Back in the middle of the spring 2017 semester, as I was trying to select texts for students enrolled in my \u201cWriting the Essay\u201d course at New York University, I felt the need to get them to confront something real and something staggering. The intellectual work performed by these first-year students was, up to that point, impressive and marked their evolutions as thinkers and writers. That said, as we entered the second essay progression \u2013 what\u2019s known by the dictates of the Expository Writing Program at NYU as the \u201cReckoning Essay\u201d \u2013 I decided that I wanted to get the blood pumping harder in my students\u2019 veins, to get them to deal with a historical event that resisted paraphrase and resolution.<\/p>\n
The Oxford English Dictionary defines \u201cthe act of reckoning\u201d as having to do with the \u201caction or an act of account to God after death for (one\u2019s) conduct in life.\u201d This explication comes after<\/em> life, lands upon the moment of final Judgement. It requires a form of address that is not entire sure of its own direction, but driven by an impulse to know the answers to those big, unanswerable questions \u2013 how? why?<\/p>\n When I asked my students to explain the phrase, \u201cDon\u2019t Drink the Kool-Aid,\u201d they did, by rattling off all of the usual associations that go along with this problematic saying. When I then asked them about its history, to explain the moment when Kool-Aid became tethered to brainwashing, they stared at me with open mouths. Digging into Tim Carter\u2019s moving account<\/a> of surviving Peoples Temple and Jonestown, the students began to grasp its meaning, but their questions remained. In my work with them over the coming weeks, I asked them to keep their senses of confusion at hand, to guide themselves through Carter\u2019s text with a sense of doubt and inquisition befitting a proper act of reckoning. In doing so, and by reaching out to ancillary materials that seemed to give partial explanations to some of the questions that persisted through their work with Carter, the students began to take on the immense responsibility of understanding this small piece of Peoples Temple and Jonestown history after the fact. In what follows, you will see five examples of this labor that endeavor to partially calculate the weight of this history, not only on the imaginations of the students themselves, but on the souls of all of us who have lived on.<\/p>\n I would like to thank these students in particular \u2013 Ian Chen<\/a>, Brad Davis<\/a>, Cameron Fachman<\/a>, Jasmine Hia Sin Che<\/a> and Deakon McCurdy<\/a> \u2013 for their willingness to revisit these essays and to share their ideas with future readers. I am especially grateful to Tim Carter, for his generosity of spirit in receiving and discussing all of my students\u2019 work in the spring, and to Fielding McGehee, for inviting these submissions to become a part of this year\u2019s edition of the jonestown report. <\/em><\/p>\n