The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

  “I quickly came to love Jonestown,” Laura Johnston Kohl recalls. “The spirit there was tremendous.” Then Jim Jones arrived, and everything changed.

  Jones could have adopted the patient attitude of those he had sent ahead to build Jonestown. It was a complex task requiring a long-term approach—it would take several harvest seasons just to test crops in the jungle soil, learning through trial and error which flourished and which couldn’t be grown successfully. The lease agreement with the Guyanese government stipulated five years to get the mission up and running. Jones himself had agreed to that. But now circumstances were different. Jones had no intention of abandoning a position of power and importance in America to huddle impotently among a handful of followers making incremental progress toward building a jungle paradise. Despite the controversy back in San Francisco, in fact because of it, Jones arrived in Jonestown determined to demonstrate from the outset that he was undaunted, and in charge of something astonishing. That was why Jones wanted every possible follower crammed into the settlement immediately; he must lead a multitude, just as he had back in California. That they lacked proper housing, that feeding so many put an impossible strain on the still limited possibilities of Jonestown’s fields, didn’t concern him. Through his inspiration, they could quickly create a self-sustaining utopia, one that set a much more immediate socialist example for the world and simultaneously served as Jones’s reminder to all of his enemies that, despite his retreat from San Francisco, they had failed to bring him down.

  And so he took over control of everything. No task was assigned, no crop planted, no tool purchased, without Jones’s approval. Those wanting to begin romantic relationships had to apply for permission first, and even if they received it had to endure a probationary period before officially becoming a couple. Breakups had to be approved as well.

  All incoming mail was opened and read before being passed on to the intended recipient. Outgoing mail was censored. Jones insisted that letters from Jonestown contain only glowing descriptions of bucolic life. Unacceptable letters were returned to their writers with scribbled margin notes instructing them about what changes must be made. Jones’s inner circle did the censoring, with Carolyn Layton and Maria Katsaris forming a two-woman buffer between even these subordinates and Jones. Carolyn and Maria were Jones’s only real intimates, carrying out his orders and guessing what he would want done on those occasions when he was indisposed. There were plenty of drugs ordered into Jonestown by camp physician Larry Schacht, and a fair amount found their way into Jones’s possession.

  For everyone else in Jonestown, privacy was virtually nonexistent. Cottages were overcrowded with as many as eight, then ten, then a dozen or more occupants as newcomers kept pouring in. Even with sixteen holes each, the outhouses were constantly crowded. Real toilet paper was a rare extravagance. Scrap paper was most often used, and then leaves after paper became so scarce in Jonestown that every bit was needed for record keeping and letters. There was limited water available in primitive showers. Workers filthy from a day in the fields had only two minutes to rinse off, and they were warned to keep their mouths closed while washing, since the water was polluted. Jones had much nicer quarters and facilities. He lived with Carolyn, Maria, John Victor, and Kimo in a private cabin with soft beds, a private latrine, and a generator that powered a refrigerator filled with soft drinks and a floor fan. Jones’s quarters were connected to the camp radio room. He didn’t have to leave to make calls or broadcasts to the United States, and, if he chose, could even make camp announcements from the comfort of his home. During those times when he drugged himself into near-insensibility, which grew more frequent as the months passed, Jones wallowed in his bed out of sight of the rest of Jonestown’s residents. The amenities didn’t compare to what he’d left behind in San Francisco, but compared to everyone else in the settlement, Jones lived in luxury.

