges.

  At the same time that Jones was courting the city’s power brokers, the Temple was becoming enshrouded in secrecy. With his popularity growing, Jones worried that the Temple’s inner workings would be exposed. He began to bar the public from some services, and required members to carry identity cards. Guy Young, a white parole officer who’d attended the church in Redwood Valley in 1968, was shocked at the change when he returned five years later. He’d become disenchanted with the stodgy Presbyterian denomination of his youth and longed for a church that was more engaged with the times. Although he dismissed Jones’s supposed powers as a tool to draw people into the cause, he was impressed with Jones’s street-level ministry. During his first visit to the Geary Boulevard church, however, he was stunned. The gentle, all-embracing vibe that had drawn him to the community in Redwood Valley had been replaced by a suspicious militarism. He noted some of the Temple guards were carrying guns, and when he walked in, a group of women interrogated him: “Why are you here?” “How did you hear about the Temple?” “What do you think about Jim Jones?”

  Young was a good friend and former housemate of Temple attorney Tim Stoen, who the women called over to vouch for him. Guy stayed, convinced the church’s good works and prestige outweighed its strange secrecy, and he eventually became one of Jones’s associate pastors.

  He also collaborated with Temple attorneys to get members’ jail sentences reduced by convincing court officials to release offenders to the Temple’s care. One of the people Young sprung from jail was Stanley Clayton.

  In Ukiah, Stanley had moved in with a white couple from the Temple and attended South Valley High continuation school. As he completed his high school degree, he was able to tap into a large pool of adults who were eager to proofread his term papers or walk him through quadratic equations. He’d fallen several grades behind due to dyslexia, an ear deformity that left him partially deaf, and his chaotic childhood. Temple counselors kept him on task; if he cut class or flunked a test, he would be called before the entire congregation to answer for himself.

  The tough-love approach worked. When he received his diploma, Jones pressured him to stay in Redwood Valley, but Stanley politely declined. He was done with country living, done with watching the same two channels on television, done with listening to white-boy music on the radio. He wanted to go back to the East Bay. He wanted to show his mother his diploma and hear her say that she was proud of him.

  But without the stabilizing effect of the church, Stanley soon found trouble. His mother barely glanced at him or his diploma. Local police arrested him for public intoxication and for breaking into a warehouse to steal a charity donation jar. In 1975, when he was twenty-three, Berkeley police caught him red-handed carrying a typewriter out of an elementary school. He was sentenced to three years in county jail.

  Four months into his term, he was working on the yard crew picking up trash when his release was announced over the loudspeaker. He thought someone was trying to trick him and ignored it. Finally, a guard came over demanding to know what was wrong with him that he didn’t want to leave.

  Guy Young had intervened on Stanley’s behalf and was waiting for him outside. He drove Stanley straight to 1859 Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, an hour away, and led him into a small room. A few minutes later, Jim Jones walked in.

  “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” the Temple leader said.

  “If you got me out of there, I’m staying,” Stanley emphatically replied.

  Jones laid down the rules: no cigarettes, booze, or drugs. Such vices were the bane of the black community, Jones lectured, and kept otherwise bright young men like Stanley mired in poverty and crime. He needed a clear mind to participate in the social revolution.

  Stanley agreed to the terms, and joined the growing number of people living inside the Temple building. By night, he spread out a sleeping bag in the balcony, which was reserved for children during services; by day he cleaned the church. He showed his gratitude to Jones by keeping the place spic and span. He wanted Jones to be proud of him, and it worked. Jones named him head janitor.

  The Temple upheld Stanley. He fell in love with a seventeen-year-old girl, Janice Johnson, who had a megawatt smile and kept him honest. For the first time in his life, he felt like he belonged.

  Edith Roller did, too. Although not part of the planning commission, Edith was revered for her dedication and erudition; Jones flattered her by calling her Professor Roller. But her three sisters had reservations about the Temple. When the miracle crusade stopped in Detroit, her sister Dorothy tried to get into the service. Because she was a white, well-spoken older woman, she raised red flags. Although she gave “correct” answers to the political questions the greeters asked (she was an atheist who worked for Madalyn Murray O’Hair), they grew suspicious when she said, enigmatically, that she’d been in touch with “one of the Temple’s principal enemies.” She didn’t elaborate, but it was clear she wasn’t friendly to the cause. They refused to let her in. She stood by the door for eight hours before giving up.

  The episode widened the rift between Edith and her sisters. They demanded to know what kind of church screened its visitors, and didn’t buy it when Edith told them of Jones’s assassination fears. After one testy phone call that ended with her sister Mabs hanging up on her, Edith summarized her convictions in a letter to her: “True love is doing something about the condition of minorities and other disadvantaged people.” Jones recruited Edith to write for a short-lived magazine he launched to promote the church, and assigned her the lead article, introducing the reader to Jim Jones. As an intellectual and atheist, she couldn’t relate to Jones’s religious appeal, however, and portrayed him solely as a great socialist leader. Jones rejected the article as too political; he was still, in 1972, reluctant to openly advertise himself as a socialist, fearing it would turn potential converts away.

