“[It] saved me, in every way a person can be saved.”
Rose Dawson Calvert, in Titanic
As a 31-year-old disabled mom of two kids, I have not been allowed to work for most of my adult life. I had trained to be a Certified Nursing Assistant, but the government pulled my right to practice due to constant seizures interrupting my ability to work. Though I am endlessly lucky to be able to stay home with my kids, there have been many times when I felt lost as a person. In the everyday shuffle of being a wife, a mom, and a pet parent, I wondered what else I could do to give myself a sense of purpose. Nothing seemed to offer me the passion and drive that I had all those years ago.
Until I began my work on this book. Amidst the piles of paperwork and the hidden primary sources, in the untold stories that threatened to be lost to history, I found a new purpose, a new drive. The work turned into a three-year journey that fundamentally changed so much about me, my outlook on life, and even the way I write and research.
I am an entirely different person than I was three years ago. In the course of my research, I learned never to let a lead die, but also – conversely – to realize when it was time to let go, to brace myself to do the scary thing. And along the way, I discovered the true meaning of writing from the heart.
Teaching me to never let a lead die was the most important lesson for the research, so it also has to be the one I start with. There were days that I would spend hours researching just one person or one family within the Temple. I was like a fish, and old worn documents were my pond. Suddenly a tiny lead – call it “bait” in this increasingly difficult metaphor – would pop up! I had to learn to hold on for dear life and let that line take me. Sometimes it would take me only ten years back into someone’s personal historyw, but sometimes it would send me generations into the past. Those leads are what helped me find entirely new connections between the people who died in Jonestown. I found people whom this site once considered “singles” – without any blood relations at all in Jonestown – but who turned out to have a cousin or a nephew or a grandchild who lived there too. I found “sisters” who were turned out to be a mother and her daughters.
But as I say, I also had to learn how to let go, when the leads just don’t appear, when that bait just never pops up. As hard as it was, I had to learn to come to terms with the fact that sometimes I won’t find the answers about an individual, but that there were still ways I could honor him or her.
By definition, the lesson of doing the scary thing was a difficult one, but perhaps the most important. At the beginning of this process, I panicked every time I reached out to a survivor or a family member, and my success in landing an interview invariably caused me to hyperventilate. With that experience, though, I now find I can make calls to the Guyanese Embassy, to contact previously unknown family members I connected through my genealogical research, and to do it all without blinking an eye. And what I found out was people want to help! Most people I met treated me with kindness and understanding. They didn’t tell me I was inexperienced and in over my head, even if both of these things were true at different times. Most people – like me –just want to have the stories told.
The final lesson I learned is the true meaning of writing from the heart. I have always loved to write and always felt I had a lot to say. However, I realized that most of the things I have written in the past, even things that were deeply personal, were all just surface level. But in the past three years of writing this book, I feel like I have gotten to know these people. It’s true, I’ll never know the color of their eyes in the sun or the way their voices cracked when they got nervous, or the way they laughed when something tickled their fancy. But I know about the families they built, the lives they led, and the friends they made along the way. I have watched home videos of them, spoken to their families, and pored over countless documents and old photos, most of this when I was meant to be sleeping. Through all of that I feel like I know them. A part of me grieves them in an odd way as I write their stories or edit their photos. And that feeling, that feeling of somehow being connected to the people, their stories, and those they left behind, made me write from the heart in a way I was never capable of before. I mean every word I say about the more than 900 people who died on November 18th, 1978, and I feel truly lucky to be able to tell their story.
*****
As for the book itself, the research and the writing that have gone into it have been nothing but surprises. From new discoveries of family members, to watching the postwar Great Migration happen in real time through various records, it was one wonderful lesson at a time. My knowledge of peoples Temple, Jim Jones, and Jonestown when I started this work three years ago was that of one of those true crime documentaries on a cable TV channel, focused on the deaths and the sinister forces leading up to them. Literally from the very first interview I had with a survivor, I realized that most of that was simply not correct. The mass media’s portrayal of the tragedy lacks understanding of the culture of both the Peoples Temple and the American society from which it emerged. Most of that coverage pushes exaggerations and outright inaccuracies, and ignores nuances and subtleties, all in pursuit of a better story. This process made me realize this was true for many so-called cults operating both then and now. That not only hinders the humanization of victims of cults, but it’s also dangerous.
This is what I mean. Cults still function. Cult mindset is constantly around us. Think of the people you have on your favorite social media platform. Do they all have the exact same views as you? Do they all share the same memes or vote for the same person? Do they all think the same jokes are funny? That means you are in an echo chamber of like-minded people that you feel you can safely and happily relate to. You are operating in the same environment that drew in the people who joined Peoples Temple. You are operating in a cult mindset.
Realizing that is the first step to a true understanding of what happened in Jonestown. It wasn’t a bunch of “crazy Kool-Aid drinkers,” it was a group of people who shared each other’s views and cared about each other. This research taught me, a former true crime lover, to look more deeply than the documentaries and the podcasts. I know now that in order to understand a cult or a crime, you need to look past the newspapers and listen to those who survived it. In other words, before you learn about Jonestown, you need to unlearn everything you thought you knew about Jonestown. I’ve found that applies to everything from American History and politics to something simple like basic sciences.
What surprised me most in my genealogical research on the hundreds of Jonestown residents who were born in the American South was how truly bad the record keeping was for the black population there. It shouldn’t have surprised me, since it reflected how they were treated in every other aspect of their lives. I also appreciated that many in the black community in the South, especially in rural areas, gave birth at home. However, to have hundreds of people that I couldn’t find anything on was a complete shock. And some of these people didn’t even have a record of their existence in California. I learned that the states had the worst recording keeping were Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and – surprisingly – California; and those with the best were Texas, Louisiana, and most northern states. That enabled me to manage my expectation even before I started to search for a person.
On the reverse side, but equally surprising, those that did have records showed me in real time the Great Migration happen over and over again! I watched people get married in some tiny town in the South or Midwest, then move west, have babies and find jobs – in other words, establish their lives – before they joined the Temple. Those discoveries gave me a deeper understanding of history. But more than that, as a disabled person it was truly heartbreaking for me to see members of a disenfranchised and largely forgotten community find a place for themselves in a South American jungle, to carve that place out with their bare hands, and then to have it taken from them in the worst possible way imaginable.
I had known going into this that I agreed with many of the ideals espoused by Peoples Temple: that all humans should be equal; that everyone should have the life-sustaining necessities of food, water, shelter and clothing; that a community which offers these things is one of the most important things a person can find; and, most of all, that the only way to achieve true equity and equality is to fight for it. What I didn’t know is that I would continue to understand and relate to them until close to the end. Once you understand what they had, you will be able to relate to that mindset in 100 different ways.
This experience changed me. It surprised me at every turn and broke my heart hundreds of times. Finishing The People of Peoples Temple is bittersweet. I am so proud of what I have created, and I truly think I did justice to those who died. But for it to be done, it feels like closing the door on the face of a friend knowing it’s the last time you will ever see them.
The last person I wrote about is Ramona Young. As I finished typing what her adoptive father, Guy Young, told me about her, while looking at her sweet face it felt too final. It made their losses feel somehow fresh, like I scratched open the collective old wounds of every survivor and felt the combined loses of so many loved ones rise up to the top again.
I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, so I am going to wrap this up before I break yet another promise to myself. As I do, I have to add that this book, this process, and the people who have helped me through it have grown to mean so much to me, and I am endlessly thankful to be able to experience every joyful and sad moment of it.