A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  Garry flew to Guyana in October for a three-day visit. He wanted to meet Jones in person to see if the Temple leader was crazy, as Gene implied, or if he was just being theatrical, as other Temple aides assured him. When he got to Jonestown, he was impressed with the orderly village the pioneers had carved from the jungle. Jones seemed calm, and apologized for overreacting. “No one ever intended to die,” he assured his counsel.

  Although Garry admired Jones for his commitment to socialism, he quickly came to dislike him as a person. One night during the visit, Garry was sitting at a table with Jones, his wife, Marceline, and a group of Temple leaders, when Jones casually mentioned that he’d once had to “fuck” sixteen people in one day to keep them dedicated to the cause, and that two of those people were men. Although no one else flinched, Garry was mortified. He didn’t think it was appropriate for a leader to use sex to control his followers. He sought out Gene but found him weirdly placid, considering the urgent conversations the men had only weeks earlier. Gene repeated the official story: The suicide threat was just a ploy—Jones would never follow through with it.

  Garry’s quibbles were small, it seemed, compared to the hundreds of smiling faces he’d observed. Everyone he’d spoken with had nothing but praise for Jones’s socialist utopia.

  When Garry returned to California, he, too, toed the line.

  “I have seen paradise,” he told reporters. “I saw a community where there is no such thing as racism … there is no such thing as ageism … From what I saw there, I’d say the society being built in Jonestown is a credit to humanity.”

  CHAPTER 13

  RUNAWAYS

  Tommy Bogue liked to perch at the edge of the pavilion and study the faces of newcomers.

  They assumed Jonestown would have the same relaxed atmosphere of the Temple’s headquarters in Georgetown, where they’d spent their first few days waiting for clearance from immigration and health authorities. At 41 Lamaha Gardens, jazz played on the stereo, sodas cooled in the refrigerator, and after a satisfying dinner, folks gathered to watch movies or play board games.

  By the time they regretted coming to Jonestown, it was too late.

  “No one leaves until all are here,” Jones announced. “If you want to go home, you can swim. We won’t pay your fucking way home.”

  The dismay and anxiety he read on the new people’s faces served as an affirmation of his own unvoiced feelings. From his father he’d learned to master his facial expressions and vocal intonations, but these new faces didn’t yet know to lie, and Tommy referred to them whenever he needed a sanity check.

  His parents’ marriage had completely dissolved in Guyana. Now his dad was in a relationship with a black woman from Mississippi named Luna Murral, who was there with her five young kids. They’d sat together in the trailer on an errand to Matthew’s Ridge and talked the whole way, and in quick succession, Jones performed a marriage ceremony to seal their bond and assigned them to a loft. Jim Bogue changed his last name to Murral, and Harold Cordell changed his to Bogue. Just as Jones substituted white for black to indicate something pejorative—as in white nights—he also encouraged men to take the surnames of their common-law wives to signal a break with patriarchal tradition.

  Tommy was thrilled to see Brian Davis among a group of new arrivals in May 1977. Brian came alone; his father wouldn’t move down for eight more months. The boys shared a bond of trust that was a rare in an organization where members were expected to pledge allegiance to the cause above all else, and Tommy felt closer to Brian than he did his own mother or sisters. After all, his mother had narked on his dad the very day she arrived in Jonestown, and his sister Marilee had informed on him soon after: One day, as the siblings were standing outside the warehouse, Tommy told her how easy it would be for him to break into it and take a new pair of sneakers to replace the disintegrating pair on his feet. You could just part the troolie leaf wall like a curtain and squeeze through, he said. Marilee turned and walked inside the warehouse: “My brother’s fixing to steal out of here, so I figure I’d best tell you,” she told the attendant as Tommy listened in disbelief. The attendant told Marilee not to worry about it, and Tommy wheeled away, both relieved and angry. He resolved never to speak to his sister again.

