Don’t just remember the tragedy—understand the trap. Author and Academic, Annie Dawid, talks about the true and often-ignored story of the Peoples Temple. We discuss the inner circle of Jim Jones, the racism and strict hierarchy hiding behind the promise of “equality,” and the lasting impact on Guyana. A vital look at cult dynamics that serves as a chilling reminder: no one is immune.
An excerpt from Dawid’s “Paradise Undone”
“Kenny Winking” Short Story by Annie Dawid
Books mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
welcome to the Inkspot podcast. And a big welcome to author Annie Dawid, who is also a lecturer and an academic.
And she’s the author of six books. And the last one, Paradise Undone, is a novel of Jonestown. And we’re actually releasing this podcast on the 18th of November, which is the 47th anniversary of the terrible tragedy that happened in Guyana. And Annie is somewhat of an expert on this, having spent probably, close to 20 years researching this?
Is that right Annie? 21 years. So before we get into the events that led to the terrible tragedy in the Guyanese jungle, do you want to just give a little pricey about your career and basically what led you to write about Jonestown? Yes, I was giving a reading of an unrelated story at the University
of North Dakota in 2004, where I was a guestmaster teacher for a week. in my story, which was about these two sisters who had fled New York, where I grew up, a New York suburb, for this what they call a no-name cult, this little cult in the Southwest,
I was reading about how the parents went to a deprogrammer, which back in the day was a big thing when parents were trying to get their kids out of cults and they’d pay a deprogrammer, which was sometimes looked upon as kidnapping. In this case, I made up the event, although in real life, the parents did go to.
deprogrammer and I had the deprogrammer say, well, just so you know, my daughter died in Jonestown because this was happening in 1982 and Jonestown was 78. And that was the only time Jonestown was mentioned in this super long story. So I wasn’t thinking about Jonestown particularly. And after the reading, the director came up who was a friend of mine and he was
crying and he was telling me how these friends of his had family who died in Jonestown and that was a very very powerful reaction which I had not received giving readings for all those years before. So a month later I was preparing for my sabbatical where I was gonna write my next book.
called Hippie Ruins about these hippie communes in Southern Colorado. And I was in the bookstore aisle and I was at CO and I was looking at communes and I moved down a little and I got to see you to cults. And there were all these books about Jonestown, a ton of books. And I was planning to do research and I made this decision right then I call it my bookstore aisle epiphany.
that I was gonna write about Jonestown and the hippie ruins could wait. And so this is 2004 and really what I was thinking about was how
People followed the cult leader of Osama bin Laden, 19 of them, to get on planes and kill 3,000 people in New York City, the Al-Qaeda followers. And I was thinking how following somebody like that made no sense. So that was a homicidal following and people…
think of Jonestown as being suicidal and there was some suicide that happened that day but it was really a mass murder more than it was a mass suicide because there were guards with guns pointed at everyone while they were standing up for the flavor aid, not Kool-Aid, the flavor aid which had cyanide in it. So that’s the genesis of how I came to start this novel.
OK, yeah. And actually, what you’ve just mentioned, that it wasn’t a mass suicide. As you say, there was some suicide. It was mainly murder, certainly murder of infants, children, babies, ⁓ old people who were unable to defend themselves. And yet, the Jonestown victims have been painted by history as mindless zombies who just
drank the Kool-Aid and it was flavor aid. And they’ve been sort of written off by history as people who were somehow weak minded. This the time, at the time that what came out, the cult of death and it’s just all these dead bodies, faceless dead bodies, don’t even get a human face on. And that was the same cover in many.
many news magazines. so your novel is a very powerful attempt to humanize the people who died in Jonestown. And also it does a really good job of explaining why those people had taken the decision to go to Guyana in the first place. Many of them were black, over 70 % of the
of the victims were black and they had escaped in America, in which life was pretty intolerable for them. Perhaps you could describe a little bit of the backgrounds of some of these people? Yeah. So in my novel, I focused on four human beings who had Jonestown connections.
