The Road to Jonestown Page 9

  Jim cooperated, at least during the week. He’d tell her what he was thinking about in terms of a sermon. But no matter how carefully Marceline tried to work out a plan, or how often she went over it with Jim in advance, on Sunday he never stuck to it. He’d ask the people if any of them had problems, and the more of these that he helped solve, the more often he was asked to solve other problems. Some Sundays the letter writing went on for an hour or more. Afterward, Jim was still in no hurry to wrap things up. He might go ahead and stick to the sermon he’d told her about, but usually he’d have read something in the paper that morning, a news story describing an unjust act perpetrated on the powerless, and he’d talk about that instead. It got so there had to be two or three breaks each Sunday, so people could use the bathroom. The service would be over when Jim was too exhausted to talk anymore. Marceline feared everyone else would get so bored that they’d quit coming, but this never seemed to be the case. They appreciated their pastor wearing himself out for them.

  Yet most had no idea just how hard he worked on their behalf. It cost money to rent the storefront, and the meager offerings Jones collected on Sundays from his impoverished followers weren’t enough. Marceline’s salary from her full-time job barely covered essentials for Jones’s immediate family. So Jones worked, too, selling spider monkeys door-to-door for $29 each. He imported them from a firm in South America, and in April 1954 the Indianapolis Star ran a story about his refusal to accept a shipment of monkeys because they were ill. Beyond that, he held other part-time jobs, anything to bring in a few extra dollars for the Community Unity cause. He slept when he could.

  By the standard of what anyone else might have hoped for, Community Unity was a success. It had built a small but enthusiastic congregation, helping its members in critical ways in their everyday lives while still providing the traditional, Bible-based worship that they craved. But Jones wanted much more. Yes, his church was serving needy people without regard for their race or desperate economic straits. In that sense, he was practicing socialism. But any current accomplishments were limited. Already, Community Unity was outgrowing the cramped storefront space it rented on Sundays. Some larger, permanent place was needed—neighborhood fund-raising to buy appropriate property wasn’t possible, because no one in this neighborhood had any money. Helping a few people with the electric company or school officials was gratifying, but Jones dreamed of greater things benefiting multitudes. Among his goals was a soup kitchen feeding not only the homeless, as was traditional, but anyone who was hungry and wanted a free meal; a community clothing bank, where everything was available at no cost; free child care for poor working mothers; assistance in helping the unemployed find work. Such services were especially needed among Indianapolis’s African American slum dwellers. Jones had no intention of proposing solutions that required participation by outsiders who might threaten his personal control. If the things Jones wanted next were going to happen, it fell to him to bring them about. He believed that he knew how to do it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  PEOPLES TEMPLE

  Jim Jones returned to the revival/tent meeting circuit with a new agenda. His earlier efforts were, in effect, training, where he learned how to attract audiences of complete strangers and win them over with a mixture of preaching and healings. Now he set out to establish himself as a top-tier traveling preacher. That would position him to bring in badly needed money. To begin with, Jones wanted to own—not rent—a much bigger building for Community Unity, with sufficient space for continued expansion.

  His performances were carefully structured; they continued to combine Bible-quoting rhetoric with healings. Jones had a fine sense of just how many miracles were necessary to keep individual crowds enthralled. Most of these still involved eavesdropping in advance, “whatever I could take down.” He commanded headaches to vanish, coughs to desist, and, on very rare occasions, the lame to walk. These miracles didn’t always come off as Jones would have liked, or as his audiences hoped. He was dealing with strangers and couldn’t count on their cooperation, so he was careful not to ask too much. A woman in a wheelchair might be gently instructed to stand and take just a single, shaky step rather than run or dance down the aisle. Then Jones could declare even the slightest hint of progress as the initial moment in a gradual healing process that God had granted through him.

  It worked. Many people who came to see Jones for the first time in smaller settings returned to his appearances in larger venues. In expansive tents and midsized auditoriums that held good-sized crowds, Jones preached, healed, had collection plates passed, often taking away hundreds of dollars. Both he and Marceline recognized a September 1954 program as a turning point. Marceline described the scene in a letter to Lynetta Jones back in Richmond:

  Dearest Mom,

  I feel that I must write you of the latest developments in the life of your beloved son. Through all our tests and hardships I had faith that Jimmy would be something special. This, however, is beyond our fondest dreams. . . . Saturday night in Cincinnati 200 were turned away. Well over 1000 stayed.

  Sunday mornings found Jones back at Community Unity, preaching about helping each other, being a true family. Jones rarely asked the congregation to help compose letters now. He had far less time to personally assist with individual problems, but there was still a sense of excitement among the growing congregation as Jones and Marceline shared stories and news clippings about turned-away crowds at outside programs. Their pastor was a famous man—it gave his followers a pleasant sense of their own improved status. People in other places heard Pastor Jim only every once in a while. Community Unity had him every Sunday. The congregation didn’t realize that Jones considered their church to be only the first rung on a very high ladder.