  Brian would never nark on him like that. In Jonestown, the boys drifted off together to roughhouse and blow off steam. Brian agreed with Tommy that Jones brought an unrelenting gloom to the settlement whenever he was around. After the September crisis, it felt like they were living in an episode of Night Gallery; a sense of doom pervaded their lives.

  Brian, too, learned to bite his tongue around others. In the communal toilet when he casually remarked to another resident, “Well, Steve, I’ve been here seventy-two days,” the man reported Brian to Jones, saying the teen sounded “hostile, or sad and sarcastic.”

  After the six-day siege, the boys began planning their escape. Neither had any intention of committing revolutionary suicide—they weren’t even sure what the term meant. They were too young to die, for socialism or anything else. They were only sixteen, still virgins. They would not die virgins, hell no.

  Although Tommy’s first attempt to escape by building a shelter in the bush failed, he’d resolved to do better the next time. After the elitist watermelon incident, he was assigned to the banana crew, where he managed to stay out of trouble for several months. “I’m out of the woodwork now,” he’d congratulate himself at the end of an arduous day. People stopped scrutinizing his every move, comment, and facial expression for signs of anarchy and started to trust him again.

  When he was put in charge of an Amerindian crew tasked with cutting back the vines creeping into the fields, Tommy started plotting again. He’d lead the crew out of sight of the compound, then stop working and ask them to teach him how to survive in the jungle.

  The Amerindians showed him to build snares for birds and small mammals, to identify edible plants, to differentiate between look-alike vines: One oozed a clear, drinkable tea-flavored sap, the other a milky poison. They showed him how to fish by smashing the bulb of an Indian soap plant and tossing it into a stream, where the mild toxins it secreted stunned fish long enough to scoop them out of the water by hand. They taught him how to treat a snake bite by spreading bitter cassava over the wound, and the importance of watching for cumulus clouds; the huge drifting cotton balls that appeared lethargic at noon often turned into violent thunderstorms by dusk. They taught him to squat and study the earth for signs of animals—tufts of fur, flattened brush, and scat—whose trails often led to water. To recognize the tall, slender manicole palm, which grew in swamps. To develop a jungle eye, in order to get his bearings by focusing through the trees at breaks in the foliage. To ditch trackers by walking up streams or in circles.

  He shared this knowledge with Brian. They schemed in whispers, out of sight, in the dark. They wouldn’t repeat Tommy’s mistake of staying close to Jonestown this time, but planned to hike forty miles up the Kaituma river to the Barima river, which flowed into Venezuela. As they traveled, they’d fish and live off the land. It’d be My Side of the Mountain, set in Guyana instead of the Catskills. After they reached Venezuela they’d figure out, somehow, how to get back to the States. Getting out of Jonestown would be the hardest part, Tommy figured; the rest would follow. One night they broke into the warehouse, squeezing through the thatch leaves, and stole boxes of condoms to sell in Amerindian villages. They’d need money to buy provisions and to call home at some point. They waited patiently for the right moment to make a break for it.

  That moment came on November 1, 1977.

  Tommy got in trouble again, this time for falling asleep while Jones was speaking during a late-night meeting at the pavilion. He was sentenced to collect coals from piles of burned brush for use in the kitchen ovens. It was a hot, heavy, dirty job. Jones asked for a volunteer to watch him, and Brian raised his hand. The leadership was distracted and had forgotten about the duo’s escapades in San Francisco. “You’d b
etter make damn sure he works,” Jones told Brian before moving on to the next order of business.

  In the kitchen the next morning, the teenagers stuffed matches, flashlights, food, and the condoms into the gunny sacks used for hauling coals, and grabbed a pair of cutlasses. As they ran through camp, Brian hammed it up, shoving Tommy and shouting “Move it!” as they sprinted toward the tree line. They hit it and kept on running.