One of them was a guy who went by Watts, who was from Watts. That wasn’t his real name. And so he would be an example who represented many of the inhabitants of first the People’s Temple in California. then what Jonestown was called the People’s Temple Agricultural Project. That was its
official name and the idea was they were going down there to build a utopia. Far from civilization and they would be self-sufficient and it’s a very actually American thing to try and start utopias. That’s what the Brits and the Dutch were doing when they first showed up on the North American continent in the 1600s. ⁓
But Annie, everyone dreams of a utopia. the problem is that everyone dreams of making a fresh start away from whatever it was that dragged them down at home. And yet, as human beings, we cannot help but bring our baggage with us. Absolutely. Yeah, Jones called it the promised land. And so.
It had a lot of bad, I he called it the promised land when they were back in the US. It’s like we’re getting ready to go to Guyana. But, you know, as most utopians end up, it was quite the disutopia. didn’t it didn’t fulfill almost any of its promise. Although for some, for some for some of the old people.
especially who had come from inner cities where they were scared to go outside, where there were needles around where they lived, et cetera. For them, Jonestown, it was beautiful. It was the jungle and peaceful. they didn’t have to work in the fields like the younger people did. Right. It was really backbreaking work. And also, yes.
most people who were there were actually fed a pretty low protein diet. They lived on what rice and bananas and, just going back to the old people before we get distracted. They were, they were also given medical care, dental care. Yes, they no longer had to choose between eating and their medicine, for example. And so
From the old people’s perspective, it must have seemed pretty flipping cool. And yes. Yes. And yet the younger ones, as we’ve discovered, they had a low protein diet, had to do back breaking work. And also they were chronically sleep deprived because Jim Jones had this terrible habit of getting onto the intercom or whatever, know, whatever megaphone system they had and ranting in the middle of the night. And so
When you combine all these factors, it is really no wonder that this paranoia set in that it’s us against the rest of the world. And Jim Jones was able to exploit that and ensure that people were compliant. Yes. Yes. And then when you’re physically worn down, which is out of the playbook of brainwashing,
you are less and less able to have a mental defense against what you’re hearing day and night. And when he wasn’t talking on the public address system, they were playing tapes of him talking. And yet even so, there were plenty of people who really wanted to leave and felt they were unable to. First of all, their passports were confiscated. And obviously from
Jones’s perspective, the more people he had in Jonestown, the more social security checks he was receiving every month, the more viable the project became. so, and obviously, the more people that defected, the more the people who remained behind would question why that was the case. And so, as in always, all these cults, defection is a sign that there’s something terribly wrong. And obviously, he was willing to do pretty much anything to stop that.
Yes. The level of coercion was was high. Very, very high. And there were some people who tried to escape and were caught and beaten so that they wouldn’t do it again. But there were also some successful escapes, most pointedly on the day of the massacre, which happened in the late afternoon evening.
But that morning there was a group of African-American family and friends, they weren’t all related, who walked out of Jonestown and the jungle. They went 30 miles to the next town. They didn’t go to the close by town because they didn’t want to get seen there. And that family and their friends
All those people, nine of them, were fine. And so that story doesn’t get told as often as it might. And that woman, Leslie Wagner Wilson, who was kind of the leader of this band, she is starting a podcast which will begin today on the 18th, and it’s called Black Jonestown.
Okay. And she’s telling the story specifically from an African American perspective, which has been missing from the conversation for nearly 50 years. For the most part. Definitely. Definitely. We’ll put a link to that when it’s when it’s available. Okay.
Is she going to interview survivors or family members? do you know what? I don’t know what the format is going to be. It’s a mystery right now. But it has more than one part. And I’m guessing that will be, you know, she is herself a survivor and will be doing other interviews with survivors.
And there were a couple of people at the dentist that day and also Jones and Marceline’s son was away with a football team. Basketball basketball. That’s it. Sorry. Right. There were a number of young men who were on the basketball team from Jonesto. So, yeah, there’s a contingent of.
survivors, we call them survivors of Jonestown who weren’t there on that day, they were in the capital. And then many others were back in San Francisco at the Temple headquarters, which provided all the supplies for Jonestown, which is an enormous job, shipping like everything you needed from the states to Jonestown.
