The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

  Especially in Redwood Valley and to some extent in Los Angeles and San Francisco, members with outside jobs got them through Temple connections, often reporting to supervisors who were also in the Temple. To quit the church was to risk being fired. Adult members employed full-time by the Temple itself often had no conception of how to look for work in the outside world. Terri Buford recalls that at her first post-Temple job interview, she showed up barefoot and eating an ice-cream cone: “I had no idea of how I was supposed to look or act.”

  When someone did leave, Jones had varying reactions, depending on the person and the level of threat he believed that he or she potentially represented. Those who joined only briefly, leaving after a few weeks or months, were sometimes allowed to go. Bonnie Burnham, frustrated by contradictions in Jones’s preaching and actions, left with minimal resistance from Jones. He warned Burnham that if she quit the Temple, she was likely to die. When that didn’t dissuade her, Jones sent Marceline to plead the Temple’s case. Marceline offered rote objections—Jim loved Bonnie and was sincerely worried for her safety outside the Temple—and left it at that. Afterward, Marceline stayed overnight with Burnham “fifteen or twenty times.” The women would laugh and chat about inconsequential things, giving Marceline a much-needed break from her obligations as “Mother” in the Temple. Sometimes, Burnham wrote in her memoir, “I would hear Marceline sobbing in her room. . . . I would go in and try to comfort her, but there wasn’t a lot that could be said. It was helpful for her just to cry.” Unhappy as Marceline was, Burnham wrote, “She would not criticize her husband,” which is undoubtedly why Jones permitted the friendship and even allowed Burnham to visit the Jones family at their home after her defection.

  In almost every other instance, Jones didn’t want former members anywhere near his other followers. He announced that anyone leaving the Temple must move at least one hundred miles away, and soon increased the distance to five hundred miles. Defectors would violate these boundaries at their peril—accidents would surely befall them.

  Those who left the Temple, but remained inside Jones’s arbitrary boundary, were harassed by Temple security. The squads Jones sent out to intimidate former members almost always included Jim McElvane and Chris Lewis, both big, dangerous-looking black men. Tim Carter, the Vietnam veteran, once went with them. When Jones learned that David Wise, who briefly served as a Temple associate minister, was still living in Los Angeles, Carter recalls that “me, McElvane and two other guys were sent to scare him away. We went to his house and told him, ‘You better not talk about the Temple.’ We didn’t rough him up. He stayed inside his house and we were outside the door. The visit was to show him that Jones knew where he was, that we could find him any time Jones wanted. I felt uncomfortable doing it, and I never went out on something like that again. But [Jones] had other people to send.”

  Juanell Smart, present at the Planning Commission meeting where Jones humiliated Laurie Efrein, was disgusted by the incident, and further offended when, at another meeting, someone alleged that her husband, David Wise, had tapped Jones’s phone with Smart’s full knowledge, if not cooperation. “I started crying, and I told Jim that I wanted out. He said to me, ‘Then you’ll have to move a hundred miles away.’ I told him I wouldn’t, that I’d lived in L.A. for most of my life. So then he comes up with these other conditions.”

  Jones told Smart that before she left, “I’d have to sign my four kids over to the church. Well, I realized that signing something like that wouldn’t mean anything in court. So I did it. Then he has somebody bring out this gun, and they make me put my hand on it, hold it, and after they had my fingerprints on it they put it in a bag and took it away. The threat was, if I went out and said or did something against Jones or the Temple, the gun could be used in some criminal way and I’d be [implicated].”

  For a while, Smart’s three youngest children lived with their father, and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Tanitra, lived with her grandmother Kay. All four remained active in the Temple. Smart believed that “at least there, they still were away from the streets and the drugs. Tanitra found a boyfriend in the Temple named Poncho, and of course she always wanted to be with him. So I stayed out and they stayed in.”