  He surely felt he deserved to, considering all the demands made on him. Virtually every waking minute of Jones’s day found him having to deal with some emergency or other. One constant was cash outlay. Tim Carter estimates that, at its population height of just over nine hundred, Jonestown’s average monthly expenses were about $600,000. One-third of its residents were pensioners whose Social Security checks, totaling about $40,000 per month, were vital to the Jonestown budget. But at one point in 1977, at the behest of the Social Security office, the San Francisco post office stopped forwarding the checks to Guyana. It took time to untangle the bureaucratic red tape. At the same time, the FCC formally charged Temple ham radio operators in the United States and Guyana with breaking rules involving use of bandwidth. Fearing eavesdropping by the FBI and CIA, Jones wanted his radio operators to use varying signals and complicated, ever-changing code words and names to communicate. Other ham operators, hearing strange conversations, reported them to the FCC. Temple operators in the States had to respond to the charges and narrowly avoided prosecution. Jones couldn’t risk any in-depth investigation. The Temple continued smuggling guns into Guyana, only a few at a time, and never enough to total a bristling arsenal. Jones constantly feared attack, from U.S. agencies or mercenaries hired by Temple enemies, and wanted enough arms to fight back. For a long while, Jonestown’s radio code name for “guns” was “Bibles,” on the theory that no outsider listening in would find anything unusual about a church mission asking its San Francisco office to send more Bibles to the jungle.

  Jones had hoped Jonestown could raise most of the money it needed by selling surplus crops, but there weren’t any. So pressure was put on the door-to-door procurers in Georgetown to step up their collection of donations. It was an impossible demand. They’d already covered much of the capital city, and there weren’t any other major cities. Jonestown settlers began manufacturing toys, fine ones, cars and trains carved from wood and pretty little pigtailed dolls made from scraps of material. These were sent to Georgetown and sold there in open-air markets and a few department stores. The income derived was several thousand dollars a month—helpful, but by no means enough. Soon, fewer San Francisco communals were allowed to move to Jonestown. If they had full-time employment, their stateside paychecks were needed in Guyana far more than they were.

  Newly arrived settlers were unnerved as Jonestown greeters rummaged through their personal baggage. All passports were confiscated, held under close guard by Jones and his lieutenants. Jewelry and knickknacks were appropriated for sale in Georgetown, and spare clothing was added to the inventory of the mission’s communal warehouse. In California, everyone had very little. In Jonestown, they possessed only the clothes on their backs. Some items, particularly socks, deteriorated so quickly in the humid jungle that cartons of replacements had to be ordered from America every month, another unexpected expense.

  Food proved most worrisome of all. Feeding a few dozen Pioneers was relatively inexpensive. Providing nine hundred settlers with three nourishing meals a day was prohibitive. Everyone wanted meat; Jones calculated that serving chicken or pork at a single Jonestown dinner cost $2,000. The old communal fallbacks of peanut butter sandwiches and oatmeal that worked back in the States weren’t sufficient in the jungle, where so many adults and teens performed hard physical labor all day long. They needed lots of calories, protein in particular. Faced with crushing food costs, rice—which also had to be purchased rather than grown, but was at least inexpensive—became the primary Jonestown staple. Soaked in watery gravy, dotted sparingly with specks of meat, it was included in most meals. Cassava flour, raised in the fields and ground in Jonestown’s own mill, was prepared in various ways. There were chicken coops and a piggery, but it was hard to keep the chickens alive long enough to produce eggs. Beverages were limited, too, usually water or a sweet, powdered drink called Flavor Aid, which was cheaper than the better-known Kool-Aid. Desserts were virtually unknown during weekday meals. Once each weekend, Jones made a point of rewarding each follower with a single cookie, dramatically handed out by him as settlers filed past.

  Wit
h unexpected costs rising each month, Jones depended on donations at Temple services back in California to help make up the difference, but, in the wake of the New West article and Jones’s absence, these were no longer robust. The Redwood Valley temple was up for sale, and the Los Angeles property, too. In San Francisco, attendance was down by half, and collections at Geary Boulevard temple services that once totaled $5,000 or more were now often only a few hundred dollars. Marceline, struggling to keep the San Francisco temple operating, passed along messages from remaining local followers: “I am really grateful to J.J. I have more than I deserve. I will do anything.” “I miss J.J.’s presence and camaraderie, but I know he is opening doors for us in the P.L. [Promised Land].”

