The People of Peoples Temple has truly been an honor to write. It has taken me through more journeys, roller coasters and emotions than I thought it was possible for one person to have. I have spent countless hours poring over primary source documents, doing genealogical research, interviewing survivors and victims’ families and ingesting every picture and video I could get my hands on. I would especially like to thank the wonderful people at the California Historical Society for their methodical record keeping when it comes to Temple documents. I wouldn’t have been able to do the work I’ve done without the incredible work of the people there. It’s been a beautiful and heartbreaking process, but I feel so honored to be the one to watch the victims’ stories come alive and to watch the timeline of their life take shape.
Through this process I have had one goal in mind, to humanize the dehumanized. Sometimes, that wasn’t easy. Humans are flawed at the end of the day. We all are capable of terrible things when our own survival depends on it. I don’t think any of us want to admit that we are capable of doing things that go against our own morals, but throughout this research, throughout learning about these people, I have realized that we all will do what we need to survive. That fact however has, at times, made my job a bit more difficult. How do I balance humanizing these people while also admitting to their faults? Admitting that they did bad things in Jonestown, everything from turning other people in to Jim Jones for minor transgressions, participating in group shaming sessions or even beating others on the orders of Jim Jones. How do I come to terms that these wonderful, kind-hearted and brave humans were also participating in terrible things, and doing so willingly? This was especially difficult for the “big wig” people within the Temple, people like Annie Moore, Carolyn Layton, Jack and Rheaviana Beams, Harriet Tropp and the extended Jones family. This group of people helped make decisions within the Temple and in Jonestown. They helped come up with punishments, made the paperwork that signed the rights of their friends away, enabled Jim Jones and his power-hungry dictator-like actions and even made the instruments of torture by hand that would be wielded against the people they claimed to care about.
However, they are also known as the people they were aside from all of that. Annie was selfless and a nurse through and through. Carolyn loved big and was an attentive mother. The Beams were handymen, brave and joyous. Harriet Tropp was hilarious and smart. The entire Jones extended family was generous and made you feel like you were their whole world when they spoke with you. They were people aside from the things they did, and that realization, that click in my brain that made me realize people were, overall, morally gray was eye opening to say the least.
Through all of the research into each of the people I named, there was one person I continually put off writing about, and that was Marceline Mae Jones, or Mother Jones, Jim Jones’ wife.
Marcie has one of the longest descriptions of anyone in my book, because she needs a large description. She was a special, complicated human being, and I was terrified of tackling this particular mountain. As a survivor of an abusive relationship, I found myself desperately trying to use that as an excuse for her complacency in Jim’s violence. But, as always, the truth is much more gray.
In a companion article to this piece, I present this book’s coverage of Marceline Jones. The conclusions I reached are based on weeks’ and weeks’ worth of interviews, written word and recordings from and about her. They are based on a weird combination of fact and opinion, and I just hope I did her, and the victims of Jim, justice with my conclusions.
My book is finished and is waiting for the perfect publisher to see the importance of this work and these stories. I hope to one day, officially, make sure the voices of all the victims are heard, loud and clearly.