  Jones sometimes used emissaries to try talking defectors into returning, particularly former members who’d been of particular use to the Temple. Garry Lambrev was the first Californian to join the Temple and afterward ran a church antique shop and worked on the staff of The Peoples Forum. Lambrev had an ongoing disagreement with Jones about Lambrev’s desire for a long-term, loving gay relationship, and had left and rejoined the Temple several times. But in 1974, his latest defection seemed that it might last. Lambrev still kept in touch with Temple friends, and at one point he spoke on the telephone with Karen Layton. In their conversation, Lambrev told Layton that he was considering suicide. His romantic, non-Temple relationship was floundering, and “it’s like the sky is caving in.” Layton reminded Lambrev of Jones’s teaching about reincarnation—everyone experiences many lives, trying in each to become truly enlightened, until, finally, success allows the individual to “graduate” to a higher, happier spiritual plane. If Lambrev killed himself, Layton said, “Just think, you’d have to regress all that way back and start it all over again . . . go through that same shit again. It’s just not worth it.”

  In his next reincarnation, Layton warned, Jones “won’t be here to help, you know. It’ll be a horrible place. Think of living through this hell again.” But if Lambrev was truly intent on killing himself, he should consider an alternative: “If you’re gonna die, you might as well die for the cause. I mean, you might as well die a noble death than die a coward’s death, really . . . do something to make it a better world for other people, you know. If we can just hold on for a few more years [in the Temple] . . . then everybody graduates.”

  Lambrev didn’t kill himself, and he didn’t go back to Peoples Temple. But a few years later, he would have a horrifying reason to recall Karen Layton’s words.

  * * *

  Sometime in 1973, Jones brought another element into play.

  Even before the Gang of Eight defections, Jones constantly kept his followers in what former Temple member Hue Fortson terms “crisis mode,” warning that no matter how bad things in America had been, they were about to get worse. In 1973 and most of 1974, the Watergate scandal was Jones’s favorite point of reference.

  In his sermons, Jones began predicting that despite talk of impeachment Nixon wouldn’t go quietly—wouldn’t, in fact, go at all. This evil man, who represented all that Peoples Temple stood against, was capable of any awful act. Jones compared Nixon’s power to that of Hitler. Nixon and his modern-day Nazis hated poor people, blacks especially—concentration camps were coming, and it required very little imagination to guess who would be sent there. Of course, when they came for Jim Jones’s people, Father would lead the resistance. Anyone threatening Temple members, especially the children, would face one hell of a fight. But there was another option, and during a few of his early and mid-1973 sermons, Jones began alluding to it.

  That April, Jones reminded everyone that nuclear war was inevitable—but there was a more immediate, equally terrible, threat: “Between now and that [nuclear] prophecy, a [Nixon] dictatorship could come which would mean that we have to take a short journey out of this land to save our lives.” But the Temple had an escape plan. “Now, what we have in mind when [the martial law] comes . . . we’re going to serve people abroad. We’ll quietly take our little trip through the wilderness and leave Pharaoh’s Egypt, Pharaoh’s Washington, Pharaoh’s America, we’ll leave it quietly and we will go along humming our songs, riding in our buses ’til we get to the border . . . and we’re gonna build a clinic and then we’re gonna get some land where we can raise food, that’s our hope, and some animals.”

  In a subsequent sermon, he described, but didn’t name, the destination: “I know a place where I can take you, where there’ll be no more racism, where
there’ll be no more division, where there’ll be no more class exploitation. I know just the place. Oh, yes, I do.”

  And that, at least, was no exaggeration. Though it would be almost six more months before Jones specified the location, he frequently identified it by another name that struck an especially deep chord with his older African American members:

  The Promised Land.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE PROMISED LAND

  Jim Jones had keenly studied traditional black religion in America, and eventually his own preaching assimilated one of its recurring themes: sometime, somehow, true believers would throw off their shackles—formerly the real, jangling chains of slavery, afterward poverty and racism—and be guided to a place where true equality and brotherhood exist. The Promised Land was an important motif in the African American church.

