Julia Scheeres - A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown

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ALSO BY JULIA SCHEERES

Jesus Land: A Memoir

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Copyright 2011 by Julia Scheeres

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights
Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Free Press hardcover edition October 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scheeres, Julia.
A thousand lives : the untold story of hope, deception, and survival at Jonestown / by Julia
Scheeres.1st Free Press hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Jonestown Mass Suicide, Jonestown, Guyana, 1978. I. Title.
BP605.P46S34 2011
289.9dc22
2011012169

ISBN 978-1-4165-9639-4
ISBN 978-1-4516-2896-8 (ebook)

All endpaper images used with permission from
Peoples Temple Collection, California Historical Society.

FOR THE PEOPLE OF JONESTOWN

I love socialism, and Im willing to die to bring it about, but if I did, Id take a thousand with me.

Jim Jones, September 6, 1975

H ad I walked by 1859 Geary Boulevard in San Francisco when Peoples Temple was in full swing, I certainly would have been drawn to the doorway.

I grew up in a conservative Christian family with an adopted black brother; race and religion were the dominant themes of my childhood. In our small Indiana town, David and I often felt self-conscious walking down the street together. Strangers scowled at us, and sometimes called us names. I wrote about the challenges of our relationship in my memoir, Jesus Land.

Suffice it to say, David and I would have been thrilled and amazed by Peoples Temple, a church where blacks and whites worshipped side by side, the preacher taught social justice instead of damnation, and the gospel choir transported the congregation to a loftier realm. We longed for such a place.

Unfortunately, the laudable aspects of Peoples Temple have been forgotten in the horrifying wake of Jonestown.

I stumbled onto writing this book by accident. I was writing a satirical novel about a charismatic preacher who takes over a fictional Indiana town, when I remembered Jim Jones was from Indiana, and Googled him. I learned that the FBI had released fifty thousand pages of documents, including diaries, meeting notes, and crop reports, as well as one thousand audiotapes that agents found in Jonestown after the massacre, and that no one had used this material to write a comprehensive history of the doomed community. Once I started digging through the files, I couldnt tear myself away.

It was easy to set my novel aside. I believe that true stories are more powerful, in a meaningful, existential way, than made-up ones. Learning about other peoples lives somehow puts ones own life in sharper relief.

Aside from race and religion, there were other elements of the Peoples Temple story that resonated with me. When David and I were teenagers, our parents sent us to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic that had some uncanny parallels with Jonestown. I could empathize with the residents sense of isolation and desperation.

You wont find the word cult in this book, unless Im directly citing a source that uses the word. My aim here is to help readers understand the reasons that people were drawn to Jim Jones and his church, and how so many of them ended up dying in a mass-murder suicide on November 18, 1978. The word cult only discourages intellectual curiosity and empathy. As one survivor told me, nobody joins a cult.

To date, the Jonestown canon has veered between sensational media accounts and narrow academic studies. In this book, I endeavor to tell the Jonestown story on a grander, more human, scale.

Julia Scheeres
Berkeley, California, March 24, 2011

T he journey up the coastline was choppy, the shrimp trawler too far out to get a good look at the muddy shore. While other passengers rested fitfully in sleeping bags spread out on the deck or in the berths below, fifteen-year-old Tommy Bogue gripped the slick railing, bracing himself against the waves. Hed already puked twice, but was determined not to miss a beat of this adventure. The constellations soared overhead, clearer than hed ever seen them. He wiped salt spray from his eyes with an impatient hand and squinted at the horizon. He was still boy enough to imagine a pirate galleon looming toward them, the Jolly Roger flapping in the Caribbean breeze.

This was his first sea journey. His first trip outside the United States. He squinted at South America as it blurred by, vague and mysterious, imagining the creatures that roamed there. A few years earlier, hed devoured DC Comics Bomba, The Jungle Boy series, and now imagined himself the hero of his own drama.

The very name of his destination was exotic: Guyana. None of his school friends had ever heard of it, nor had he before his church established an agricultural mission there. After his pastor made the announcement, Tommy read and reread the Guyana entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica until he could spout Guyanese trivia to anyone who showed the slightest interest in what the lanky, bushy-haired teen had to say. Aboard the Cudjoe, he ticked off this book knowledge to himself. Jaguars. Howler monkeys. One of the worlds largest snakes, the green anaconda, growing up to twenty feet long and reaching 350 pounds. The country was home to several of the worlds largest beasts: the giant anteater, the giant sea otter, the giant armadillo, the fifteen-foot black caiman. He knew a few things about the strangeness surrounding him, and those few things comforted him.

The plane ride from San Francisco to Georgetown had been another first for Tommy. He sat next to another teenager from his church, Vincent Lopez, and the two boys took turns gaping out the small convex window as they soared over the Sierra Nevada, the Great Plains, the farm beltthe entire breadth of America. The cement mass of New York City astounded him; skyscrapers bristled toward every horizon. At JFK International Airport, Pastor Jones, who was going down to visit the mission himself, kept a tight hand on the boys as he herded them toward their connecting flight.