A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  The visit only increased Edith’s anxiety. In her resignation letter from San Francisco State University, she’d written, “I have learned in my life experience … in particular in the intelligence service, that concealing the truth, consenting to secrecy and pretense is practically always a mistake. To put it another way, truth really is intelligence, and intelligence truth.”

  In Jonestown, she’d be forced to endure a life of pretense and secrecy with everyone else.

  The community held an extra layer of distress for an introvert like Edith Roller. From the time she lined up outside the clinic every morning to get the pill that controlled her hot flashes, to the time she bunked down in her cottage, which soon housed twelve women, she was surrounded by the crush of humanity. She waited in long queues at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Jonestown overwhelmed her; she had few moments of privacy.

  She squabbled with her roommates in cottage 48, just as she’d done with her roommates in apartment 47 at 1029 Geary Street. She scolded them for talking after lights out, and for tracking mud on the wood plank floor. If someone dared move her shoes from the place where she put them, she’d be furious. Nonetheless, her roommates helped themselves to her sewing supplies and hand mirror, and by turns ignored her or exasperated her to the point of tears. A few got so fed up with her complaints that they curtained off their side of the cottage to create a barrier against her.

  And she grew close to Bates, about whom she’d once written in her journal: “I am having as little communication with Bates as possible. I don’t want to hear any more about her ills. I save considerable time by not having to listen to her.” Bates made Edith a pillow using a swath of the Indian silk Edith brought from California. The silk pillow and a small Mexican painting from her friend Lorraine cheered her private space, which consisted of her bunk bed and the wall next to it. The tiny space where she stored her personal effects was her queendom, her small island of control amid the mayhem.

  A few weeks later, when she was finally given a class of teens, and another of barely literate seniors, she busied herself making lesson plans. She taught socialism and English. When she arrived, the school staff was debating teaching methodology. Most of the pupils were African Americans who spoke an inner-city vernacular, and the teachers wondered how to best serve them: Should they teach them standard English, Black English, or a combination of the two? After much discussion, they agreed to permit Black English in classroom conversations, but insisted students learn to read and write in standard English. (The Jonestown school was ahead of its time: In 1996, the Oakland school board would pass a resolution that also allowed the use of “Ebonics” in the classroom.)

  The school was comprised of two open-sided long tents set side by side near the pavilion. The tarps leaked from numerous holes when it rained, and although each tent was subdivided into makeshift classrooms by bookshelves and chalkboards, the noise from one class spilled into the next. Edith frequently had to shout to make herself heard over the din of the band practicing, the rain, or Jones babbling over the loudspeakers. (Classes were usually allowed to proceed when he was speaking.)

  She wrote in her journal that she “planned to sneak up [on] her high-school students with poetry.” But when she read them selections from Robert Frost, Ogden Nash, and A. E. Housman, they looked bored, and when she announced she planned to continue with Shakespeare, they protested outright. They wanted poets they could relate to: black poets like Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou, not pedantic old white men. She agreed, and a happy compromise was made.

  More often, however, she lost patience with her teenage charges. She didn’t know how to relate to them, nor they to her. She was stiff, rules oriented, and tragically unhip in her Peter Pan collars and thick glasses. Her young pupils were rowdy when they entered the classroom, and talked to each other or fell asleep while she lectured. Some liked to provoke her by asking her a stream of irrelevant questions and watching as she became increasingly exasperated. She suspected Tommy Bogue was stealing her pencils. It was a game, pissing off Professor Roller. Her classroom was a far cry from the respectful, quiet place of learning she fantasized about as she perused textbook catalogues during her last days at Bechtel. Once, her class overheard another teacher lecturing on the same topic as she was, and they stood in unison and deserted her for the other classroom.

