I Remember Jonestown

Until attempts were made to match earlier photographs to one of the dead bodies found apart from the masses, there were speculations that Jim Jones had escaped, because only very few people had even a fleeting recollection of what he looked like.

Some Guyanese people still like to say that he didn’t die. What is certain though, is that this American preacher had, after allegedly fathering dozens of babies by various women, somehow managed to brain wash his devotees not only to give up their homes in America and follow him to a third world former British colony, but to kill themselves and their children, submitting to a whim of his putrid, devilish mind.

It was later revealed that not all of Jim Jones’ followers met their deaths by drinking the Kool-aid. Some were found shot at a nearby airstrip, apparently trying to escape the afternoon drink on offer at the People’s Temple of doom.

I followed this story with the rapt attention of a middle-aged reporter in need of a better twist to a macabre story. It naturally, didn’t help me with my personal abuse problems as they got worse and I lived every day in the hell Jim Jones might have created if he had any power at all.

Because of its use of death as an escape, this story did discover for me a bizarre outlet which – apart from in my nightmarish dreams – I never really even considered using. And though I didn’t understand it clearly at the time, it brought to my attention the fact that unlike those people whose pictures I had studied, I did not choose to be victimized.

I was only a child, and like in the case of those children whose little booties made the front page of the national paper, grown ups are the ones who make the decision to either protect or violate the lives of little angels.

When President Carter mourned for the dead, it was for the shot Congressman Ryan, the NBC news reporters and the other Americans who lost their lives at the hands of his own citizen. Our dead and that little twisted piece of history that should not have been ours, will live in multi million pixels in my mind forever. After all, my late uncle was one of the soldiers sent into Jonestown for a frenzied clean up right after the massacre.