  Elderly African Americans, mostly recruited in San Francisco and Los Angeles but originally hailing from the South, comprised perhaps one-third of the Peoples Temple fellowship. They remembered well black visionary Marcus Garvey and his heralded Back-to-Africa movement of the 1920s, where Garvey envisioned a black society blessed with modern-day industry and economics. Garvey failed in the face of vigorous opposition from colonial powers, but at least the concept had been widely discussed. For many black Americans, what Garvey described was the Promised Land.

  Father Divine, Jones’s former role model and mentor, incorporated the Promised Land theme into his ministry. Divine’s Peace Mission established Promised Land farming communities in Ulster County, New York, and used the crops grown there to feed members of the Mission’s communes. Jones knew all about the Promised Land farms; he’d studied them, as he’d scrutinized every aspect of Divine’s operations, cherry-picking programs for Peoples Temple.

  There was another critical reason that the Promised Land theme appealed to Jones. Outside influence was pernicious. The Gang of Eight spent more time on campus and in classrooms than they did surrounded by Temple membership. They got ideas that way. If potential traitors were isolated on some farming community far away from anywhere else, allegiance to the Temple—to Jim Jones—would be their only realistic option.

  By the time Jones raised the Promised Land with the Planning Commission and Temple membership as a whole, he already knew where it should be. It was necessary to give the impression that a global search might be required—that would make the ultimate choice a group decision rather than one dictated by Jones, an important distinction if he wanted everyone to have a sense of ownership. In the tradition of Marcus Garvey, somewhere in Africa seemed like a logical choice, a country with a majority black population. South America had possibilities, too—Jones had attempted a personal ministry in Brazil. Elmer and Deanna Mertle were instructed to prepare for scouting trips to Kenya and Peru. Tim Stoen presented them with a “To Whom It May Concern” letter requesting aid and assistance anywhere the Mertles attempted “locating and investigating a permanent missionary location to be developed and supported by this church.” The Mertles were one of the few couples in the Temple still to have extensive outside property, much of it rental units. As they prepared to leave, they were persuaded to temporarily sign over control so that Temple leadership could manage the properties in their absence. Then, at the last minute, the Mertles were told not to go: there were worrisome political problems in Kenya, and the illness of Peru’s leader made that government too unreliable. But the Temple would retain control of the Mertles’ property—they were too valuable as members to be distracted by such petty business concerns.

  On September 10, 1973, the seven-member Temple board of directors (Tim Stoen, chairman, and Sharon Amos, secretary) formally authorized investigation of “developmental sites and locations for an agricultural mission.” It was a formality. At the next meeting, on October 8, the board voted unanimously that “Guyana, South America, was the most suitable place,” and authorized “James W. Jones, pastor and president . . . and all persons designated by said pastor, to take any and all actions necessary or convenient to the establishing of a branch church and of an agricultural and rural development mission in the Cooperative Republic of Guyana.”

  * * *

  Twelve years earlier, on an extended trip where Jones visited possible places to relocate his family, and, perhaps, his church from Indianapolis, he had visited British Guiana. Approximately the size of Kansas or Idaho, bounded by Venezuela, Brazil, Surinam (now Suriname), and the Atlantic Ocean, the country was then in the process of separating itself from the British Empire. Though Britain still had ultimate control, it allowed Guyana’s first general election in 1953. Much to British consternation, the Guyanese elected avowed Marxist Cheddi Jagan as prime minister. Both British and American intelligence services believed that communist nations—Russia, Cuba—were providing secret financial support to Jagan and his People’s Progressive Party (PPP). Jagan remained in office until 1964, when he was defeated by Forbes Burnham, whose allegiance to socialism was considered by British and American powers a lesser evil than Jagan’s Marxism. England and the United States covertly underwrote much of Burnham’s campaign. The money came in handy for bribing ballot box officials—rigged elections were already standard in Guyana. Only after Burnham’s election did Britain finally grant Guyana complete independence, even though with his People’s National Congress (PNC) party controlling the country’s parliament, Burnham’s election effectively made Guyana an official socialist state, which made Guyana attractive to Jim Jones.

