~<\/p>\n
Before I ever meet Rebecca Moore and Fielding \u2018Mac\u2019 McGehee, the managers of this site, I exchange multiple emails with them. I Skype with Becky for maybe an hour one November morning, when I\u2019m still focused on screenwriting, and ask her questions about her older sister. This sister, of course, is Carolyn. My questions are mostly stupid (\u201cDid she like dancing?\u201d \u201cDid she speak Russian?\u201d), and Becky reminds me that Carolyn was sort of a mystery to her as well, that there was a six-year age gap, that she was twelve when Carolyn left home for college. But Becky is smart and good-natured and doesn\u2019t seem to mind answering questions from a random Australian, and when I ask her if there\u2019s anything important I should remember when writing about Carolyn, her response is poignant:<\/p>\n
\u201cCarolyn was isolated. In San Francisco and Jonestown especially, I doubt she was close to anyone except Jim Jones. That relationship and the power associated with it would have been very isolating.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next morning, I meet Becky\u2019s dad, a retired Methodist minister. He\u2019s in his nineties and going pretty deaf, and I\u2019m shy and soft-spoken, so not much happens in the way of conversation. But I like looking at his sharp features and light-colored eyes, and am reminded of the misty high school graduation photo of Carolyn, in which she has puffball early \u201960s hair and similar sharp features. When he mentions Australian Aborigines and Japanese internment camps in WWII, I can\u2019t help thinking that this is the man who helped form the social conscience that attracted Carolyn to Peoples Temple\u2014and also, inadvertently, the complexes that made her vulnerable to a religious leader who called himself \u2018Father\u2019.<\/p>\n Over the weekend, Becky and Mac talk to me about how they can help my research, and talk to each other in my presence. They say things like, \u201cMaybe Laura should meet so-and-so?\u201d and \u201cLaura should read so-and-so book!\u201d, and look at each other in knowing ways or laugh, and I say sure, okay. It\u2019s all very nice and bizarre, and when I leave them on the Monday, I already miss them.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n From talking to Becky and from things I\u2019ve read, I already know that Carolyn is an unpopular figure in the drama of Peoples Temple. Words like \u2018cold\u2019, \u2018fanatical\u2019, \u2018unscrupulous\u2019, \u2018supercilious\u2019 come to mind, and there are harsh realities: she was an adulteress, sleeping with a married minister, and most likely helped him plan the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. In the book Six Years with God<\/i><\/a>, Carolyn comes across as an overzealous bitch who says things like, \u201cIf we ever try to produce a master race, Father should be the one to impregnate all the women,\u201d and writes intense things on scraps of paper because she\u2019s afraid of wiretapping. But I don\u2019t believe in burning witches, or that endings are more important than beginnings.<\/p>\n I\u2019m glad to be meeting a college friend of Carolyn\u2019s, who knew her at nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. She seems glad to meet me too, is charmed by certain physical similarities between me and Carolyn: dark hair, pale skin, something about the eyebrows and eye shape. She speaks to me of sharehouses, road trips, young women who were intrigued by feminism but still wanted to be asked to dance. Of how Carolyn was the most advanced and unconventional of these young women, the first to have sex, go to Europe, call herself an existentialist, wear gypsy skirts, try hash. Of how Carolyn intimidated some girls, shocked others, but was always kind and tolerant.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd she was always one of us. I think that\u2019s important.\u201d<\/p>\n This friend has fond memories of Carolyn\u2019s parents, speaks of Carolyn\u2019s deep love and respect for them, confirms my intuition that Carolyn found rebellion difficult because of this, tells me of the elaborate lengths Carolyn went to to conceal that she was living with a boyfriend. When I ask about boys, I\u2019m told Carolyn favored the \u2018quiet, alternative\u2019 type and wonder how loudmouth Jim Jones figures in. I ask about fashion, music.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not surprised that Carolyn liked Baez or Dylan, but Leonard Cohen is unexpected. In my apartment that night, I listen to Songs of Leonard Cohen<\/em>, wonder if Carolyn liked \u2018Stories of the Street\u2019, my favorite Cohen song. \u2018Master Song\u2019 takes on new significance:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You met him at some temple, where<\/em><\/p>\n They take your clothes at the door<\/em><\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n And you wrap up his tired face in your hair<\/em><\/p>\n And he hands you the apple core.