![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/06-02b-harriet-book.png\")
<\/a>Mary Wotherspoon, her husband Peter, and their child Mary Margaret perished on November 18, 1978 in Jonestown. In this thoroughly researched, thoughtful and moving book, Mary\u2019s sister H.J. Jones takes the reader on a journey of discovery, sharing her own difficult voyage into \u201cone of the wildest places on earth,\u201d the jungle surrounding Jonestown, Guyana. She explores the often brutal facts of the story and delves into the grief it brought to her family and herself. This is a courageous and generous book, uplifting in surprising ways, despite the horrific tragedy at its center: the deaths of 918 people, half of them in their twenties or younger, one-third of them children like the author\u2019s eight-year-old niece.<\/p>\nJonestown: An American Family Tragedy <\/em>begins with a brief history of the author\u2019s family including their parents\u2019 romantic meeting, their marriage and their six children. The author was six, her sister Mary four, and their younger brother two when the father, ravaged with cancer, died \u201cat a psychiatric hospital, locked inside a secure room, driven mad with unmitigated pain.\u201d Herm \u2013 at age 15 the oldest son still at home \u2013 had been given the job of caring for his father all night, so their mother could get at least some respite.<\/p>\n The death left the family scarred. Their mother changed from a \u201cquiet, reassuring presence\u201d in their lives to one who scolded and punished them and demanded that H.J. must not say \u201canything about \u2018daddy.\u2019\u201d The family church, \u201ca stern Calvinist denomination where people neither laughed nor cried during its austere services,\u201d was no help. The author describes \u201cour mother\u2019s flight from grief\u201d and the ensuing difficulties the children endured as they entered adulthood.<\/p>\n Mary had dropped out of college. Then she found a life partner in Peter, whom the author describes as having \u201ca dazzling intellect,\u201d as well as being \u201clikeable and \u201cunpretentious.\u201d He had been in the Peace Corps and was involved in opposition to the Vietnam War. Mary had joined the protest movement too \u2013 the two met in the streets of Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention \u2013 and were soon married with a new baby.<\/p>\n As Mary wrote to her sister:<\/p>\n I\u2019m searching, desperately, for a concrete knowledge of God which I can hold on to, which will bring me above the bad things around me. I\u2019m afraid that life will crack me up before I find what I am looking for. I want to be happy and make others happy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It was Peter who discovered Peoples Temple near where they lived then in Redwood Valley. It had a friendly congregation who did good works. Mary felt it provided answers for her. Soon they were active members. But on what was to become the sisters\u2019 last time together \u2013 Mary was on a Temple trip, and managed to get away to visit her family \u2013 that H.J. noticed that Mary<\/p>\n seemed angry and strangely detached, and because of that I did not feel comfortable hugging her goodbye\u2026. Instead, I just stood there waving goodbye as they drove away down our gravel road, never suspecting how vulnerable and needy she must have been during that last stolen visit back home.<\/p>\n And I will always, and forever, regret not hugging her one last time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown, <\/em>a book I wrote with Ron Cabral, my fellow teacher at Opportunity High School in San Francisco, has many parallels with this book. <\/em>The previous passage embodies a deep connection. The loss of nearly 100 of our students in such a horrific event left us with a grief tangled with many other emotions. We too questioned ourselves about what we might have done, and have regrets. Mary and her family left for Guyana on July 17, 1977, the day of the publication of the New West <\/em>magazine\u2019s expos\u00e9 of what was going on in the Temple behind closed doors. Most of our students were sent off to Guyana that summer also. We too hoped for letters that never came. Like H.J. Jones, we were to discover much more, and much of it remains hard to read and digest. But in the interest of telling as true a story as possible, Ron and I kept on, as she did. And for us, as well as for her, it was encouraging to find so many good people willing to help us.<\/p>\n Both books focus on idealistic young people who wanted to help create a better, kinder world. H.J. Jones describes her younger sister as \u201cvulnerable.\u201d Our students too, were vulnerable. Like the Wotherspoon family, most of them arrived in Jonestown about the same time that their leader came to stay permanently, creating a jungle prison camp in which people were overworked, underfed, sleep-deprived and often punished, even sadistically tortured, for what Jim Jones, in his increasing paranoia, saw as \u201ccrimes.