  Jones also liked Guyana’s ethnic makeup. Its population of 850,000 was roughly equivalent to San Francisco’s, but 40 percent of the Guyanese were black, and 50 percent East Indian, the result of Britain’s importing workers from another colony. A Peoples Temple colony would be a good match. And, besides, Guyana was the only country in South America where the national language was English. Its location was convenient, too—boats could make a relatively easy trip from Miami to Guyana’s capital of Georgetown, a port city.

  Jones wanted isolation for his new agricultural mission, and Guyana lent itself perfectly to that. Virtually the entire population lived along the Atlantic coast. The vast majority of Guyana was covered with dense jungle. There were no connecting roads in the interior. It was necessary to fly, traverse winding rivers, or else cut your way through the jungle. With the exception of some hardy denizens of manganese mining camps, the jungle’s only human inhabitants were Amerindian tribes. Peoples Temple could clear enough acres for use as reasonably fertile farmland. How hard could that be? A small but significant portion of church membership was made up of rough-and-tumble former Indiana farmers. The Guyanese jungle could be an ideal setting for Peoples Temple.

  Though Jones described the proposed Promised Land mission site as a place where everyone in the Temple would flee to avoid American martial law and concentration camps (Marceline referred to it as an “exodus”), Jones, at least initially, had no intention of moving all his followers to Guyana. For one thing, he realized that many of them wouldn’t be willing to go. Tim Carter remembers, “In Planning Commission meetings, we talked about how lots of people wouldn’t want to live in primitive [jungle] conditions. What we finally figured was that there’d be maybe five hundred or six hundred who’d go. We got that number from about how many people we had [in the Temple] who were currently living communally. We thought they were probably the ones who’d be most willing to try it. The main [church] would still be in California.”

  For the time being, Jones avoided publicly announcing Guyana as the promised paradise. Though the Temple board had decided on Guyana, the Guyanese had yet to be consulted. In early December 1973, Tim Stoen led a five-person advance team to Georgetown. They were joined about ten days later by Jones himself, along with another dozen Temple members, including Marceline, Carolyn Layton, Archie Ijames, Dick Tropp, and Johnny Brown.

  The Temple delegation visited the Guyanese parliament in Georgetown, and was granted interviews with Burnham and several of his administration�
�s top officials. The Americans made their case for establishing a mission—they, too, were socialists, and would support the Burnham government; they would contribute to the national economy, buying goods in local markets; they were solid, law-abiding citizens who’d cause no trouble. They were pleased to find Burnham and his people receptive. The Guyanese even had a prospective location to suggest, and within days arrangements were made to fly Jones and his people there to see it for themselves. It seemed almost too easy. The Temple contingent had no idea that the timing of their request exactly matched a critical need that had been identified by the Guyanese government.

  In December 1973, Guyana was in economic distress. Prices in international markets for its sugar-related crops were down, and the recent Arab oil embargo drove up prices for goods the fledgling country desperately needed. With money so scarce, Burnham’s government couldn’t afford much of a military. Guyana’s few thousand soldiers were mostly young, untrained, and poorly equipped. That, in turn, attracted the attention of neighboring Venezuela with its large, vastly superior armed forces. For decades, the exact location of the border separating southeast Venezuela and northwest Guyana had been in dispute. Venezuela claimed its border extended hundreds of miles into territory claimed by the Guyanese. While Guyana was under British protection, there wasn’t much the Venezuelans could do. But with Guyana now an independent nation, and one with only a meager defense, Venezuela’s leaders began rattling sabers. Guyanese leaders reluctantly realized that if Venezuela invaded, it could take as much land as it wanted with minimal opposition. However, Venezuelan leaders feared American military might. If a settlement of U.S. citizens was established in Guyana’s northwest, precisely in the middle of the region under dispute, then the Venezuelans would have to reconsider military encroachment. Burnham and the other Guyanese officials welcomed Jones and his people to their country as fellow socialists, but what really mattered to them was that these people were Americans.