  They made good headway until darkness fell. There was no jungle eye at night. When they raised their hands in front of their faces, they could feel the heat emanating from their palms, but couldn’t see them. They kept tripping on vines, startling at weird noises. All the fanged and clawed creatures hunted at night: the jaguar and puma, the anaconda and emerald tree boa. The world’s largest beasts. They decided to turn back to the road running between Matthew’s Ridge and Port Kaituma. As it cut through a steep hill, a group of figures surrounded them. It was the Jonestown guards.

  The boys raised their cutlasses, prepared to go down swinging. They were so close to freedom. “You raise those knives up, Stephan’s back there with a rifle, ready to shoot you,” one of the guards shouted, and Tommy didn’t doubt he would. As the guards marched them toward the glowing pavilion, Tommy blazed with disappointment. They’d almost made it. The throng was waiting for them, angry at being hauled out of bed. Jones sat in his light-green chair on the platform at the front, and as the guards pushed the boys toward him, Tommy wondered what new torture he’d come up with this time.

  The Temple leader had a mean look on his face. Tommy sensed the crowd behind him, seething like a giant, hungry animal, ready for the night’s sport. Over Jones’s head hung a large sign with its message printed in capital letters: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Tommy believed it had something to do with reincarnation, but at that moment, it seemed like a personal reminder that, despite his eternal optimism, he could never outrun trouble. He was meant to repeat it.

  In a low growl, Jones asked the boys how far they thought they’d get. Tommy took the brunt of the criticism because he’d been in Jonestown longer than Brian. Jones asked one of the guards for his version of their apprehension, then reached over to switch on the tape recorder resting on the table beside him. The tape, Q933, was one of 971 audiotapes that FBI agents recovered from Jonestown after the massacre.

  It starts midsentence, as the guard berates Tommy:

  … I’d just like to say, this idiot … you’ve been in the bush, but you’ve only been around where people are always at … and there ain’t going to be no animals there. You get out in the Venezuelan jungle, and you’re going to run into every kind of fucking thing. They would’ve killed you, you’re lucky we found you. You know what lives here, man, you know it. Don’t say you don’t.

  Jones: What lives there? You know about … You know about it? The puma? The leopard? The ocelot? ’Bout 50 different uh, breeds of uh, poisonous reptiles? Are you aware of this—any of this? How long you been around here?

  Tommy: Fourteen months, Father.

  Jones: The anaconda?

  Tommy: I’m not aware of all of this—

  Jones: Thirty-six-foot long? Can crush a horse in seconds?

  Tommy: Yes, Father.

  Jones: Didn’t you think you should’ve told your brother this? Tripping out in jungles? Did you not think that this government is our ally?

  Tommy: Yes, Father, I did.

  Jones: Well, how did you manage to think you were going to get in Venezuela with the government alerted? I’ve alerted every person in this government. From the prime minister on down. The border patrol said, if you try to cross, you’d be shot. How did you think you were going to get out of here?

  Tommy: I was—I was going to go down there by the uh, Barima River and stay down there.

  Jones: Well, they’ve all been alerted. No boat would dare pick you up, it’d a been a violation of the law.

  Guard 2: Coast Guard was already notified here to come up and down the river looking for you already. So, you didn’t have a chance in the world.

  Jones: You think I’ve located in this jungle, knowing all the scalawags like you that’ve done this shit before, after we’ve been through Leon (Broussard’s) lies … We knew there’d be others. So we had firm working alliances. We wanted Leon gone, ’cause we knew he was a babbling idiot by the time they found him. Talking about fighting in World War III. We didn’t want his big fat ass around … Anybody got any questions to ask these assholes?

  This was the signal for the audience to join the verbal attack. The size and sound of the crowd’s fury is frightening even on a low-quality tape recording. How much more so it must have been for the two sixteen-year-old boys that night. Jones turned the microphone off and on as the session grew more heated, editing on the fly. The recording shows Jones’s disturbing ability to switch from a gentle rebuke to an enraged bellow in the space between two words as he whips the crowd into an angry frenzy. A woman shrieked that the boys were “shameful bastards,” and “goddamn white fascist bigots.” More insults followed, and violence was expected, encouraged. “Vile filth,” Jones called them, before spitting several times.