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em>~<\/p>\n The men I speak to who knew Carolyn in Peoples Temple all inform me that they never found her attractive, though this isn\u2019t a question I ask. One describes her as \u201ccompletely impassive\u201d and remembers only one instance where she spoke to him. Her words were bitchy and in French. This man has trouble imagining a romantic relationship between such a woman and Jones, thinks it all comes down to ideology, but he hasn\u2019t seen the things I\u2019ve seen. In one letter, written on hotel stationary, Carolyn extols their perfect physical and psychical connection. The letter is addressed, oddly, to her family.<\/p>\n Through stationary, stamps on envelopes with a dozen return addresses, handwriting, Carolyn becomes more real to me. In the California Historical Society archives, I find a 1976 drivers\u2019 license where her hair is lobbed short and her cheeks hollow, her weight only 103 lbs. I find a 1977 passport full of visa stamps from Panama, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, where her face looks fuller and where her fixed stare and hoop earrings and hairstyle remind me of Frida Kahlo. I find other possible references to her relationship with Jones, a scrawl in a little black book that disturbs me:<\/p>\n Father\u2014I don\u2019t mind dying\u2014However if we have decided not to we better leave for work pretty soon. <\/em><\/p>\n Another find: a list labeled \u2018JJ thoughts while ill\u2019, which I can only assume contains some drug-addled ramblings of Jones\u2019 copied out by Carolyn. It\u2019s typical crazy Jones, full of stuff like, Remember when he shit in a bible<\/em>. But there\u2019s one line that gets to the woman in me, and I somehow hope it was spoken lucidly, lovingly, directly to her:<\/p>\n You keep me thinking<\/em>.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n Carolyn\u2019s high intelligence is something everyone mentions, to the point that I can pretty much accept it as objective fact. One man goes into detail describing her intelligence, what he saw of its operations, what he couldn\u2019t see, the wheels always turning. He describes Carolyn\u2019s ability to pull strings, to be everywhere at once, without saying much or revealing anything of herself. He tells me of her invisible, directorial role in the painful catharsis sessions where individuals were criticized for hours at a time, and from which only she and Jones consistently emerged unscathed. He tells me that, face-to-face, Carolyn was inoffensive, easy to overlook. Smiling, he tells me she would have made the perfect spy.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a photo I find on my last day at the CHS archives that reminds me of \u2018Carolyn the Spy\u2019. She\u2019s the only woman in the photo, and easy to miss: just a pair of folded arms, a slice of cream-colored tank top, a clavicle, a chin, a mouth, a nose, a cheekbone, a single eye. She stands on the outside of a circle of men, both watchful and excluded, the smallest figure and the most powerful. I wish I knew what was in her brain.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n Looking at photos from Carolyn\u2019s time in Peoples Temple, I feel an obscure sympathy. Maybe it\u2019s only skin-deep \u2013 the physical sympathy of one slim white brunette for another \u2013 or maybe it\u2019s her mystique. I\u2019ve always been fascinated by the women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, their detached looks, their fragile power, their veiled and burdensome minds. They are witches, queens, saints, killers, culpable, cursed, tragic. I find the same thing here.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s danger in this kind of artistic identification, when talking about real people, real damage caused. I try to bear this in mind. I am thankful to speak one day with a man who disliked Carolyn and is willing to be honest about it. It\u2019s not the things he says so much as the tone of his voice that gets me, the tremor of rage, the pain still raw after almost forty years. It isn\u2019t Greek tragedy. It isn\u2019t Shakespeare. It\u2019s way more real; the bodies are real, the loss is real, and so is the culpability.<\/p>\n However, this man isn\u2019t interested in burning witches either. He acknowledges that people are complex \u2013 women are complex \u2013 that being young in the \u201960s was complex. He tells me about his own reasons for staying in the Temple, the sense of truly doing good, changing society. Considerately, he admits, \u201cIt was the same for Carolyn. I do believe she genuinely wanted to do good.\u201d<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n A female Jonestown survivor seems more sympathetic to Carolyn, but confesses she never really knew her. She tells me she has a photo somewhere of Carolyn wearing a bandana, and I think: Carolyn in a bandana!<\/em> She compares Carolyn to Annie, the youngest of the Moore sisters, who joined Peoples Temple in 1972 and was a far more well-liked figure, always laughing, joking. She refers to Carolyn as \u2018mirthless\u2019, but doesn\u2019t mean it as a put-down: \u201cI think all her light was just kept for Jim.