  Her greatest satisfaction came from her older students, who were truly grateful for the opportunity to learn. In her basic English class, most of the black seniors could only read at a third or fourth grade level. Some couldn’t write. She used children’s books to teach them. When Jones started testing the community on the news, her senior students panicked. They struggled to understand complex geopolitical notions, let alone write about them. Their fear only grew when Jones said that anyone who failed the news test twice would be assigned to the Learning Crew. Edith started to write Jones a memo suggesting he rely more on teaching rather than testing to improve residents’ political awareness, but then wondered if it would be construed as a criticism, and decided not to give it to him. Instead, she started producing a special senior edition of the daily news, simplifying the concepts Jones spoke of and typing them up on a large-font typewriter.

  She encouraged her older black students to take pride in their cultural heritage, and spent her free time fashioning a large map of Africa from a blue bed sheet and paper flour sacks to teach them geography. As her students pinned the continent’s fifty-three countries to the sheet, they were “deeply impressed” with its size, she wrote in her journal. For many of them, it was the first time they’d learned about their roots.

  She became particularly close to one of her students, a seventy-seven-year-old black woman from Texas named Eddie Washington. Washington arrived a week after Edith, and like Edith, she was unmarried, childless, and alone in Jonestown. At the pavilion rallies, Eddie started saving Edith a seat at one of the front benches, which had seat backs. It took Jonestown for Edith to surmount her classism and reach out to an unschooled black senior like Eddie. Jonestown was the great equalizer. For the next nine months, Edith and Eddie sat side by side in their front pew, witnessing the man they once so admired plunge into madness.

  CHAPTER 16

  RELEASE

  On February 2, two representatives from the US Embassy, Desk Officer Frank Tumminia and Deputy Chief of Mission John Blacken, flew up to the settlement for a routine visit. Tumminia would later testify that Jones appeared “rational, though he exhibited a distinct persecution complex.” He was more concerned about the residents. Many appeared “drugged and robot like” when they responded to his questions, he later testified. But he was a pencil pusher, not a psychiatrist; he couldn’t detect any signs of violence, or indications that people were being held against their will. He didn’t see any weapons or anything else that would hint at coercion. He was forced to take everything at face value.

  Tumminia had no way of knowing how carefully Jones had rehearsed for the diplomats’ visit. Only the day before, officials from the Soviet embassy visited Jonestown, and in preparation, Jones micromanaged every detail of their tour, from the red shirts donned by residents to the band playing “The Internationale” in the pavilion as they arrived.

  For the US Embassy guests, Jones told residents to avoid red, and instructed entertainers to sing “God Bless America.” Several classes were staged to impress the guests, and Edith Roller was asked to fill a seat in a contrived history class. If residents were asked where John John was, they were to reply “I don’t know.”

  One of the people Tumminia interviewed was Hyacinth Thrash. Her family was concerned because she hadn’t written them, while Zippy had penned several glowing reviews of Jonestown. Hy couldn’t bring herself to lie, and she was nervous during the interview. “I’m fine,” she told Tumminia. “Tell my family not to worry.”

  Everyone was hewing closely to the script until the guests entered the senior dorms, where an eighty-three-year-old Texan named Katherine Domineck complained that
she’d fallen from the top of a triple-decker bunk.

  As soon as the visitors left, Jones summoned the entire camp to the radio room. There, for a solid hour, he cursed the old woman for ruining his careful preparations as his henchmen shook their fists in her face. Edith noted in her journal that he proposed isolating potential troublemakers during future visits.

  Domineck’s confrontation left Hyacinth deeply shaken. She’d never seen Jones turn his fury on a black senior, a woman, no less. In California, he was always so caring toward seniors, pausing to compliment them or lay a soft hand on their shoulder. His apparent concern, and his outspoken endorsement of equal rights, prompted many African Americans to join the Temple and donate all their earthly goods to his cause. He’d promised them that, in Jonestown, they could walk around without fear of getting mugged. They now feared Jim Jones. Hy was glad she’d kept her mouth shut. She was crippled, thin, only five-foot-two; if Jones sicced his heavies on her, there’d be nothing left.