  Yet even as his reputation grew, Jones was frustrated. He drew audiences in the thousands, but still couldn’t preach the socialist themes that formed the basis of his real philosophy: “I could get the crowds together, but I couldn’t get them politicized.” The necessity of healings at almost every circuit performance put him under tremendous pressure. Jones certainly knew other healers at least sometimes used plants in the audience, but he didn’t have anyone to plant. He traveled without an entourage other than his wife, and Jones was careful, at least for the time being, to let Marceline believe that he had developed the power to read the thoughts of others, rather than simply gaining information by eavesdropping. Jones began showing signs of a stress-related problem of his own, grinding his teeth to the point of developing dental problems. This proved so severe that he had to take a few weeks off for treatment. Jones asked Ron Haldeman to preside over Sunday services at Community Unity in his place. Haldeman was stunned by how the congregation had grown in the few months since his earlier visits. Where there had previously been only two dozen or so, now a hundred people crammed into the storefront.

  Soon afterward, Jones asked Haldeman for a favor. The two men had grown close personally as well as professionally. Along with their wives, who were also friends, they often went out for inexpensive dinners. Jones especially liked a place called Acapulco Joe’s—he relished spicy food, but this time Jones wanted a private conversation. He told Haldeman that while it was exciting to see Community Unity grow as an independent church, now he yearned for something more. From birth, Jones reiterated, he’d been a committed Quaker. With Community Unity finally established, Jones wanted to formally affiliate his new church with the Quakers. The most critical stage of potential affiliation, Jones knew, was submitting a written request, one that specifically demonstrated how the congregation adhered to, and could help extend, overall Quaker philosophy and goals.

  Haldeman was gratified. He said he’d be glad to help his friend with the application. Jones pressed: Would Ron actually write the application? After all, Ron knew better than anyone exactly what would convince the Quaker examination board. Of course, Jones could write it himself, but Ron could do it so much better, and wouldn’t Community Unity, with its almost entirely Negro
membership, move the regional Quaker organization toward complete integration, the very thing that Haldeman himself wanted? Haldeman was flattered and felt that he couldn’t refuse. He started immediately.

  As later events proved, Jim Jones never intended to surrender control of his church to anyone else, including administrators representing a large denomination. But affiliation would provide him with a powerful tool as he worked to gain social and political influence. It would be harder for elected officials and business leaders to ignore a man theoretically representing tens of thousands of people and a major denomination than an independent ghetto preacher whose church membership totaled a few hundred slum dwellers. There were tax considerations, too. Under Indiana state law, only ministers representing established denominations were entitled to personal tax breaks. Jones was beginning to rake in money on the preaching circuit. He wanted to keep as much of it as possible, though mostly for Community Unity programs rather than for himself.

  In very short order, the Quakers declined Community Unity’s application. Jones and Haldeman believed that the church, despite its avowed outreach to the impoverished, didn’t want blacks. Alternatively, when the Quakers investigated Jim Jones, they may have been put off by his rumored shady financial actions as a student pastor at Somerset Methodist, or suspected him of staging phony healings. He returned to the regional revival circuit, where he was now an established attraction.

  By late 1954, other prominent preachers on the circuit took notice of Jones. Some, representing global evangelism programs, offered to hire and send him all over the world to preach. It would have been rewarding financially as well as spiritually—he, his wife, and their adopted daughter, Agnes, could live comfortably. Jones refused. He told Marceline that real social change anywhere could be brought about only if a leader stayed in that place. He’d chosen Indianapolis as his battlefield. Marceline was proud of her husband’s principled refusal to move on and up. She believed that Jim didn’t need anyone else’s worldwide organization to become famous. He could use his God-given gifts to take what Marceline disdainfully termed “the Oral Roberts route” of self-aggrandizing independent ministry, gaining personal wealth as well as evangelical renown. But Jim showed no interest in that, either. It was so admirable. True, some of his private beliefs and actions alarmed her, but look at what he had already accomplished, and all the things that he still intended to do.

  Marceline Jones was the first, but far from the last, person to decide that Jim Jones’s programs and goals more than compensated for his personal flaws. Taken all in all, Marceline believed, her husband was a great man, though extremely difficult to live with. All right, then: she would remain in her challenging marriage, and do all that she could to help Jim. She stopped mentioning the possibility of divorce to her family.

  * * *

  Jones made a particularly dynamic appearance at a revival in Detroit. Among those in attendance was Russell Winberg, an associate pastor at Laurel Street Tabernacle in Indianapolis. Laurel Street was an Assemblies of God (Pentecostal) church with a white congregation of almost a thousand. Laurel Street’s main pastor was John L. Price, an older man. Sunday sermons there were often delivered by guest ministers, and Winberg arranged for Jones to speak. He was an instant success, and, after returning several times, got the impression that he would be asked to replace Price when he retired—which was expected to happen soon. This was a tremendous opportunity. His eventual goal never changed: he intended for his followers to embrace socialism, and exemplify it through their own lives and church outreach programs. To take his next local step, challenging discrimination on a citywide rather than neighborhood basis, he still needed sufficient followers to impress Indianapolis leadership. Some would come from the local ghetto, but there were already black Indianapolis churches with a thousand or more members. What Community Unity required was a racially mixed congregation, blacks and whites united in purpose. Combining Community Unity and Laurel Street Tabernacle under his leadership would give Jones the racial combination he needed.

