When she woke around six-thirty, her roommates were still gone. She got dressed and hobbled outside on her cane, then slowly descended the cottage’s four stairs, cane in one hand, the other hand gripping the wooden railing.
She made her way to a neighboring senior residence and opened the door. Inside she saw a figure sitting in a chair, draped with a sheet. She could tell it was her friend Birdie Johnson, an eighty-six-year-old Mississippian, by her shoes. Hy called to her, but got no response. Behind Birdie was another draped figure in a chair, and Hy shuffled over to pull back the sheet. It was Lavana James, a seventy-four-year-old Texan. She was obviously dead. Hy looked around and saw three more women, lying or sitting in their beds, all covered with sheets. She panicked.
“They came and killed them all, and I’s the onliest one alive!” she yelled in anguish.
She pinched herself to make sure she wasn’t dead, too. Then she thought she heard a voice say, “Fear not; for I am with you,” and recognized Isaiah 41:10, a passage she often repeated silently to comfort herself in Jonestown. She hadn’t stopped believing in God during her twenty years with Jones, and now, she believed His spirit was consoling her.
She walked back to the pathway, and looked in the direction of the kitchen. The door was open, and it was empty. A tray of sandwiches sat uncovered on a table. Not knowing what to do, she returned to her cottage. She panicked again, and took a white towel and stood on her porch waving it, yelling for help. No one came. She went inside and mixed up some powdered milk the residents kept in the cottage and drank it, then sat on a chair in a daze, listening to the birds. She considered trying to hike through the jungle, but knew she wouldn’t make it. As dusk approached, she finally ventured to the bathroom, where she fell asleep on the toilet. She woke at dawn and watched the sun break over the settlement, as glorious as ever, before returning to her cottage to wait, weak, confused, and frightened.
That’s where a couple of astonished Guyanese soldiers found her on Monday afternoon, November 20. “Lady, what are you doing here?” one asked. They carried her to the pavilion. It looked like a battlefield. They asked her to help them identify the dead, but she couldn’t stomach looking at the lifeless forms of dear friends she’d chatted with only a few days earlier.
She was able to identify her sister, however. Zippy was lying on her back in the dirt just outside the pavilion. Hy recognized her red sweater. There were too many bodies in the way to get closer to her.
Odell Rhodes, a crafts teacher who escaped by volunteering to fetch a stethoscope for Dr. Schacht before fleeing into the bush, and a few other survivors arrived to identify the dead; Hy had Rhodes write Zippy’s name on a piece of cardboard and pin it to her dress. The soldiers asked her to verify the identity of Jim Jones, who was lying on the platform in the pavilion, but she refused. Although his body was only thirty feet away, she’d have to walk by so many people she knew and loved to reach him. Rhodes told her Jones’s eyes were wide open, as if he were seeing something horrifying. Hyacinth took this to mean he was in hell.
The soldiers brought her to a school tent, where she encountered another elderly survivor, Grover Davis, seventy-nine, who’d survived by lowering himself into a ditch while the others lined up.
“Hyacinth, don’t say nothing about Jim,” Davis warned her; he still feared Jones’s mythical powers.
Reporters arrived. “No comment,” Hy told them. They described her as a “tiny, birdlike woman.” She wanted to be left alone to think. She fretted over her sister’s death; did she drink the poison willingly? She saw needles scattered about the pavilion, the tub of toxic punch. She refused to believe Zip died without a struggle. She’d later regret that she didn’t examine her sister’s body for needle marks. She anguished over the children; the nursery workers often paraded the toddlers past her cottage dressed in sun suits and little paper hats, and she’d wave to them from her porch.
The looting—by impoverished locals, reporters looking for an angle, soldiers wanting souvenirs—began even before Hyacinth left. She returned to her cottage after spending the night in the school tent to find her photographs splayed over the floor. Her arthritis made it hard for her to bend over to retrieve them, and the soldiers were rushing her, as the bodies had started to smell. She was forced to leave five photo albums behind: a lifetime of memories of Zippy, of their parents, of their Alabama girlhood, of their hard-won home in Indianapolis. She’d write the American Embassy and offer to pay to have the albums shipped to her, but would never receive a reply.