  He encouraged her to find work at the Bechtel Corporation, the engineering services giant that was rumored to provide cover for the CIA. She quickly landed a job as a secretary. Among her bosses were George P. Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, who, respectively, would become President Reagan’s secretary of state and secretary of defense. When Edith wasn’t transcribing the men’s speeches or straining to operate the primitive ATS computer that replaced her typewriter, she was copying internal memos for Jones, who liked to collect the private documents of influential people and companies for potential blackmail.

  Risking her job was one of the many sacrifices Edith made for Jim Jones. She did her best to practice the self-denial he insisted was necessary to live a life of principle. For example, Jones said that true followers should be equally tolerant of hot and cold, pleasure and pain, and should treat everyone—friend or foe—equally. Edith obediently bathed in cold water and told the dentist to hold the novocaine. She signed her paychecks over to the Temple, so that the money could finance charity work; bought clothes at consignment stores; and, harkening to Jones’s chronic pleas for money, even sold several prized personal items, including a statue from her travels in India and her late mother’s bedspread.

  When Jones warned the congregation that the government planned to round up blacks and intern them, she believed him. She knew from her history studies that governments had oppressed minorities throughout history, and she’d seen the wretched plight of the Jews in Europe with her own eyes.

  Jones recognized Edith as a dedicated foot soldier, and in 1975, he asked her to keep a daily journal of her life in the church. This would not be a mere diary, he assured her: It would be the historical record of the Temple movement. S
he kept it for almost four years. Her entries, for the most part, were dry and reportorial: the time she woke, what she ate, highlights of the Temple services. She took notes by hand throughout the day that she periodically typed up and gave to Jones’s aides for safekeeping.

  She believed Jones possessed a remarkable gift of insight: Once, after a service, he grasped her hands in his and gazed into her eyes without saying a word. While others might have found this gesture unnerving, Edith interpreted it as Jones’s acknowledgment of some problems she was having at work. She stood up during a service one Sunday to say that Jones reminded her of another great leader, Vladimir Lenin. She was reading Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station at the time, which included a sympathetic portrait of the Russian leader. Jones was deeply flattered.

  Nevertheless, when Jones pressured members to live communally as part of his divine socialism philosophy, she balked. She liked her solitude, and her cozy Victorian apartment near Golden Gate Park, where she enjoyed walking after work. In the evenings, she listened to opera on her radio, or read books of poetry or political theory. Crowds made her nervous; she could only take them in small doses during Temple services or bus trips.

  But Temple aides kept pressuring Edith to move into a commune. The Temple leased apartments across San Francisco and Los Angeles for common dwellings, and even subdivided the upper floors of the Geary Street church into a warren of claustrophobic sleeping spaces. The Jones family lived in an apartment on the third floor.

  Everyone was expected to move into a commune sooner or later. It was the first step toward the mass migration to Guyana—although members didn’t know this at the time.

  When a church secretary continued to press Edith to go communal, she told the woman to mark her file as “not ready.” She had too much stress at work, she said, and no time to sell off her belongings.

  But she knew she couldn’t delay the move forever; after several years in the church, she’d learned it was folly to defy Jim Jones.

  CHAPTER 6

  TRAITORS

  Even in Indiana, Jones showed a pathological fear of abandonment. When a man named Earl Jackson stopped attending his services in Indianapolis, Jones sent him a fevered note: “I am going to speak sincerely and frankly! God sent you to the Peoples Temple and you must not release yourself! I know there are things about the Message that you may not see but it is God … you will be making a serious mistake if you leave our Temple that God has ordained and declared you to be a part of. Don’t go out to see the proof of what I just said … Please hear my counsel which I give with a heart full of love for you!”

  The jarring blend of affection and threat would become Jones’s standard response to members who tried to part ways with him. The subtext is striking: If you leave me, bad things will happen to you.

  He constantly devised new ways to bind people to him. Every church member older than eleven routinely signed the bottom of a blank piece of paper referred to as an “attendance” or “meditation” sheet. Anything could be typed over their signature: an incriminating statement, a false confession, a healing affidavit, a power of attorney. This was proof of their loyalty to the cause, they were told; the sheets would only be used if they turned against the church. Then, Jones pressed further. On Wednesday nights, during members-only meetings, his aides passed out papers and pens and told everyone to admit to imaginary crimes en masse: What would they do if someone harmed the cause? What would they do if someone hurt Father? They were encouraged to be explicit and violent.

  When one of Jones’s secretaries instructed the congregation to write a statement to the effect that they would kill anyone who harmed the movement, Guy Young balked. He carried a gun for his probation job, and if the statement was ever turned over to authorities, his threat would be taken very seriously. He decided to write waste instead of kill, but one of Jones’s aides told him to be more specific. He refused. Jones was called over, and he asked Young to define waste. Young said it meant kill. They left it at that.

