Jonestown Transcription – Landon Weber

[Editor’s note: Landon Weber was one of the students in Prof. Alexandra Prince’s Religion 230 class on Religion and Society who assisted in the transcription of letters from Jonestown residents. This is the paper he wrote about his experiences in working with the text.]

To most of the world, any mention of Jonestown is going to be indicative of a few things. Notably, it will be in the context of mindless obedience or usual anti-cult rhetoric that has been circulating for a long time. It is also the genesis of the phrase “Drinking the Kool-Aid”, which has its own moral questions as to whether or not it should be said so widely, along with spawning the people who think they’re hot stuff because they know that it was actually Flavor Aid, an alternative brand, but that is besides the point. Jonestown was populated by people, real humans with lives and families, hopes, dreams, and aspirations, but they all shared something: devotion and commitment to Peoples Temple. This manifested in many different forms depending on the person, but to say that the people of Jonestown were hopeful for the future is an understatement, at least until the time of the White Night.

One of the more jarring things when this class started our work on transcribing the Letters to Dad and other writing from Jonestown was the nonchalance multiple people expressed about death. While the exposure to this idea in written form was early on, it also may be a little more intense than others because it was the account of Joe Wilson, a trusted member of Peoples Temple and high-up in the security team. Some of his writing to Jim Jones (via the Letters to Dad) says things such as “I know I would not have any trouble killing anyone who turned traitor including my mother or sisters especially someone who has been there as long as I have and has seen as much principle from you as I have,”^[1] but his writing is not all sunshine, murder, and rainbows. In fact, Wilson here establishes another tenet that many people echo in their writing: dedication to hard work and labor, or to generalize a bit, the socialist lifestyle.

His very next point, as this letter is structured by numbered points, presumably in response to questions of some kind, discusses something that he misses from the States, the only thing being able to take a long walk on the beach. Wilson, however, then says that those are not worth missing because “it is non-productive and counter revolutionary to sneak off into another world and escape reality.”^[2] That commitment to socialism and working to make Jonestown into the best place it can be, hoping to pay it forward in a sense, is something that many people write about in their letters. To the people of Jonestown, socialism is an ideal to live up to, one that Jim Jones embodies and fights for,^[3] and to some of them, Jones gives them a purpose or meaning.^[4] This is also not a phenomenon exclusive to Jonestown as a place: Jim Jones’ passion and message as the Reverend of Peoples Temple are what got people in the door in the first place.

Somebody who exemplifies Jones’ ability as a speaker and as an empathetic reverend is B. Alethia Orsot, who was a member of Peoples Temple that went to Guyana, but ultimately survived the White Night through external circumstances. She writes on her general experience and thoughts around Peoples Temple (as well as what happened after) in her essay, “Together We Stood, Divided We Fell”, and there she recounts the day that she knew that she “would be with him forever”^[5]: April 11, 1970. Much like many members of Peoples Temple, Orsot grew up as a Black person in a pre-Civil Rights US, and even then, the Civil Rights Movement/Act is only a starting point. That is to say, she grew up being questioned and discriminated against on multiple fronts, from her peers to her places of employment, and it certainly didn’t help that she is a woman. All of this context and background illustrates a through line between many members of Peoples Temple: it gave them a place to go when the world refused them. Orsot credits him with giving her “the kind of family I never had before or since.”^[6] Rita Lenin, a trusted figure at Jonestown under Jones himself, wrote that Jones effectively gave her life meaning, and without meeting him, the lives of both her and her children would have been in vain.^[7] Another member, Daisy Lee, wrote how Jones introducing her to the concepts of socialism and committing to helping others were a great positive change in her life.^[8] These are all people who had their lives changed in what they saw as a positive way, and made a conscious choice and effort to join Peoples Temple, and made an even more conscious choice to uproot themselves from the United States and move to the jungle of Guyana. At least, that seems to be the majority opinion.

Of course there are dissenters or disillusioned members of Peoples Temple, there are with most groups or organizations, but these people have something that boosts their voices high above the rest. Unfortunately for the members of Peoples Temple, and more specifically those who resided in Jonestown, it hits an intersection of things that the US is not too keen on: NRMs and socialism. At risk of sounding too pessimistic, their fate was sealed from the moment those two facts about Peoples Temple emerged and seeped into public knowledge. A well-known name in survivors of Jonestown is Leslie Wagner Wilson, who was the wife of Joe Wilson mentioned earlier. Amongst other things, her book Slavery of Faithcontains some insight into her thoughts about her time in Peoples Temple, and what led her to stay involved (and eventually leave), however she did not publish it until decades had passed due to the public stigma surrounding Peoples Temple and the events at Jonestown, which Orsot attests to as feeling like “an alien in my native land,”^[9] and at the very least that remains consistent across multiple accounts from survivors.

