The video below is of Marceline Jones, wife of Jim Jones, singing a haunting song, Black Baby.
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/peoples-temple-choir-black-baby-lyrics.html
The song and its lyrics are a heartbreaking reminder of the circumstances that led to the formation of Peoples Temple. Most of the 918 people who died on that terrible day in Guyana were black. Most had followed the charismatic Jim Jones because he promised belonging and equality, a brotherhood where everyone was equal, where the colour of your skin wouldn’t matter. Most of his flock had lived in appalling poverty in America, where they experienced the contempt of their supposedly fellow citizens every day.
I first connected with Annie Dawid when she won first place in the Chipping Norton Short Story Competition in 2022 with her incredible short story Kenny Winking. She sent me the ms of Paradise Undone shortly afterwards, and I decided to publish it. It’s not an easy read, as – spoiler alert – we all know how the story ends. Some died voluntarily, but many were forced to swallow the cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid. Thirty-three babies were born in Jonestown in the three years since the Agricultural Project had been formed. All of them died. The lyrics above include the line: ‘Oh your daddy and mommy will protect you, and keep you safe from all harm…‘
The uncomfortable truth is that Jim Jones’s original intentions for Peoples Temple were good. Another very uncomfortable truth is that there is no compelling evidence that ‘Mother Marceline’ did anything to stop her husband from setting the horrors in motion.
Inkspot published the book because Annie attempts to tell, as truthfully as possible, the stories of the people behind Jim Jones. History has written them off as mindless zombies, but many are still remembered and mourned by their families to this day.
Is it so difficult to understand why black people, many of them elderly, had left everything behind and gone to Guyana with ‘Dad’ when you know that while they were in America they had to choose between food and medicine?
Here’s an excerpt from the book which describes how Marceline first met Jim Jones, and why a lonely, shy, plain girl may have been attracted to him in the first place:
Mercy Hospital, Richmond, Indiana, 1949
Only Marceline wanted to hold the Negro child with the nasty cough, which turned out to be pneumonia. “Aren’t you the sweetest thing?” she murmured into the baby’s burning ear as she carried her up from emergency to pediatrics. “Aren’t you the prettiest little girl?” The infant, whose nametag read Baby Doe, had been left in the lobby, wrapped in a white bedspread, clean but many times mended in crazy quilt style, the intricate crosshatch testifying to the sewer’s skill. Whoever left her had bathed and powdered the child and folded a change of clothing into the coverlet, which was promptly tossed in the trash by the receptionist who found her. The other nurses were pretending to be busy around the emergency room desk. Marceline took the girl from Mary Margaret, who was holding the infant as far away from her as possible, breath held.
“Come with me, sweetheart. Let’s see if we can cool you down.” Always, Marceline had loved the warmth of babies. She relished their fresh smell and their bird sounds. “We’re going to get you all fixed up,” she whispered, passing the cluster of nurses, all of them older than she by a least a decade. After three years at Mercy, first as student nurse, and now officially three months an RN, Marceline Baldwin, twenty-two years old, could testify to the want of merciful behavior at this institution, though its mission was to succor the poor and destitute of eastern Indiana.
“I’m going to call you Cinnamon,” said Marceline as she weighed and measured the baby, then took her temperature with a rectal thermometer. The baby had a coughing fit, which metamorphosed into full-on screaming. One hundred and six degrees. “Let’s get her into a lukewarm bath,” Marceline called to one of the aides on the children’s floor. “Then Doctor Burt can look her over.”
A young blonde in a pink assistant’s smock backed away. “Nurse Sinclair just asked me to help get a patient out of bed.”
“I’ll do it,” came a male voice. A very young man walked ahead of her into the bathing area, opened the door and turned on the water before carefully taking the baby from her arms. “Nurse Baldwin, will you adjust the temperature? I don’t want to get it wrong and burn her.”
To the baby he said, in a playful voice, “Now you’re one hot little girl, aren’t you? We’re gonna get you cooled down first thing.”
While she checked the water, the boy tickled the baby’s tummy. He was white, like Marceline, but his hair and eyes shone brilliant black; he seemed exotic, not only in his unusual appearance but due to his apparent indifference to the baby’s skin color.
“Are you new, Mr. …” She paused.
“I’m Jim. Jim Jones. Just started this morning.” He smiled at her over the basin, both of them with their hands on the child, he cupping the girl’s head gently in his large palm, she splashing water over the baby’s toes. Marceline thought the boy would make a good father someday, and she looked up into his eyes. He was studying her face, which she found unsettling and thrilling simultaneously.