And I presume they were doing all the administrative work behind the scenes to ensure that Social Security was getting through and all that. All that kind of stuff. Yes. And doing some PR work for Jonestown with the Guyanese government in the capital. I’m talking now about the the capital headquarters for
the People’s Temple, which was another place where there were a lot of people who were surviving in Georgetown. Because it was a huge undertaking to transport so many people to effectively the jungle, where was no infrastructure. But I mean, in a country with which had limited resources. They were clearing, they cleared
300 acres of jungle and they built a small city there with all of the infrastructure. mean, it’s quite a phenomenal accomplishment what they ended up doing. Those were called the Jonestown pioneers, the people who went over earlier in 1973. And so they were there, that’s five years before the massacre and they were just
building and clearing and making crops and you know.
really starting a life from nothing. so I feel like it’s an incredible accomplishment what those people did as one or more person has said, the only thing wrong with Jonestone was Jones. Well, yes, but there was also an inner circle around Jones.
as well, who fed his ego and, increased his, that feeling he had that he was somehow messianic. Is that even the right way to pronounce it? Yeah, that’s fine. He was some kind of messiah and he had this not only a God complex, but a persecution complex as well. Yes. I mean, part of that was enabled by his drug addiction.
which was in turn enabled by these women in the inner circle, which included his wife, who was an RN and there were other medical people. And one of the great ironies out of many is that one of their most successful programs back in the States was getting people off of drugs. Wow, that is very ironic. Yeah.
And to my knowledge, I have never read about anyone trying to approach Jim Jones to say you need to get clean. Because it seems like they would have been able to do it because they had done it with so many other people. And in fact, the doctor at Jonestown had come to People’s Temple as a junkie. He was a Jewish Texan.
middle class who arrived in San Francisco like so many hippie types and one with a drug problem. And so he got clean in the temple and the temple sent him to med school. So very awfully, this man is also the engineer of the poison. He did all the research and made the poison. So
I’m not saying he’s a good guy. I’m just saying he had been a drug addict and then became a productive member of the community because he got clean. But like I said, I’ve never seen anything about somebody trying to get the leader clean. And in fact, his drug use just got worse and worse and worse.
Just going back to the individual you just described, it’s really incredible to be given a second chance and then to misuse it in that way. ⁓ It’s just so appalling, isn’t it? Right. But for him, his name was Dr. Larry Schacht. He’s one of those young men who saw Jones as a messiah figure because his
He had been so down and out. And then he came back and became a doctor, which was probably what his middle-class Jewish parents had hoped for him from the very beginning. And then he descended into drugs. So there were some young men who were in his thrall. And many know that…
Jones was bisexual and did have affairs with men. And I can’t say for certain that he had an affair with the doctor, but there was definitely this unequal power relationship between them. Yes. And also, we’re probably getting ahead of ourselves, but I was really interested in the custody battle about the little boy, John, who
and whose mother had to leave people’s she had to leave him behind in people’s temple before they went to Guiana’s. Isn’t that right? ⁓ Yes, correct. And and then she immediately started trying to setting getting the law on her side to get her son back. right. And some some people see that as one of the triggers for the massacre, because
Jones refused to give up this boy. So he was supposedly the boy’s father, but that was never proved like with DNA or anything. And the boy’s legal father, Grace’s husband, was super high up in the organization and he had defected.
I believe within a year of the massacre. And so the two of them, even though they weren’t married anymore, they were trying as hard as they could to get their son out of Jonestown. And Jones was adamant that that would never happen. And actually, he had some collusion with the Guyanese judiciary, who like they went out and posted a
what do you call that, summons that he needed to come to court in Georgetown. And he refused and they dropped it. Nobody had made him come to Georgetown to go to court about the custody of this little boy. He was six. His name was John Victor Stone. Why do you think this child was so important to Jones? ⁓
When there were so many other, I mean, there were 33 babies born in Jonestown. Well. And he and Marceline had adopted a number of Black and several mixed-race children. Yeah. And they had their own son, Marcus. Yeah. In real life, Marcus’s name is Stephen. Sorry. That’s my mistake. ⁓
Well, was, I believe it was really about ownership. And Jones felt like he owned this boy and this boy was noticeably white, OK, because there’s always this undercurrent of racism when you talk about Jones. ⁓ He slept with so many white people, but only one.