Unlike the members mentioned so far, Wagner Wilson was not entirely involved with Peoples Temple due to her own choice, but due to her family, and she just so happened to be along for the ride. Wagner Wilson’s mother became a member of Peoples Temple while seeking help for her other daughter, who was struggling with drug addiction. Wagner Wilson herself grew up relatively comfortably, as much as an adopted Black child could in the mid-20th century, anyways, by her own account being upper-middle class.^[10] By the time she and her family got involved with Peoples Temple, she was a teenager, and by the time Jonestown itself was constructed she was barely in her 20s, although she had been married and had a son, Jakari, with Joe Wilson, who was already at Jonestown with Jakari. Taking into account her age and circumstances, Wagner Wilson was not going to Jonestown because she wanted to, she was going out of anxiety and guilt over her son. She writes her own thoughts on seeing him again as thinking “I can finally be a good mother…”^[11]

While Wagner Wilson does look back on at least some of her time in Jonestown as positive, such as being able to learn some medical practice^[12] or reuniting and rekindling her up-to-then strained relationship with her husband,^[13] the anchoring point, her reason to be there, was not due to devotion to the cause of socialism (even if she writes about thinking so) or to finding a true family or community, like Orsot and other members write about, rather, Wagner Wilson was there for her son. Jakari, while not alone, seems to be the thing that validated Wagner Wilson being in Jonestown at all.^[14] Comparing her to somebody such as Orsot, there are definitely commonalities, but there are bigger differences. Wagner Wilson, whose life was not perfect by any means, still had what many of the other members wished they had at her age: relative stability, a comfortable lifestyle, and a future. A member like B. Alethia Orsot, on the other hand, had not only less of that, but also grew up in a different time. Were the late 1950s-early 1960s great for Black people? Not by any stretch of the imagination. That time, however, was likely preferable to being born in the 1920s before the Great Depression. What Orsot had by the time she found Peoples Temple was life experience that had not been kind to her, things that an average teenager just would not experience to anywhere near the same degree at that point in their life. Wagner Wilson was not the only teenager in Peoples Temple, nor was she the only young person who lived at Jonestown, such as 15 year old Patricia Houston, whose writing sounds very similar to most of the adults present when it comes to spreading socialism to help people.^[15] Houston, however, did not have the same motivation that Wagner Wilson did, that being a child in a different country, to draw her to Jonestown.

This is not to say that Wagner Wilson is wrong for feeling the way she does towards Peoples Temple, nor to blame her for anything. This is just to potentially try and show that, while people can be forged from the same event, notably surviving the White Night on November 18, 1978, they can respond extremely differently. Even the days leading up to that event were almost polar opposites for Orsot and Wagner Wilson: Orsot was almost refusing to leave Jonestown to get a toothache fixed, and only left at the behest of Jones himself, while Wagner Wilson was planning an escape along with some others who had become disillusioned with Jonestown and its purpose. Orsot spent the rest of her life trying to clarify and give a voice to those who did genuinely believe in what Jim Jones spoke about, while Wagner Wilson has made her name discussing her experiences in what is designated as a cult.^[16] There is an inevitable question that rises from this: would these people who went down diverging paths be able to understand one another? Even come to some sort of harmony or resolution? The sad truth is that as time goes on, we will likely never know, and we will never know when it comes to Orsot specifically.

Regardless of their differing beliefs, accounts from the people who were actually at Jonestown and members of Peoples Temple, like these, should be lifted up and heard, not just cast aside due to a cultural bias against what people have designated a “cult”. Peoples Temple and Jonestown both had history before November 18, 1978, and it is only through accounts such as Orsot’s and Wagner Wilson’s that the whole picture can be seen and understood.

Bibliography

Footnotes

^[1] Joe Wilson, EE-1-UVWXYZ-85

^[2] Joe Wilson, UVWXYZ-86.

^[3] Marceline Jones, August 6, 1977, EE-1-I&J-75.

^[4] Rita Lenin, “What Jim Jones means to me, and how I think he suffers most, what pains him most”, EE-1-L-77.

^[5] B. Alethia Orsot, “Together We Stood, Divided We Fell” in The Need for a Second Look at Jonestown: Remembering its People, ed. Rebecca Moore and Fielding M. McGehee III (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 96.

^[6] Orsot, “Together We Stood”, 95.

^[7] Rita Lenin, “What Jim Jones means to me, and how I think he suffers most, what pains him most”, EE-1-L-77.

^[8] Daisy Lee, EE-1-L-83, EE-1-L-84.

^[9] Orsot, “Together We Stood,”, 105.

^[10] “The Jonestown Massacre Survivor Leslie Wagner Wilson” interview by Jessica Okonkwo, posted June 23, 2020, by Africax5 Network, YouTube, 5:00-5:30.

^[11] Leslie Wagner Wilson, Slavery of Faith (iUniverse, 2009), 69.

^[12] Wagner Wilson, Slavery of Faith, 77.

^[13] Wagner Wilson, Slavery of Faith, 79.

^[14] Wagner Wilson, Slavery of Faith, 72.

^[15] Patricia Houston, “Questions”, EE-1-I&J-84.

^[16] “Home,” Leslie Wagner Wilson. https://www.lesliewagnerwilson.org/.