When she boarded a plane at the Port Kaituma airstrip for the first leg of her journey back to the United States, she hunkered down between the seats and covered her head. The other survivors laughed at her, but she’d heard about the attack on the congressman’s party.
“I’ve made it this far,” she told them. “I want to go home.”
* * *
Stanley Clayton reached the house of the kiosk owner around midnight and banged on the door.
“I got a story to tell you,” he told the man. “Give me a beer and a pack of cigarettes.” He downed one beer and was starting the second when he announced, “Everyone in Jonestown is dead.” The man snatched the bottle from his hands and accused Stanley of talking nonsense. The next morning, Stanley learned other survivors had been seen at the airstrip, and he set off down the road toward Port Kaituma, but was picked up by a patrol of GDF soldiers. Suspicious that he was still alive, they handcuffed him and brought him to the police station, where Odell Rhodes corroborated his story of Jonestown’s last hours. Stanley credited his street smarts, of always being mindful of the nearest exit, with his survival. He would never again be that terrified twelve-year-old boy, locked inside the store he was robbing as he waited for the police to arrive.
Others straggled out of the bush. The police arrested brothers Tim and Mike Carter, as well as PR man Mike Prokes, in Port Kaituma. While the suicides were in progress, Maria Katsaris gave them a suitcase filled with $550,000 and told them to deliver it to the Russian embassy. It was too heavy, so they buried some of the money in Jonestown. When they reached the river, the Cudjoe wasn’t there to take them to Georgetown. A local saw them enter a building to hide and alerted the police.
Teri Buford told reporters that Jones had set aside millions of dollars in Swiss banks to finance the last-stand plan. The government managed to freeze the church’s overseas accounts, but several defectors went underground, some for decades, still worried that Jones’s loyal lieutenants would kill them.
Fearing prosecution, surviving church leaders quickly purged Temple files. They burned boxes of documents in a bonfire at a San Francisco beach and used magnets to erase tape recordings. One can only wonder what damning information these contained. Afterward, most Temple leaders would disappear into the woodwork, guarding their secrets and living quiet, undistinguished lives as they successfully dodged the media spotlight.
* * *
There were a couple of exceptions. One was Mike Prokes. On March 13, 1979, Prokes called a press conference in a Modesto motel room, where he read a five-page statement defending the Jonestown “suicides” to half a dozen reporters, then walked into the bathroom and shot himself in the head.
Another was Paula Adams. After the massacre, Adams followed Ambassador Mann to Washington, D.C., and had a son with him. When she tried to leave the abusive relationship in 1983, Mann tracked her down at her new apartment, where he shot and killed her and their eighteen-month-old son before turning the gun on himself.
Charles Garry and Mark Lane emerged from the jungle on November 19, bedraggled and still bickering. During their long night together, Lane told Garry many secrets he’d learned from Teri Buford, including the plan for a mass suicide. Back in the States, Garry would accuse Lane of being “morally responsible” for the massacre because he’d fostered Jones’s paranoia. For his part, Mark Lane told the New York Times that he was “the only person who tried to prevent the murders and tried to keep Leo Ryan from going to
Guyana.” He went on the lecture circuit with his “Horrors of Jonestown” talk, earning $2,750 per appearance, and wrote a book in which he still, incredibly, maintained there was a conspiracy to destroy Peoples Temple. Charles Garry, for his part, was deeply scarred by his association with the group and, after a luminous career defending progressive causes, he shunned the spotlight. He died in 1991.
FBI agents interviewed about two thousand people as they tried to determine whether there was a conspiracy to assassinate Congressman Ryan. In 1987, a Federal Court in San Francisco charged Larry Layton with aiding and abetting Ryan’s murder. He spent eighteen years in prison before being paroled in 2002.