He attempted to sleep with only one Black woman who rejected him. This was in Jonestown. She was 19 also, and so he’s in his 40s. And she got punished as one of the ways they were punishing people in Jonestown was being injected with sedatives or depressants. And so that was…
That was her story, but let me get back to John Victor Stone. So he was, so he had the name of that fancy lawyer who had just defected, who went to Stanford. And I think that that was also part of the cache of this boy. So it became this tug of war possession.
Issue he also had another son who was around the same age with Carolyn Layton who had other last names More was her original name and You know, so these two boys they were actually found in the cabin where they lived with Jones and The mother and the mistress and
Not Mrs. Jones, but his other bedmates. They all lived in this well-appointed cabin as opposed to every other place in Jonestown, was very bare bones. So anyway, they were not among the pile of bodies. They had their own pile of bodies that were specific to that cabin.
But there is a it’s very interesting you talk about that poor girl who was plied with sedatives for having the temerity to turn down Jim Jones, because one of the one of the defining characteristics of people’s temple
certainly before they went to Guyana, was the brotherly love aspect and the promise that everyone would be treated equally. Whereas in fact, in reality, once the project became underway, you had once more this depressing hierarchy of a hierarchical inner circle and black people supporting it with their lives and their social security sex.
And I’m just astonished that that wasn’t picked up on sooner, I suppose. Right. Well, I do want to point out that in 1973, a group of young people, they’re called the Gang of Eight Revolutionaries. And so interestingly, they had been going to college. The People’s Temple sent them to college because they wanted their people to get educated.
And that group was four men and four women, four black and four white. Some of them were couples.
kind of the leader who I want to write about in my next book, Jim Cobb, who died recently, they wrote this manifesto to Jones complaining about how the inner circle was almost entirely white. Like there was a token black man and a token black woman, but everybody else was white. And so he,
or they, I’m not sure who actually authored the manuscript, but there are these eight names on it. So they complained and then they fled because they were worried about retribution because he was always threatening retribution on anybody who left. And so they went and hid out. They were like traveling around the Western United States from like cheap hotel to cheap hotel, hoping they weren’t being tracked.
And they weren’t and that all those people survived. They survived that 1973, leaving the temple, that is. one of the really sad things among them. So Jim Cobb had a sister who was also part of the gang of eight. But back in Jonestown later on, they had like four other siblings and their mother.
So that family got split up at the time in 73. And that was not unusual where some people would leave, but other family members would stay. And so Jim Cobb ended up in the concerned relatives, the group that was trying to get people out of there. And he ended up on the plane with Leo Ryan. So.
He saw his family members the day of the massacre. He was like having lunch with them and talking. And he got back to the airstrip with the congressmen and the others and he was shot at. I don’t think he was injured. I think he fled into the jungle. But so yeah, he had the smarts to…
see very early on what so many other people were blind to and to have the courage to voice his dissent along with some others. And so it wasn’t entirely unseen that kind of racism in the inner circle. And presumably he tried to get his family members to leave that day. Yeah, I mean, we don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m
pretty sure his siblings and some of them had kids there also. So he had nieces or nephews.
⁓ They were very die-hard Jones people. I don’t think, from everything I’ve read, I’ve never seen that family listed as among the people who were trying to get out that day.
So just going back to the conditions in the camp ⁓ and obviously hard though they must have been, there must have been a sense that everyone there was part of something. one of the things that you highlight in your book is how the people who were left behind in the States had a kind of
first of all, an envy that they were not part of it. And then obviously they’ve suffered afterwards from survivor’s guilt. it must have come as a huge shock to them. I know that Jones was preparing people with his white knights. ⁓ Can you just describe what those were?