  Jones was hiding more than the drugging of his congregants and his own growing addiction. In California, he shed Midwestern conventions and embraced the Golden State’s emphasis on sensation. In 1968, while the hippies celebrated free love in the Haight-Ashbury, Jones embarked on an affair in Redwood Valley with a married congregant named Carolyn Layton. At the time, Marcie was in traction for chronic back pain. When she found out about the romance, she threatened to divorce him, but he turned their children against her, and vowed to prevent her from seeing them if she left him. This gave her pause. She knew how devious he was, and didn’t doubt for a minute that he’d do it. His threat kept her in the church, playing the role of devoted wife, until the bitter end.

  In line with his principles of divine socialism, and the burgeoning women’s liberation movement, he denounced marriage and family as bourgeois inventions and initiated numerous, secret affairs with both male and female followers. “My love will not reach you if you put a piece of flesh between you and me,” he told his congregation. He did his best to dismantle families by splitting them into different communes. He expected his followers to call him father and Marceline mother.

  He impregnated several of his lovers. Carolyn Layton had a son with him in 1975; others he pressured to abort. Jones bragged about his dalliances in crude language to his long-time associates, and dismissed them to his inner circle as unimportant. He said he only had sex with members to help them “relate to the cause,” and that it was a sacrifice he did not enjoy making. He only made it, however, with thin, small-breasted white women and handsome young men. The rank and file knew nothing of his predations; he kept up his image of ministerial rectitude for their benefit.

  * * *

  Congregations naturally defer to their leader because they believe he or she has their best interests in mind. This relationship lends itself to a lack of critical thinking in adherents, as well as a passive acceptance of the leader’s decisions. So, when Jones decided that members should be physically punished for their trespasses, no one challenged him. At first, the Wednesday night “family meetings” in Redwood Valley were normal counseling sessions; members were called to account for bad behavior and gently rebuked. Jones gradually made them violent. Typically, the meetings began with Jones calling a member on stage to start the dressing down: “So-and-so is such a nice person, a really special man,” he’d tell the assembly, “but what he did is unacceptable.” Then the harangue would start. Audience members would take turns pointing out the person’s transgressions: past, present, real, or suspected. An offhand quip, money withheld from the church, skipped meetings, a refusal to pamphlet: The slightest trespass could be perceived as waning dedication, and thus a cause for discipline. The verbal attacks became more virulent and menacing, until one day, Jones ordered the first member to be spanked with a belt. Once that line was crossed, beatings became de rigueur. Adults caught smoking or drinking were lined up and spanked en masse.

  Children, however, bore the brunt of the abuse. As families were broken up and kids farmed out to different communes, parental authority weakened and discipline fell to church leaders. If, during a catharsis session, the children’s parents were present, they were expected to whip their own kids to show their support for Jones’s edicts. Likewise, their criticism of their child was supposed to be the harshest. If they balked, Jones accused them of disloyalty.

  Sometime in 1972, the belt was replaced by a wooden plank dubbed the “board of education.” Jones acted as judge and jury, dictating the number of blows, and a microphone was held to the child’s mouth to amplify his or her cries. Often, a large black woman named Ruby Carroll wielded the board, and if the child couldn’t or wouldn’t stand still, two adults would hold the child in place. Sometimes, children would collapse after being battered and had to be carried offstage.

  Jones’s cruel streak did not end there. The youngest kids were subjected to special terror called the “blue-eyed monster.” This consisted of leading them into a dark room
where a creepy voice announced: “I am the blue-eyed monster and I am going to get you,” before the paddles of an electroshock therapy machine were held to their chest, delivering a jolt of electricity.

  As Jones sat high on the rostrum like King Solomon on his throne, meting out outrageous punishment for infractions such as stealing, lying, or cheating, Edith Roller duly noted his judgments in her journal:

  John Gardener, 15: 120 whacks with the board of education for calling someone a “crippled bitch.” “John screamed as he took 70 whacks; at that point Jim commuted his sentence.”

  Clarence Klingman, 12: seven rounds boxing Mark Sly, 15, for stealing. “Mark gave him some severe punches while Jack Beam stayed behind him with paddle to make him stand up. He kept saying he didn’t feel well, had the flu … for complaining he was made to take several hits while being held.”

  Little Ronald Campbell, 3: “Even after being up all night with the toothbrush (scrubbing floors), he bit a little girl today. Jim assigned him to work all night. Jim had Dave Garrison bite him so that he knows what it feels like.”

  After being disciplined, the offender was required to say “Thank you, Father” into the microphone. The next week, Jones would tell the congregation that the member’s behavior had improved, thereby justifying the discipline.

  At a certain point, Jones decided no one could leave his church.

  Those who did were called traitors or defectors and, in San Francisco, Jones ordered them to move five hundred miles away from the church and never speak ill of it, lest harm befall them. One family moved all the way to the East Coast, but not necessarily out of lingering respect for Jones’s supposed powers. He held their false confessions over their heads.

  “No one has a right to leave, and if you do, even if you come back, I’ll never forget it,” he told his congregation. He likened them to the spokes and hub of a wheel; each part was integral to the whole.