A House of Representatives investigation found fault with the US Embassy’s dealings with Jonestown on several levels. It criticized consular officers for giving the Temple an advance list of most of the people they wanted to interview, allowing Jones to rehearse residents’ responses, and blamed officers for lacking “common sense” and a “healthy skepticism” when faced with Jones’s staged performances and the interviewees’ canned responses.
A San Francisco Superior Court appointed a local attorney, Robert Fabian, to locate and disperse Temple assets. Between overseas accounts and real estate holdings, he amassed over $10 million. The Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service took $1.7 million for cleaning up the bodies and for unpaid taxes. The rest was divided among more than six hundred claimants, including survivors, relatives of Jonestown residents, people who were wounded at the Port Kaituma airstrip, and the heirs of those killed in the airstrip attack. Hyacinth Thrash received $4,351. Jackie Speier received $360,000.
The ornate brick building at 1859 Geary Boulevard was auctioned to a Korean Presbyterian church, which occupied it for a decade before it was severely damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake and torn down. Today, a branch of the United States Post Office occupies the lot.
Jonestown was slowly dismantled by neighboring Amerindians who took clothing, food, books, mattresses, lumber, and even the fence marking Lynetta Jones’s grave. The Guyanese government distributed the better furniture among its ministries, as well as thousands of packets of salt and pepper, which are a novelty in that country and were still being used in government offices until recently. A fire burned down the Jonestown buildings, and gold prospectors stripped deserted vehicles of metal to build mining equipment. The site is now an empty, overgrown field, a tangle of vines and jungle flowers. A single tree marks the spot where the pavilion once stood. The earthen tunnel that once concealed “the box” is filled with roosting bats.
The Guyanese government, hoping to capitalize on the trend in “dark tourism,” is considering several proposals to turn the site into a travel destination. One plan calls for rebuilding the pavilion, Jones’s cabin, and several cottages and charging visitors two hundred dollars per night for the thrill of living the Jonestown “experience.”
* * *
Hyacinth Thrash flew to Los Angeles to stay with a nephew. The FBI found Social Security checks belonging to her inside the safe in Jones’s cabin, and she used the money to bury her sister. She dreamed of Zipporah often. Her room at her nephew’s house had twin beds, and sometimes she awoke sensing Zippy’s presence in the next bed. A couple of times she thought she heard Zip call her name, and once she heard her groan, as, Hy thought, she must have done as the poison killed her. She had nightmares about Jim Jones being angry that she was still alive.
A doctor prescribed sedatives to treat her anxiety. She felt ashamed of her Temple association, and refused to talk about it for many years, even with close friends and relatives. She concluded that Jones was devil-possessed and that he took advantage of unschooled blacks to gain a following. Like Job, she felt her Christian faith had been tested and restored.
Eventually, she moved back to Indianapolis to live with family there. She joined a Holiness church, and whenever she fell into a funk, she sang gospel music aloud to lift her spirits. She kept waiting for her healing. At Deliverance Temple, members prayed over her leg, and she attended the services of a healing evangelist at the Indianapolis Convention Center. She was still waiting for her healing when she died in a nursing home on November 21, 1995, at age ninety. She is buried in Indianapolis’s Crown Hill Cemetery, where her mother was laid to rest seven decades earlier.
In Georgetown, Stanley Clayton made thirty thousand dollars selling his “exclusive” story to reporters. He stayed at a hotel with other survivors for several weeks while Guyanese police questioned him, and met a local woman named Patricia at the hotel bar. He married her a month later, and sent for her when he returned to Oakland. But posttraumatic stress and the hardship of adjusting to life outside the Temple were difficult for him to surmount. He couldn’t hold down a job, and his new bride couldn’t match his idealized vision of Janice. The couple argued constantly, and one night he hit her. She left him while he served an eight-month sentence for domestic violence.
It was downhill from there. He was introduced to crack cocaine and told, “We don’t snort it no more, we smoke it.” He became an addict.