\u201d<\/p>\n I remember this on my last day at CHS, looking at another rare photo. It is dated early \u201974 and shows, from a high angle, a group of Temple \u2018pioneers\u2019 standing in a clearing in Guyana. They are men and women, black and white, and most of them seem to be looking toward a heavyset woman in the middle of the scene, who is holding a large bug. Slightly behind this woman are Carolyn and Jim\u2014and it\u2019s not only who they are but what\u2019s between them that\u2019s interesting.<\/p>\n She\u2019s wearing a red waterproof jacket. He\u2019s matching her, a red t-shirt. He has his whole body angled toward her, his feet pointing at her, is smiling at her laughter and crossed arms. He looks fond of her, and she of him. They look like normal people. They could quite easily be a normal couple in a park, smiling over their small child, and indeed in a year\u2019s time that\u2019s what they\u2019ll be: parents. There is love and there is light, and the darkness that will subsume it isn\u2019t evident here.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n I guess it\u2019s inevitable that I should dream of Carolyn, especially as my days in San Francisco near an end. When my one-month apartment lease runs out, I spend three nights in a hostel, sleep on a wooden bunk in an all-female dorm. For someone who likes personal space, it\u2019s an uncomfortable transition, but a triggering one. I dream of wooden tables, people milling around, the inside of the Jonestown pavilion.<\/p>\n They\u2019re mostly adults, these pavilion people; no children or old folks. They seem busy, but in good spirits, like they\u2019re making plans. The name \u2018Planning Commission\u2019 comes to mind. I know these people are ghosts, that their death is a fact of this dream, that she is dead too, this woman cramped in next to me at the wooden table. I know her hair, her eyes, her teeth, her posture. She is matter-of-fact and lovely, and willing to speak to me.<\/p>\n \u201cHow do you feel about me writing about you?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n \u201cHonestly, I think it\u2019s weird and I don\u2019t appreciate the attention,\u201d Carolyn replies. \u201cBut what is your thesis?\u201d<\/p>\n The apple is knowledge, power, something special from the gods. Maybe there\u2019s cyanide at the core. We want it anyway. I tell Carolyn that Evelyn contains things about her but can never fully be<\/em> her, that there limits to my knowledge and me. I\u2019m not a perfect spy.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you think I was a cold-blooded killer?\u201d Carolyn asks, and there\u2019s something Becky-like about her sidelong look, her gallows humor.<\/p>\n \u201cMostly I think you were just unhappy and lost perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n Carolyn dips her head slightly, accepts this. She fixes her hair, doesn\u2019t meet my eye as she tells me quietly, \u201cThere are things I would have liked to live for.\u201d<\/p>\n (Laura Elizabeth Woollett is an Australian writer. She recently <\/em>signed a two-book deal with Scribe, an Australian publisher, for her short story collection <\/em>The Love of a Bad Man and her Peoples Temple novel <\/em>Beautiful Revolutionary.<\/em> Her other contributions to this edition of <\/em>the jonestown report are the companion article Life Lessons With Peoples Temple<\/a> and her short story Soybeans<\/a>. Her guest blog for the Melbourne Writers Festival about her research trip to the United States is here<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Soon after hearing the name \u2018Carolyn Moore Layton\u2019 for the first time in early 2014, I learn enough to know that I wanted to write about her. That she was the eldest of three daughters, from a loving and socially active family. That her father was a Methodist minister. That she was a high-achiever all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":64612,"menu_order":7,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-64697","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64697","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64697"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120827,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64697\/revisions\/120827"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"woollett3\"](\"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/woollett3.jpg\")
<\/a>It\u2019s the April of 2015 when I\u2019m met by Becky and Mac in San Diego. I\u2019m only there for a weekend and there are major things to process: being in America, being around people who know more than I do about Peoples Temple, being around relatives of Carolyn. Though she\u2019s about three decades older than Carolyn was in 1978, I look at Becky and find \u2013 or imagine \u2013 similarities in her face and her stance, her crossed arms, her slim build, her narrow blue eyes, her way of squinting at the sun, her sense of humor.<\/p>\n