Yes. So yes, it came as a surprise to some, but not all, because he’d been prepping them for a mass s*****e for many years, including before Jonestown. So some of them who were still in San Francisco were probably shocked, but not surprised when it actually happened, because in the way brainwashing works,
get used to something horrible, which you would never get used to, but you have repetition. And so it becomes not so extraordinary. some of them had already been through more than one. A “White Knight” was when the
People’s temple members were told, “okay, we’re under attack. We’re going to have to drink the poison and commit s*****e And this is going to test your loyalty”. And they would have to drink something, a liquid. And before November 18th, the liquid was always free of poison. So they would drink it even though they might be expecting to die, but then they didn’t die. So you do that a few times.
And so it is possible on the very last day that some of them, especially the ones at the front of the line, thought it might be just another drill. But then once the people began dying around them, then those people remaining would see that this was the real thing. the White Knights were kind of, I suppose we call them now a visualization exercise.
And enacting the ritual. Yes. Right. So they drank their flavor aid and sat down and waited to see what would happen. And then nothing happened. And so he did that several times in the jungle. He also had.
Even in the jungle and before in California, he sort of staged some attacks on himself. And in Northern California, he did that. And in the jungle, he did that. So he built the paranoia of his followers like he was paranoid. And this is another kind of dictator handbook thing to do. then.
they’re after Jim and so we feel so sorry for him, you know, and and by extension they’re after us.
Yeah.
So.
One of the figures that is, well, very, I suppose, morally ambiguous in this whole thing is Marceline. Yes. Which, again, it’s a very, very difficult thing to tackle. And I think you did it very well in the book without overstepping any boundaries, which is Marceline’s role in this whole tragedy.
She was a nurse. She was a very shy pastor’s daughter who had been very sheltered in her upbringing. And then she suddenly meets this young intern at her hospital who was younger than her. Isn’t that right? was a couple years younger. And she was, and she’d never had a proper boyfriend before. And she was totally swept off her feet. Obviously the guy had, he had looks and he had charisma.
And he seemed to have all of the personality traits that ticked all of her boxes, that he wasn’t, or at least he didn’t appear to be racist. He seemed to have the same vision for humanity as she did. And so it’s really understandable how she got really swept in really quickly. However, she did not stop this terrible tragedy from occurring.
And it’s also, I think you’ve listened to what are known as the death tapes, isn’t that right? Yes, yes. The death tapes being a 40 or 50 minute recording of the, and which period does it capture? Well, apparently, because the tape has been studied, there’s something like 30 times.
in those 45 minutes where it got turned on and off. ⁓ so things were left out and it didn’t only take 45 minutes for all those people to die. We don’t hear her on the death tape. We hear him saying mother, mother, mother. And he could have been talking to her like mother, mother, stop protesting. That could have been.
Or he could have been saying, mother, mother, mother, to all of the mothers there who were supposed to kill their children and they were protesting. So we don’t know what she was doing on the last day, but she did die from poison. Everybody died from poison except for Jim Jones and what they called his nurse anymore.
So both of them died of gunshot wounds to the head and they may have each killed themselves or one of them killed the other, which I’m sure would have been Annie who took the initiative rather than Jones before killing themselves. So she died like everyone else died of the poison, Marceline did. And she could have been out there raging and they shot her up or they put a gun to her head.
That’s very possible, but we’ll never know that. That’s true. And also she was very cowed by her husband, wasn’t she? He was coercive and he controlled her and, like so many charismatic men, he regarded her as an extension of himself and not a person in her own right. Yes, absolutely. And then she was this enabler.
as were all of these women who were in his orbit, and for a lot of them, there was a sexual flavor to their connection. And this is the 70s. mean, the women’s movement has begun, but it’s not out there yet in full force. so, Marceline had…
threatened to divorce him once back in California. And he said, oh, no, you’ll never see the kids again if you do this. And he was very serious. And he had these great lawyers. He didn’t have any lawyers. And she accepted that and stayed with him. also, we have to remember the time, the 70s, all of the women involved would have
come with a lifetime of social conditioning. men and the courts would have supported him rather than her. Probably. Yes. They tended to support the fathers rather than the mothers. And in fact, single women had a really tough time.