  But Jones needed money more than uplifting missives. On its best months, Jonestown’s combined income from its own operations and U.S. contributions reached perhaps $450,000, leaving a consistent monthly shortfall of about $150,000. The Temple had ample reserves in foreign banks to make up the difference for decades to come, but only Jones and a few others knew that. Subsidizing Jonestown indefinitely went against the whole purpose of the mission, which was to demonstrate that a purely socialist community could not only be egalitarian, but also self-sustaining in defiant contrast to the beliefs of capitalists. The settlers had to work harder, do better. But they kept falling short of Jones’s expectations. Many left America owing back rent or taxes. The Temple’s San Francisco office was deluged by calls from debt collectors. Jones established new guidelines for everyone working there. All members of the media were to be referred to Charles Garry. So were process servers. Above all, no one in the Temple office was to accept any type of legal papers.

  Upon arrival in Guyana, most settlers stayed a few days at the Temple’s Lamaha Gardens headquarters in Georgetown to become acclimated to the steamy climate and recover from jet lag. Many took advantage of their last contact with civilization by visiting bars and getting drunk. The Cudjoe often arrived in Port Kaituma with a load of hungover passengers. Jones reiterated the Temple’s long-standing ban on alcohol, but it proved impossible for some Jonestown settlers to get through their grueling new lives without occasional relief from liquor. Some Amerindians living near the mission site were adept at concocting potent fermented beverages that the settlers called “jungle juice.” Each week, at least a few Jonestown residents were discovered passed out on their beds or in the huts of the natives. And, periodically, even sober settlers were caught slacking off work assignments or sneaking a piece of fruit or a sandwich from the kitchen.

  Back in San Francisco, anyone breaking Temple rules was called on the floor for whacks with a board or rubber hose. But after arriving in Guyana, Jones had been apprised by Marceline that post–New West media coverage continued to focus on the Temple’s physical discipline. She suggested that a new method should be initiated in Jonestown, perhaps some form of peer pressure. Jones established the “Learning Crew.” Rule breakers slept and ate separately from the rest of the settlers. They were required to run everywhere—to the fields, to the main camp pavilion for mission-wide meetings, even to the outhouse. No one was allowed to speak to or even look at them—they were pariahs. Learning Crew supervisors reported on their individual progress, or lack of it, to Jones. There was no set limit to the punishment. Jones would arbitrarily decide when someone was allowed to return to the main group.

  Whether part of the Learning Crew or not, everyone in Jonestown was required to come to nightly meetings in the settlement’s main pavilion, a large open-air structure built with wood beams and a corrugated tin roof. Settlers perched shoulder-to-shoulder on long picnic-style benches. For a time, there was room for everyone to sit down. As the Jonestown population grew to more than nine hundred, some settlers had to stand. Jones lounged onstage on a comfortable lawn chair. A sign slightly misquoting philosopher George Santayana hung behind him: “Those Who Do Not Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It.” Some nights, there was entertainment. Jones discouraged going to movies in the States, but the Temple regularly shipped film reels to Jonestown for the settlers, TV miniseries such as Roots or philosophically acceptable movies: Little Big Man, The Candidate, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Execution of Private Slovik. Executive Action, a film about U.S. government subterfuge, was one of Jones’s personal favorites. As a special treat for the children, Jones sometimes scheduled cartoons or tapes of Sesame Street.

  Mostly, though, Jones spoke. Sometimes he still preached, but more often he gave his personalized accounts of recent U.S. and world news, much of it gleaned from Soviet sources and all of it embellished by his own imagination. In Washington, D.C., military leaders at the Pentagon had drawn up plans for killing blacks. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan had recently increased 100 percent, and even the children of Klan members openly wore white-sheet uniforms. Idi Amin of Uganda in Africa was proving himself to be a great leader—he intimidated antagonistic white leaders of other countries by “acting like a crazy nigger.” Temple members should follow his example. Virtually every night, Jones described something shocking that just happened, some great evil that the Jonestown settlers escaped only because he had led them to the Promised Land. He went on for hours, either oblivious to or ignoring the fact that most of his audience, exhausted by their long days, struggled to stay awake. Officially, it was lights out in Jonestown at 11 p.m. But Jones often spoke until midnight or even later; settlers might only be dismissed at two or three in the morning, and Jonestown reveille came at 6 a.m.