  Tommy’s mother, Edith, rushed forward to slap her son’s face repeatedly until Jones told her “enough.”

  The conversation took a surreal turn when Edith proposed she cut both boys’ heads off, then commit suicide, “to keep the church from getting in trouble.” Reason had flown the coop.

  Edith: Why do you think you deserve to live when neither of you want to serve anybody or care about anybody? Why do you think you deserve to live? To just do your own thing?

  Tommy: I don’t really deserve to live.

  Edith: That’s right. You don’t.

  Brian: I don’t—I don’t think I deserve to live either.

  There was a long debate about whether the boys should die. Several people volunteered to kill them. Any time the teens interrupted to try to explain themselves, they were shouted down. At one point, a man tackled Brian from behind; Tommy saw his friend slammed to the dirt floor from the corner of his eye. The man wasn’t Brian’s father, who was still in California, but another member in the throes of devotion to Jones. The man straddled Brian’s chest and started to choke him, sputtering insults as Brian’s face turned red. After watching the display impassively for a few minutes, Jones called the man off.

  He stopped the recording before determining the boys’ punishment, but a slip of paper retrieved by the FBI picked up the thread. The typed release, signed by Jim and Edith Bogue and by Joyce Touchette, Brian’s guardian in his dad’s absence, permitted the boys to be physically restrained by chain to prevent them from running away again.

  The following day, leg irons were welded onto the boys’ ankles. The hot metal singed their skin before their feet were plunged into buckets of water. Next, a three-foot chain was welded onto their shackles, connecting them. To further humble them, the teens’ heads were shaved to within a quarter inch of their scalps. Although they were bound together, they were prohibited from speaking to each other or anyone else, except for the armed guard watching them, and were forced to run wherever they went, dragging the chain between them. They slept together, showered together, ate together, used the toilet together, and slept in the same bunk.

  The guard led them to a fallen log and told them to chop it into firewood. They did so for sixteen-hour days. One day the guard, a boy not much older than Tommy and Brian, was playing with his gun and dropped it. It hit the ground and fired. The guard jumped, but his charges were too exhausted to react. During their second week in chains, Brian slid his thumb over the wood splitter as Tommy wielded the sledge hammer.

  “Hit it,” he whispered. Tommy refused. The guard was too far away to see this exchange. “Dude, hit it so we can have a break,” Brian insisted. They argued briefly before Tommy relented, and smashed his friend’s thumb. The guard took them to the nurses’ station, where they learned Brian’s thumb was badly bruise
d but not broken. The nurse bandaged it and they were sent back to the tree. A week later, Stephan Jones noticed that Tommy’s ankle was badly infected from chafing against the leg irons. He told his mother, Marceline, who had them cut off.

  A year later, one of the boys would make a final, successful attempt to escape Jonestown. The other would die there.

  CHAPTER 14

  CONCERN

  Back in California, a group of families who had relatives in Jonestown started meeting to strategize and share information. They called themselves the Concerned Relatives, and they were worried sick. Tim and Grace Stoen were members, as were many defectors. Some bought ham radios and eavesdropped on Temple transmissions, but the church learned of their efforts and created an elaborate code to evade them. The group persisted, trying to break the cipher.

  One of their prized members was a young woman named Yulanda Williams, who lived in Guyana from April to June of 1977, before finagling a way to leave. She waited until Jones was in a drug-induced stupor before asking him to let her go home. She promised not to criticize the Temple, or the settlement, if she returned to California. Incredibly, Jones agreed, after first warning her that the angels (supposed Temple assassins) would find her if she broke her promise, and making her sign a document “confessing” to murdering someone and dumping the body in the ocean.