I don’t think American women had it much easier than British women at the time. Right. So she was an enabler because she didn’t feel like she could stand up for herself. in the time period, you know, that was her reality. she stuck with him. He slept around constantly. Everybody knew it. He never hid it. And.
She accepted that that was part of her fate, if you will. She was a minister’s daughter and she married a minister. And there’s a whole kind of sociology that goes with that. In the US, it’s called PK, Preacher’s Kids. Like it’s a whole way of being in the world when you’re a child of a preacher.
Yeah, I’m sure. Well, it must have been very comforting for her initially to leave, you know, that sheltered environment and believe that she was going to another sheltered environment. Anyway, but she was very much the the breadwinner in the relationship. It’s interesting. She would be winning. Absolutely. He earned the money and he very, very much sent her out to work to earn money so that he could.
build up People’s Temple. so I suppose from that point of view, she had an unconventional role, but it was very much in the servitude of her husband, wasn’t it? And she, I mean, she believed in the mission of the People’s Temple. She believed in social justice. She believed in equality of the races. And her work in California, she was
Supervisor of the state of California state sponsored nursing homes for the elderly and She had always cared for the elderly that was always important to her. So she would leave people’s temple and get in her car and drive all over the state and visit all these nursing homes everywhere and
That was a big important job that she had. Now, the People’s Temple also had some of those nursing homes and I’ve read different things like, they were wonderful to their old people or they were horrible, you know, and I don’t know which, you know, maybe it was a little of both. It’s so subjective, isn’t it, Annie? Yeah. It’s experience. You could look after someone.
Physically incredibly well, but mentally they’ll probably they might be miserable There’s not you know, especially people have been taken away from their homes and their environment and their families There’s only so much you can do to you know, so it is a very subjective thing but it’s really she had this incredible nurturing nature which is why it’s it’s almost like such a betrayal of You know the women and the children that that looked up to her
Yeah, and maybe we’re being very unfair. Maybe she did try and stop it. We’ll never know. So I just think the way that you treated it in your book was as fair as you could possibly be ⁓ without being in possession of all the facts. And just for anyone listening, Annie’s book is an imaginative retelling, but as faithful to the facts as possible.
and it’s an attempt to tell the story from the victim’s point of view and not to focus overly on the, you know, messianic Jim Jones. So, but just also, you’re going to be mentioning the group of eight in your next book. you write your next book a little bit? Yes. So when I
Did my first book. did all this research. And at the time, right, when I started in 2004, it seemed like everything was about Jim Jones. And so I read, I learned all about Jim Jones. And I thought, I’m not going to write about Jim Jones. I mean, he’s been written about forever and continues to be. I want to write about the other people because 917 other people died that day.
So I figured out who I wanted to write about. wanted to write about his wife because at that time I could find very little information about Marceline I wanted a Guyanese voice. So I used the real person of the Guyanese ambassador to the United States. And then I had two sort of more rank and file followers, a young white woman and a young black man.
I wrote all about them. kind of lived with them forever. And there are so many other people and other stories I didn’t get to include. of course, you necessary every book is like you have to choose which what to include. And there’s always some very interesting and heartbreaking stuff you necessarily have to leave out. Yes. So
So I decided, and I didn’t know this all this time that I was gonna write another book about those. But I realized, there were so many stories left I wanted to tell. in the 20 years between when I started and when my book came out, of course, there’s been tons of new material that’s come out. Both books, art, journalism, history, sociology, a lot of video material.