\u201d Both books make readers aware of the cruel fact \u2013 still unknown to many \u2013 that the babies were killed first on November 18. If there had been any shred of hope left in people before then, it disappeared in that act.<\/p>\n Attempting an escape was the worst offense, the ultimate betrayal to Jim Jones. \u00a0Tommy Bogue, a teenager in our book, and Peter Wotherspoon were both punished brutally for attempted escapes. Tommy was chained by his bleeding ankle, forced to cut logs in the terrible heat, until Jim\u2019s son and mother \u2013 Stephan and Marceline \u2013 finally convinced him to release Tommy. Peter was put in the \u201cbox,\u201d \u201ca narrow, coffin-like structure \u2026 Buried four feet underground, it caused sensory deprivation and claustrophobia for anyone trapped inside, sometimes for days.\u201d<\/p>\n And both books, to borrow Herb Kohl\u2019s words in the Foreword to And Then They Were Gone<\/em>, search \u201cfor hope that seeps through the cracks and insists that love too has a central place in even the most tragic of circumstances.\u201d I often tell people that Chapter 12, \u201cPrecious Acts of Treason,\u201d a phrase taken from Deborah Layton\u2019s book, Seductive Poison<\/em>, is the heart of our book, as it tells of the risks many took in Jonestown for the sake of friendship or love. H.J. Jones learned that survivors had admired Mary greatly for her good heart. She tells of the many acts of generous courage she discovered, both by people in Jonestown and by others who reached out to help during and after the tragedy, many of which I had not known before reading this book.<\/p>\n For example, Congressman Leo Ryan and Richard Dwyer, Deputy Chief of Mission for the American Embassy in Georgetown, Guyana, were to be seated on the first plane out, but decided to surrender their seats to two of the defectors who had left Jonestown with Ryan that day. Ryan himself was killed, and Dwyer, despite being injured himself, worked efficiently to help protect those left on the airstrip after the shootings. H.J. Jones reveals that \u201cout of nowhere, a young Amerindian boy suddenly appeared and then disappeared again after silently leading [the bleeding reporter Tim Reiterman and defector Carol Boyd] into the jungle\u2019s dense, dark safety.\u201d Later, when there were no bandages for Reiterman\u2019s serious wounds, the woman who ran the village pub, Elaine, \u201coffered them some prized new curtains she had been saving,\u201d refusing to accept any payment. A group from the nearby village appeared and after they spoke with the survivors, their elderly leader said, \u201cWe are with you. We will help you.\u201d No one knew when another attack might occur.<\/p>\n H.J. Jones also gives credit to the crew at Dover Air Force Base, where the rapidly decaying bodies of those in Jonestown were brought. She says of them, \u201cThey were the quiet heroes who bore the stench of death for the rest of us.\u201d<\/p>\n There are many more such stories, but I will end with this one. After a family funeral, at the graveside where all had gathered, H.J. Jones was the last to leave.<\/p>\n I sat on a cold headstone off to the side. Unable to cry before, I now wept as the slow, torturous roll of this still unbelievable catastrophe engulfed me. After a while \u2026 I noticed some gravediggers. Two gray-haired gentlemen were leaning on their shovels, quietly looking my way. When they saw me looking at them, they removed their hats, and I was deeply moved by their gesture. It was a simple, but powerful gift of unexpected grace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Judy Bebelaar<\/strong>\u00a0is\u00a0the co-author of the book, <\/em>And Then They Were Gone, about some of the Peoples Temple students whom she and the late Ron Cabral taught at Opportunity High in San Francisco in the mid-1970s. Her remembrance of Ron is here<\/a>. Her collection of articles for this site may be found here<\/a>. She can be reached at judy@judybebelaar.com<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mary Wotherspoon, her husband Peter, and their child Mary Margaret perished on November 18, 1978 in Jonestown. In this thoroughly researched, thoughtful and moving book, Mary\u2019s sister H.J. Jones takes the reader on a journey of discovery, sharing her own difficult voyage into \u201cone of the wildest places on earth,\u201d the jungle surrounding Jonestown, Guyana. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":123916,"menu_order":26,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-124592","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/124592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124592"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/124592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124854,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/124592\/revisions\/124854"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}