To support his habit, he became a pimp. He had six women working for him at one point, and took their trick money in exchange for providing them with food, protection, and a hotel room to sleep in. When he got too old to pimp, he became homeless. He slept in neighborhood parks and “spare changed” outside restaurants.
At the time of this writing, in March 2011, Stanley was living at a shelter for the mentally disabled homeless, and was on court probation for trying to buy crack from an undercover police officer. He sorely misses his Temple family, the brothers and sisters who held him to a high standard and noticed when he failed to meet it. Nobody notices Stanley anymore. He plods around his Berkeley neighborhood in soiled clothes, unshowered, one of the city’s many invisible miserables.
“There were a lot of people in the church who believed in me and supported me,” he says. “I don’t have that no more.”
Tommy Bogue, who now goes by Thom, spent a month hospitalized in Georgetown and another month in San Francisco, after which came more months of physical therapy to regain use of his leg. He still carries shot pellets in his calf muscle; occasionally they work their way out.
Thom also had a rocky road back to normalcy. He served time for drug use, got married, had a son, and got divorced. In 1995, he met his current wife, with whom he had a daughter. They moved to Dixon, California, a small town about an hour north of San Francisco, where he opened an automotive shop. He stayed clean. Harold Cordell, whose relationship with Edith Bogue ended after several decades, works in his front office. In November 2010, he was elected to the Dixon city council, running on a platform of support for small businesses.
Jim Bogue tormented himself for years for not fleeing with Marilee when he had her at the sawmill. A few weeks after he returned to San Francisco, he was falling asleep when he believed she appeared to him.
“Dad, I just wanted you to know that everything is all right,” he heard her say.
That gave him a little more peace.
* * *
He’s now remarried to the love of his life, Colleen, and the couple leads a quiet existence in a small northern California town. He still tinkers; one of his latest efforts is a fuel-saving device that powers his car with hydrogen. He’s sworn off church completely. “If you could show me a religion where there isn’t somebody in control of the people, then I might be interested,” he says. He does believe in an afterlife, however. “If Marilee could come to me like that, then why wouldn’t I see her again?” he asks. He hopes he’ll see his son Jonathon again, too.
His bond with Thom is tighter than ever. When they discuss Jonestown, their families press in, amazed at their stories. Father and son fill in each other’s memories, and their admiration for each other is palpable.
“He’s one of the strongest people I ever met in my life,” Jim says of Thom. “What he went through, just because he dared.”
Thom laughs at this.
“I wasn’t one of the strongest. I was one of the stupidest. I couldn’t keep out of trouble.” He concedes his experience in Jonestown made him stronger. “Life can’t throw anything at me that I can’t handle now,” he says. “It can only get better—can’t get any worse.”
Neither Bogue attends the memorial service held each November 18 at the mass grave in Oakland where Marilee is buried. They view their time in the Temple as a closed room they choose not to enter. It happened, and now they’ve moved on.
“Why live in the past?” Thom asks.
The legacy of Jim Jones is still hotly contested. Although evidence of his charlatanism abounds, many former Temple members still believe Jones had inexplicable powers, and insist that his staged healings somehow spurred real ones. They chafe at suggestions that all of Jones’s alleged miracles were fakery, and are still struggling to come to terms with the depth of their deception. Some have joined other religious movements or struggle with drug abuse, others collect cats, and one woman who lost her mother and four children fills her home with so many paintings and sculptures of African American figures that by their sheer number they create a presence. A few view media coverage of Jonestown as prurient and insensitive; they prefer to remember the church in its San Francisco heyday, when they felt empowered by a sense of unity and equality.
Today, few Americans born after 1980 are familiar with the Jonestown tragedy, although anyone with an Internet connection can listen to the haunting tape of the community’s mass extinction. And while the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” has entered the cultural lexicon, its reference to gullibility and blind faith is a slap in the face of the Jonestown residents who were goaded into dying by the lies of Jim Jones, and, especially insulting to the 304 murdered children. As the FBI files clearly document, the community devolved into a living hell from which there was no escape.
A Thousand Lives Page 28
