{"id":64751,"date":"2015-10-28T20:54:59","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T20:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=64751"},"modified":"2019-10-30T14:03:57","modified_gmt":"2019-10-30T21:03:57","slug":"are-we-black-proud-and-socialist","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=64751","title":{"rendered":"\u201cAre We Black, Proud and Socialist?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hutchinson\"<\/a>In answer to Jim Jones\u2019 resonating question, Sikivu Hutchinson has written a novel that defiantly shouts Yes! White Nights, Black Paradise<\/em> frames Peoples Temple and Jonestown within an African-American perspective, something which no published novel has yet managed. Of the handful of literary novels on the subject, the two works closest to it \u2013 Jonestown<\/em> (1996) by Wilson Harris and Children of Paradise<\/em> by Fred d\u2019Aguiar (2015) \u2013 were written by Guyanese men. \u201cComing from the vantage point of a Black woman writer, in a field \u2013 Jonestown scholarship and fiction \u2013 where African American feminist analyses are few, I have sought to creatively illuminate (and problematize) what is still a turbulent and evolving historical record and signal event in the \u2018psychic space\u2019 of African American migrations,\u201d writes Hutchinson in her author\u2019s note to the 354-page fiction.<\/p>\n

Multiple characters \u2013 some fictional, some historical \u2013 people this lyrical narrative, with a core of four African-American women at its center: the sisters Hy and Taryn Strayer, the journalist Ida Lassiter and therapist Jess McPherson, who is a member of the Planning Commission back in the States and the sole black woman with power in the Jonestown hierarchy. We inhabit the hearts and minds of many more characters, including Jimmy Jones, Jr. and his white brother, called Demian in the story, Jones Sr.\u2019s only biological child with his wife. Hutchinson\u2019s schema for fictionalizing some Peoples Temple members and not others results in Jim Jones as himself, but his wife, Marceline, is called Mablean. Other characters appear as composites while some are pure inventions. On her website, Hutchinson explains, \u201cThe characters in my novel (the majority of whom are fictitious) are a cross-section\u2014they\u2019re queer, lesbian, bisexual, trans, straight, African American, Latino, multiracial, white, age\/class diverse and all over the map in terms of spiritual belief.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the novel moves back and forth in time, readers know where the story is destined to end, and even though many readers will have knowledge of the events of November 18, 1978, Hutchinson manages to inscribe the destination in fresh, potent and painful language.<\/p>\n

More came to the microphone to testify, phantoms lusting for sleep. The stench of almonds nearly knocking Taryn off her feet as Jess moved ahead with the procession of speakers.<\/p>\n

Mabelean floated past, handing out flowered Dixie cups, a fairy godmother sprinkling pixie dust.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cpixie dust\u201d dispersed by Jim Jones\u2019s wife is, of course, the death potion, and this otherworldly metaphor describing what was the prelude to a brutal mass murder\/suicide offers an example of Hutchinson\u2019s sensibility in various moments throughout the novel, which, although lengthy, rushes by in a headlong dash toward inevitability.<\/p>\n

Hutchinson\u2019s title, White Nights, Black Paradise<\/em>, has many valences. The ritual of the White Nights \u2013 rehearsals for mass suicide \u2013 is presented as theater: the residents of Jonestown participate in its urgency and action, though its ultimate meaning is still veiled in the guise of drama. It is a kind of acting.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlay me like Dirty Harry, the gun said to Jamiah,\u201d is the first sentence of the \u201cWhite Night\u201d chapter, about 50 pages before the novel\u2019s end. \u201cHe\u2019d always wanted to shoot one, just to hear the sound. The only ones he\u2019d seen up close and personal were in cops\u2019 holsters; lean, gleaming, black and mean.\u201c<\/p>\n

Jamiah is one of the novel\u2019s African-American male characters who is drawn in by Jones\u2019s allure \u2013 a fate the African-American women do not avoid but remain skeptical of and sometimes resistant to. Jamiah\u2019s blackness is reflected in the gun and the power it embodies. Yet that power is always fatal: \u201cNigger killers, his boys in East Oakland called them. Pig talismans taking out whole families with one clip, maiming the able-bodied, silencing the innocent, swallowing a clutch of his running buddies well before sweet sixteen.\u201d Hutchinson offers the possibility that the murder of the congressman by the Red Brigade \u2013 the Jonestown security guard comprised primarily of African-American men \u2013 is one kind of revenge for those Stateside deaths at the hands of police, as relevant in 2015 as in 1978.<\/p>\n

But if Jonestown is indeed a \u201cblack paradise,\u201d is its existence predicated on the White Nights, which presage the downfall of their retreat from the California ghettos gratefully abandoned by so many African-American Temple members?<\/p>\n

As the novel\u2019s resident skeptic, Taryn concludes:<\/p>\n

We\u2019re the only ones dumb enough to leave the States en masse without a plan for a way back. In fact the government is probably saying to Jim, why can\u2019t you take some more Negroes with you? While you\u2019re at it, take all the ghettoes of Watts, Newark, Detroit and Harlem and dump them in Jonestown. What the fuck do we care about a bunch of spooks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Taryn\u2019s cynicism is justified by her experiences before joining Peoples Temple, which she does skeptically, submitting to her younger sister\u2019s will. Hy \u2013 short for Hyacinth (not to be mistaken for the elderly survivor Hyacinth Thrash, author of The Onliest One Alive<\/em><\/a>) \u2013 testifies to the soft underbelly of Taryn\u2019s tough exterior. Sexy and vibrant, Hy is a free spirit whom we meet in the opening pages as she is recovering from an abortion, driven through the night by big sister Taryn. While Taryn also drives the narrative of White Nights, Black Paradise<\/em>, it is Hy\u2019s passion that will outlive the sisters\u2019 encounter with Peoples Temple.<\/p>\n

Hutchinson is the author of two books of non-fiction, also published by Infidel Books: Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels<\/em> and Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and the Values Wars<\/em>, as well as Imagining Trust<\/em>, published by Peter Lang International (2003). Her skills as a researcher and interpreter of texts have primed her to become the first African-American novelist to take on the story of Peoples Temple and Jonestown. Her forthcoming talk, \u201cNo More White Saviors: Peoples Temple & Jonestown in the Black Feminist Imagination” on November 24 at the University of Southern California Center for Feminist Research promises to unite the creative and the scholarly in Hutchinson\u2019s vision of what was found and lost in Jonestown.<\/p>\n

(Annie Dawid, author of three volumes of fiction, lives in Colorado. Her complete collection of articles for this site may be found <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>. She can be reached at <\/em>annie@anniedawid.com<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In answer to Jim Jones\u2019 resonating question, Sikivu Hutchinson has written a novel that defiantly shouts Yes! White Nights, Black Paradise frames Peoples Temple and Jonestown within an African-American perspective, something which no published novel has yet managed. Of the handful of literary novels on the subject, the two works closest to it \u2013 Jonestown […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":64612,"menu_order":12,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-64751","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64751","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=64751"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93327,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64751\/revisions\/93327"}],"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=64751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}