  Not long after Edith Roller arrived, the region’s first dry season began. The intense equatorial sun desiccated seedlings and shriveled vines, and the entire community—seniors, school kids, even four-year-old children—pitched in to form a bucket brigade to save their crops.

  Despite these painstaking measures, the settlers still couldn’t eke enough sustenance from the soil. Food—the lack of it—became a sore subject. Meat scarcely graced their plates. The piglets were felled by a mysterious illness that Jim Bogue knew only as baby pig disease. They were born perfectly healthy and suckled eagerly at the sow’s teats, but after a few days, they wandered around the pen crying weakly, before collapsing from dehydration. Bogue figured the sow’s milk supply was inadequate, so he tried changing the sow’s food, injecting the piglets with sugar water, and warming them under heat lamps. Nothing worked; few survived to maturity.

  The chickens were also dying, from disease and human error. The coops lacked proper ventilation and hygiene; as a result, the chickens became ridden with parasites, and viral and bacterial infections. To keep the chicks from pecking each other to death, inexperienced workers trimmed their beaks but sliced off the tips of their tongues in the process, causing them to starve to death. When Edith Roller arrived, the chickery was only producing an average of 270 eggs per day while the settlement’s population topped nine hundred.

  At the weekly agricultural meeting, the most pressing concern of the audience was filling their stomachs. “How long’s it gonna take for the bull to be eatable?” someone asked. “How soon will the cows be ready for milking?” asked another. A man gave an overview of the garden: how many feet planted of mustard greens, shallots, and cabbage, how many pounds harvested of okra, squash, and bora beans.

  “Any questions?” he asked in conclusion.

  “Plant more next week,” someone wisecracked, prompting a laugh from the crowd.

  Jones urged the agricultural committee to find a crop that could feed one thousand people on a regular basis. The committee recommended cassava. The starchy tuber is high in calories, thrives in poor soil, tolerates drought, and grows year-round, which makes it a staple in many poor tropical nations. Every part of the plant is useable. The roots can be prepared like potatoes or ground into flour, the leaves boiled as a potherb. But cassava, while hardy and plentiful, is also very low in vitamins and minerals, which is why malnutrition is rampant in countries that rely on it. In March, the garden supervisor announced that there would be no vegetable harvest for thirty to sixty days, except for cassava leaves.

  Edith noted the food problem soon after her arrival. To start with, residents were only served two meals a day on Sunday: breakfast and an early dinner. Jones explained that, since residents only worked a half day on Sundays, they didn’t burn as many calories and could forgo lunch. Breakfast was usually a starch—sweet rolls, a scoop of rice—containing hardly enough calories to tide anyone over for an entire day.

  On her first Sunday, the community was abuzz: Word got around that they’d have barbecued pork for dinner. Jones sold most of the pigs that survived to maturity downriver; now that he wasn’t pulling in thousands of dollars from offering plates each week, he said the community needed to sell its surplus meat and produce to help defray the cost of running the project. But when residents made their way through the meal line that evening, they were handed a bowl of rice topped by a watery gravy of greens with a few shreds of meat, and they were angry. Only two hogs had been slaughtered to feed nine hundred people. The groans and complaints that ricocheted through the dining tent were reported to Jones, who got on the PA system and scolded residents for their ingratitude. It was too expensive to put a pork cutlet on every plate, he said, so they had to get their protein from other sources, such as legumes. When the grumbles continued, he dispatched the “Jonestown police” to the dining area to discourage further insubordination.

  But with hunger clawing at their bellies, they couldn’t think of much else.

  The next week, when residents rejoiced at being served a fried chicken dinner, Jones made them feel guilty for it, lamenting that it cost him $2,000 to provide it. He told them to savor it because they wouldn’t get another chicken dinner for two months.