  Workdays lasted until six or six thirty. Sundays were half days; work was over at noon, but only two meals were served on Sundays instead of three, so everyone was even hungrier than usual. And while at work, no matter where on Jonestown’s acres the settlers found themselves, it was impossible to escape Jones, or at least his voice. Sometimes they were pleased to see him. Jones would cheer up a hot, sweaty work brigade in the fields by initiating an impromptu water fight, or even work alongside them for a few minutes until urgent business called him away. Mostly, though, they listened to him, and involuntarily. Jonestown had a loudspeaker system that was audible in every part of the main settlement, and an eclectic collection of tapes featuring artists from the blues and jazz of B.B. King and Nat King Cole to the pop stylings of Percy Faith and the Ray Conniff Orchestra, with Earth, Wind and Fire and the O’Jays in between. But often, the tunes would be interrupted by Jones making an announcement, expanding on some topic he’d discussed the night before, or even playing a tape of one of his previous evening addresses.

  Even before Jones himself arrived in Jonestown, Guyanese officials worried that too many settlers were arriving in a settlement that was clearly not yet ready to receive them. In April 1977, John Blacken, deputy chief of the American mission in Guyana, sent a message to the U.S. secretary of state: Peoples Temple had informed the Guyanese that they were bringing in 380 settlers. Guyana’s leadership wanted to know why there was such a sudden influx. Was there hostility between the Temple and the American government? If not, and since, so far, the Guyanese considered Jonestown and the settlers living in it to be “an industrious, hardworking organization,” Guyana would allow the 380 newcomers to enter the country. The secretary made no objection, and the first main wave of settlers came to Jonestown.

  But Kit Nascimento, who’d worked in press capacities in America before joining Prime Minister Burnham’s cabinet in Guyana, still had contacts among American journalists. When Jones came to Jonestown in June, this time apparently to stay for at least an extended period, Nascimento got in touch with U.S. reporter friends and was apprised of the controversy back in San Francisco.

  “I went to see the prime minister and told him what I had learned,” Nascimento says. “I think [Desmond Roberts] had already said something to him about the possibility of [Jonestown] getting smuggled guns. But the prime minister felt that we’d already contacted the U.S. [government through Blacken], and they had no complaints. [Burnham] wanted that place [Jonestown] between us and Venezuela. So long
as Jones didn’t break any of our laws, they could stay there. I said, ‘We’d better start keeping a close eye on them,’ but he didn’t want to hear it. After that, among the prime minister and those closest to him, I assure you that Jones and his people were rarely, if ever, discussed.”

  When Jones arrived in Guyana in June, he expected that he would have constant, easy access to Burnham, on the order of one head of state meeting with another. He was surprised and alarmed to find that, though the Guyanese prime minister had met with Jones on occasional social circumstances like the Georgetown wedding of Jones’s son Jimmy, Burnham now had no intention of dealing with Jones officially. Jones and Temple staff members in Georgetown were directed instead to Deputy Prime Minister Ptolemy Reid, a former veterinarian. Reid patiently discussed Jonestown concerns with Jones or his representatives, but never allowed them access to the prime minister. Jones couldn’t understand why—was it possible that Burnham was somehow in league with the CIA and FBI? Had the Guyanese government joined in plots against him? Through his Temple mistress Paula Adams, Guyanese ambassador Bonny Mann was constantly badgered by Jones to find out. Mann found little to report, except that Kit Nascimento suspected Jones and his followers were always up to something illicit.

  In Jonestown, frustrated by lack of progress there and lack of access to Burnham in Georgetown, Jones grew increasingly upset, and his unhappiness manifested itself in nightly diatribes at the pavilion and general snappishness. Given their hard lives of backbreaking labor, primitive surroundings, limited rations, strict rules, and constant haranguing by their leader, it was inevitable that some settlers grew dissatisfied with life in Jonestown, but those who did found it almost impossible to leave. Passports were locked away, and Jones made it clear that while the Temple paid all travel costs to Guyana, deserters would have to pay their own way back to the States. Given that no one was allowed to enter Jonestown without surrendering all they owned, and that most were either estranged from family outside the Temple or in only sporadic touch with them, very few could afford to go home.