And so I decided I would return to my preferred form of fiction, which is the short story. And I realized I could tell a lot of stories that way instead of the novel, because I could have a story about one character that was just a few pages, for instance. And I could have a novella about another character with a lot of background, like this Jim Cobb
person I mentioned earlier. So that’s the plan. I’m writing short stories. And again, I have to do all this choosing because I can’t write about everyone and everything. But what I what I’m hoping to do is get some other voices who are, let’s say, Jonestown adjacent. And one of them is.
the lawyer, Charles Gary, who was there that day, who was this really famous lefty lawyer who defended the Black Panthers and ended up, mean, that very year, he ended up defending the People’s Temple or working for the People’s Temple. And he was there that day of the massacre.
He and the other lawyer fled through the jungle. They weren’t invited to the ritual. They were put off in the most distant cabin you could be. And they put them there, and they had an armed guard there on them. But then the armed guard left to go participate. And so I’m thinking, well, they could have
they could have knocked over the poison if they had wanted to, you know, or they would have been shot attempting it, but they didn’t. They fled through the jungle. So, so that lawyer, Charles Gary is going to be one of my characters as well.
for anyone watching, here’s a copy of of Annie’s book. And actually, one of the things that’s noteworthy is the cover. I don’t know if you can see that closely. Yeah. Which goes around the back of the book is by an artist named Joe Samuels, who I think that’s interesting, your connection with Joe.
Do you want me to speak about that? yes, please do. So Joe said it’s actually Joe Sam period. That’s how he signed all of his artwork. And he has recently passed away. But while I was working on the book, I reached out to him because I had seen a series of drawings or just line drawings that he had done. He was the black.
San Franciscan or somebody who lived in the Bay Area while all this was going on and he was very moved by what happened. So he did all these incredible drawings which are in another book about Jonestown called The Need for a Second Look at Jonestown which is the collection of essays. So that’s where I saw these the first time. And then I thought, well, that’s what I wanna be on the cover.
So he wasn’t in Jonestown, but he was an observer. And as I’m doing research about San Francisco at the time, San Francisco was reeling when the news of those deaths came in. Like everybody in San Francisco seemed to know somebody who died in Jonestown. Well, of course, because a lot of them came from the projects there, from the Bay Area and, you know,
It’s only natural that that would have been the case. Right. And so for those who don’t know, this particular horrible, interesting fact is that eight days after the massacre, the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, was assassinated, along with Harvey Milk, the first out gay politician, by another
politician who killed them both. And so the city was like the city of tragedy, of death and destruction for a very long time, but very intensely so for these eight days. So anyway, that’s what Joe Sam was experiencing when he made those drawings.
Well, yes, he did die very shortly after he agreed to let us use his cover drawing. I hope it gave him a bit of joy Yes, I think so. think so. So to be on the cover in the other book, his drawings are all inside, but inside the book. But on mine, you can see if it’s facing out in a bookstore, you’ll see his drawing.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So the last piece to really talk about is the effect on Guyana itself. This tragedy has really cast such a long shadow over that poor, benighted country, which is desperately unfair. And it’s something that really should be discussed and talked about because it’s so little understood.
how, whereas again, it’s something that you try and address in your book, which, you know, just to do it justice, which is important. Yeah. Yeah. I should say that the very first novel about Jonestown was written by a British Guyanese writer and it came out in the nineties and I read it and I mean, I read it during my research. didn’t read it in the nineties and
So he was sort of both sides. He was Guyanese and then he was a Brit and this was his home country. And it’s a very powerful book. It’s not, it’s kind of like magical realism. So it’s not necessarily easy to read. But anyway, I knew that I wanted a Guyanese voice there. And one of my sort of discoveries, if you will, in air quotes,
I was thinking about how, so British Guiana was a colony of Britain and then it was surrounded by colonies of Spain and then France and ⁓ the Dutch. Portugal, right. So there were all these colonies in South America and this was the only British one. And that was part of why
Jones chose it was because they spoke English. So that was important because he had all these old people. It’s hard to learn a new language when you’re older, et cetera. And they had this socialist government at the time. So he was correct in that that government was going to be friendly to him. They were. ⁓ But there’s a certain amount of.
colonization that I think about, more kind of metaphorical, but still real, where this white guy comes over from the United States, takes over this particular part of the country. And of course, he’s directed there by the Guyanese government because they want him to sort of guard the Venezuelan border because the Venezuelans are always wanting more land.