  Because the farm couldn’t produce enough food to feed everyone, Temple members in Georgetown were dispatched to the capital’s produce markets and wharfs to beg for scraps. Farmers gave them bruised and overripe produce, and boat captains let them pick over their nets. This refuse was shipped upriver on the Cudjoe.

  As the months passed, some desperately hungry people resorted to stealing food, wolfing down seed peanuts and raw sweet potatoes, or unripe fruit from the orchard. Others swiped food from the plates of the seniors or toddlers they cared for. A guard arrested a group of children, including a seven-year-old boy, for picking fruit off trees.

  But while Jones kept his followers hungry, he kept the small refrigerator in his cabin well-stocked. It is telling that Jones drank Diet Pepsi; a survivor would bitterly remark that Jim Jones was the only person who got fat in Jonestown. During the pavilion meetings, he sipped cold drinks and chewed ice to ward off heat as his congregation sweltered, and he ate heaping plates of food as their stomachs churned.

  In San Francisco, Jones once told an aide that the way to control people was to “keep them tired and poor.” In Jonestown, he kept them tired, poor, and hungry.

  One night, when Stanley was guarding the front gate, he decided to visit a nearby kiosk. He was friendly with the proprietor, a man who lived in the house adjoining the shop, and reckoned he’d hit him up for a cold beer. Stanley woke the man, who indeed kindly offered him beer and cigarettes. The contraband was like manna from heaven, a break from the relentlessness of Jonestown. But as Stanley walked back to his post, he heard the tractor-trailer lumbering up the road from the community’s center toward the gate and realized the other guard had radioed back to report him AWOL. He started sprinting, but the tractor got to the gate first. Lee Ingram, one of Jones’s top enforcers, rode in the trailer. “Get in,” he ordered Stanley.

  As they drove back toward camp, he could hear Jones shrieking into the loudspeakers: “Alert! Alert! Everyone to the pavilion!” People streamed down the paths, groggy, pulling on robes. Stanley was shoved to the front of the pavilion, where Jones called him a motherfucker, a spy, and accused him of fraternizing with the enemy. Next, the horde descended on him. The violence of the catharsis meetings skyrocketed in Jonestown. People felt trapped and hopeless, and hitting someone during a confrontation was a way to release their frustration. Jones encouraged it. At one point, as the group pummeled Stanley with their fists and feet, he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled through the forest of legs, and his assailants turned on each other. Stanley stood on the sidelines watching the chaos in disbelief.

  “Y’all are some damn fools!” a guard finally yelled. “Stanley’s over here watching y’all.”

  Jones assigned Stanley to the learning crew, where he chopped firewood for weeks, prodded alon
g by a rifle.

  It was hard to control the many unhappy people in Jonestown. Jones warned residents that dangerous animals lurked in the jungle, waiting to attack them the moment they stepped off the property, and that fear alone kept many residents from attempting to flee. But some people who’d been there longer, such as Jim and Tommy Bogue, knew this was just bluff. Although there were jaguars and pumas in the surrounding bush, they were rarely seen because they fled human encounters.

  Jones constantly invented new ways to humiliate or scare residents into submission. His son Stephan used a boa constrictor to terrify people, including a five-year-old boy named Norya Blair. The child “screamed and cried as Stephan said he would tell the snake to bite him,” Edith Roller wrote in her journal. Another time, Jones ordered the snake to be hung around the neck of an emotionally disturbed woman named Kay Rosas, who refused to work. Rosas begged for forgiveness, but Jones terrorized her further by ordering Stephan to take her to see “the tiger,” stating that the “Fucking tiger hadn’t been fed tonight.” Jones didn’t actually have a tiger at his disposal, but that didn’t stop him from using the idea of a tiger to manipulate people. He also came up with a punishment called Big Foot. Children were led to a dark well where, they were told, Big Foot lived. As guards hung them upside down by their ankles, adults hiding inside the well tugged at their arms. Afterward, the kids would be led back to the compound, sobbing and distraught, thus “verifying” the monster’s existence for others.