  But when Jones tried to bring his black Community Unity followers with him to Laurel Street, church leaders there were appalled. They wanted Jones, not his congregation. Once that was made clear, Jones cut off all contact with Laurel Street, but not before dozens of white members, equally disgusted by its discriminatory action, walked away with him and joined Community Unity. Among these new white followers were Jack Beam and his wife, Rheaviana, and Edith Cordell, who was convinced that Jones cured her arthritis. Jack Beam was a gruff man, handy at all sorts of equipment maintenance and fiercely loyal to those he trusted. He’d been a board member at Laurel Street and was a good organizer. Both Beams quickly became integral to the public and private aspects of Jones’s ministry. Edith Cordell invited other members of her family to hear Jones preach at Community Unity, and some joined the congregation. Jones hadn’t left empty-handed.

  Though his dalliance with Laurel Street had brought in some white followers, Jones knew they weren’t enough. The best place to recruit more was away from Indianapolis, back on the revival circuit. Jones’s impassioned sermons would surely win some new white converts, but the chief means of attracting white members for Community Unity would be healings. It didn’t matter if newcomers had no initial interest in social reform. Jones was certain that, given sufficient time, he could make good socialists out of anyone, no matter why they originally joined.

  How much Jones created the illusion of healing at these revivals, and whether, in some cases, he began using plants in his audience, isn’t known. But many people believed the healings to be genuine, particularly if the miraculously cured sufferer was a friend or relative. Joe and Clara Phillips, a white husband and wife, were filled with gratitude when, at an out-of-town healing, Jones proclaimed that he had cured their toddler Danny’s serious heart defect. Afterward, the Phillipses took Danny to a heart specialist, who examined the little boy and said that his heart was fine. Joe and Clara dismissed the possibility that earlier doctors might have made a misdiagnosis. They took Jones at his word that he deserved the credit for Danny’s survival, and swore to follow him for life. So did dozens of others, almost all of them white, who heard Jones at revivals. Jones’s out-of-town recruitment strategy, intended to diversify as well as increase his city congregation, worked. But that wasn’t—couldn’t—be the end of it.

  Once those who believed in his powers joined the Community Unity congregation in Indianapolis, Jones was obligated to perform periodic healings there. Until these newcomers could be fully indoctrinated into socialism, they expected healings, demonstrations of their new pastor’s awe-inspiring powers. Jones had to deliver, at risk of losing them. Further, the same style of healing that worked among strangers at revivals would be ineffective among regular congregants. Use of audience plants—someone who’d never attended Community Unity before, and never would again—would tip off longtime followers that Jones’s healings weren’t genuine. He had to involve rank-and-file members, familiar faces everyone trusted. That meant letting at least a few people in on his secrets. Who he initially chose isn’t certain. The Beams were likely involved. Marceline might have been. But now there were occasional healings during Community Unity services. These were less flamboyant than those Jones performed at revivals. No one lame was commanded to walk. But there was a new type of drama. Jones began miraculously removing cancers. A strict protocol was observed. Jones would name the afflicted person, then designate someone else to escort him or her to the bathroom. Both were in on the act. When they were in the restroom, Jones promised, he’d invoke his power from the pulpit. The afflicted one would “pass” the cancerous mass, which was retrieved by the other person. After a few minutes, they would return to the main room, with the assistant Jones had designated brandishing a bloody, foul-smelling lump clutched in a white cloth or napkin. Jones would declare that here was the cancer—look at it, but not too closely, because it was terribly infectious. The assistant would take away the disgusting mass for d
isposal as Jones grandly proclaimed the healing accomplished, and the person who was healed shouted praise. Jones’s accomplices, then and later, were aware that the cancer was actually chicken offal, allowed to rot a bit before use.

  With the Beams and others, Jones was beginning to attract followers who understood and supported a flexible approach to recruitment. If, sometimes, their leader’s methods were questionable or even plainly deceptive, that was all right—Jim was doing what he had to in order to build his own mighty church and bring about equality for all. Ron Haldeman, who still attended some services, recalls that “[Jones] was a good psychologist. I was skeptical of faith healing. I was clear about that to him. He never tried to debate me about it. It was like he knew [that] I knew he was doing it for the effect, to draw in his congregation so they’d buy into his social programs.”

  Not all Jones’s healings at Community Unity involved chicken guts passed off as cancer. Jones often engaged in the laying on of hands, commanding aches or tremors or chills to be gone—and, usually but not always, sufferers experienced instant relief. (Jones loudly attributed failure to a lack of belief on the part of the person he attempted to heal.) Not all of them could have colluded in advance with Jones to claim phony cures. Psychosomatic response was likely in most cases—they believed in Jones so much that they essentially willed discomfort away. But a few surviving eyewitnesses agree that he occasionally performed healings that defied rational explanation. His act may have simply been that good—but they believe that Jim Jones did, in fact, have some sort of special healing gift, which perhaps functioned only intermittently.