And so they were strategic in where they pointed him. But with the way it ended up, I mean, we’re almost at 50 years after the disaster, but at least for like the first 30 years after the disaster, if you said Guyana to anyone in the rest of the world,
They’d either say, ⁓ isn’t that where those crazy Americans killed themselves? Or they think you were saying Ghana. And they’d say, isn’t that in Africa? Exactly. So it was this way of sort of colonizing the memory of this country that Jones is responsible for, in my view. This is in everybody’s view.
It’s only really recently, so here we are 47 years after, like last year there was this New York Times article about the oil, because there’s all this oil off the coast of Guyana, which of course is being exploited by all these foreign countries who were going there to get all this oil. But that was the first article I read that didn’t mention Jonestown.
clarified that with Dr. Moore, the head of the Jonestown Institute, where she’s like, yeah, it’s incredible. Because every other article about Guiana up until that point would talk about this is where Jonestown happened. So maybe they’re out of Jones’s shadow now, and now they’re going to be in Exxon. I hope so. But it is astonishing how even relatively young people who
Weren’t even born then if you mentioned it, they kind of know what you’re talking about. It has really seeped into popular consciousness. Right. So the language of the the Kool-Aid has become detached from the reality of what happened. So most people, especially young people who say drinking the Kool-Aid, they have no idea what it’s attached to. That’s what George Orwell called a “dead metaphor”.
when it’s a metaphor that no longer has an attachment to the image that provoked it. Like, you say, towing the line, nobody thinks about their toes up to this line. You you just say, towing the line. Yeah. Do you ever bother correcting people or do you just let it go when you hear it? It depends on the occasion.
Saying “drinking the Kool-Aid” or “drinking the Flavor-Aid” with a kind of nonchalance is what’s really disgusting. Because every time you say “drinking the Kool-Aid”, there are these 917 dead people. And it’s not just to sort of write them off in this little flippant metaphor. Yeah. Like, yeah, I totally understand that. Yeah.
Well, I just wanted to say for those listening, the reason why Annie came to us is because she won the Chipping Norton Literary Festival competition, the Short Story competition in 2022 with her really excellent story
Henny Winking, which is on our website now. So I’m going to put a little link to that as well because, so Annie won that story and she had to do, she did her reading over video link in the Chipping Norton Library. Do you remember that Annie or the other authors were actually physically present, which was nice. And then afterwards, when she found out that I had set up a little publishing company,
She sent me her manuscript and we decided to publish it, which is how we know each other. And it’s been such a pleasure working with you, Annie, because not only is your book race, I’m just going to, you know, for those of you who would like to understand the inner workings of Jonestown and also not only Jonestown, but how a cult actually occurs. it is really on people. It’s so important that people understand this because,
people always feel really comfortable. “It would never happen to me”, “It would never happen to anyone I know.” But actually it does happen to ordinary people and people who are talented and people who are clever. And there’s no, you know, you just don’t know how it’s going to get you. And you do not understand that you are a member of a cult until you are on the outside when, and as soon as you become an outsider, you are not a member of a cult anymore.
And while you’re in it, it’s not a cult to you. It’s your family. It’s your friends. It’s your lifeline. It’s your… It’s so important to to read these books, especially Annie’s, to understand exactly how it can happen. And it happens in the strangest places like, there are plenty of people who think the multi-level marketing is a cult.
But let’s not go into that because that’s a whole new discussion. Thank you so much for this opportunity, Kathy. I’ve enjoyed the it’s really nice that we’re able to do it in time for the 47th anniversary. just for, while obviously we don’t want the shadow of Jonestown to haunt Guyana anymore, the people who were there deserve to be remembered and also their families really deserve
sympathy and
But it’s been really lovely chatting to you as ever, Annie. we will chat soon. OK. We’ll talk about your next book.