“You like children, don’t you?” he asked.
Her pale skin reddened, and she looked back down at the baby.
“I do. Yes.”
“Do you have any?”
“No!” She could feel her cheeks heating up, and wondered if Jim had intentionally brushed his fingertips on hers as he grazed a washcloth over Cinnamon’s belly. “I mean I’m not married.”
“Not yet. But you will be. Soon, I think.” His laughter, deep and self-assured, forced Marceline to look again into his dark eyes. Was he making fun of her? “I like children too. Like this one.” He smiled at Cinnamon. “You are a beautiful girl. Yes, you are.” The baby opened her huge eyes and coughed, spitting water into Jim’s face.
Marceline tensed.
Again, Jim laughed, wiping his wet chin on his shoulder. “That’s right, little one. You spit out that nasty old stuff!” He shook his hair. “What time do you take your lunch?”
“Well, I usually meet my mother in the cafeteria. She works in book-keeping.”
His smile vanished. He looked as if he might cry, all swagger and confidence evaporated.
“Oh, why don’t you join us,” Marceline said reflexively. “Please.”
Across his face a wave passed, restoring him. “What time?”
He really was just a kid, Marceline thought. Her half-conscious daydream of running her fingertips through that luscious hair, down his shoulders, feeling his skin on her skin, faded. He reminded her of a young cousin, also named Jim, who did poorly in school and often visited their home seeking comfort. His parents were preoccupied with money troubles and fought constantly and had no time for their children. Jimmy Baldwin was a sweetie, tortured by acne and the girls in his class, bullied by boys for the gentleness that translated as effeminacy.
“Twelve-thirty.” She checked her watch. “I’ll meet you there.”
“How ’bout we go down together?”
How quickly he wanted to know her. She wasn’t used to it. From high school she’d gone straight to nursing college, where every student was female, and, as a minister’s daughter, her earlier life had been free from male attention. No boy in her father’s congregation dared ask her out, and in school she had a reputation for primness, which she had no agency in crafting. “Polly Prude! Polly Prude!” High school boys would taunt her as she walked by the drugstore on Second Street. Just because she was the plain daughter of a pastor. Marceline, who loved her parents and respected her father’s work, often wished she could be more “normal.” She wanted to be like her girlfriends, who held hands with boys and necked in the back seats of cars. Her friend Sally told her every detail of every kiss and caress, every hand down her skirt, sensations Sally apparently adored.
“It’s embarrassing sometimes,” Sally confessed one night at a sleepover. “My panties get wet, you know, all over. Soaked! As if I’d showered in my clothes. It feels so good, and I want to do more. More than just kiss and let Michael touch my breasts. But I know I shouldn’t.”
Marceline also wanted Sally to do more, whatever “more” consisted of, so that afterwards Sally could narrate every delicious moment of it to her. She used to touch herself all the time, at twelve and thirteen. Whenever she thought no one was looking, she rubbed her pubic bone against the wall, the door edge, tucking her fingers inside her then smelling them, finding the odor alien but interesting, unlike any other scent. Her mother walked in on her one day in the bathtub, while Marceline was exploring her vagina, and made her promise not to do it anymore. Mrs. Baldwin said all those good feelings were supposed to wait until God – with Pastor and Mrs. Baldwin’s blessing – found her a husband. Because Marceline had promised, she stopped.
Somehow, she managed to turn twenty-two without any man ever finding the courage to lay a finger upon her body. As Marceline looked for Jim by the pediatrics desk at 12:25, she met his eyes staring her down as he walked toward her, his smile radiant with what she thought might be attraction, even desire.
He patted her shoulder. “Hi there. I’m sure hungry. What about you?”
His touch reverberated down her arm and into her belly, connecting to her groin with a pleasing shock. Flushing, she mumbled that she was, and then that she wasn’t. He took her arm – he was so very bold! Part of her liked it, and part of her feared it. It was exhilarating.
At lunch, Mrs. Baldwin quizzed Jim about his life, pleased to learn he was interested in medicine, surprised he was only finishing high school. “And yet you seem so sure of yourself and what you want.” She looked sideways at her daughter. “Most people go through some changes before settling down.”
“Ma’am, I know I want to help people. If not as a doctor, then it’ll be something else. I’ve been helping people my whole life already. Animals too.”
Marceline nodded. She looked from Jim, with his rich self-confidence, to her mother, the pastor’s wife. The Minister and Mrs. Baldwin would disapprove of Jim, of his cockiness.
“Well, whatever you decide, you have a lot of schooling ahead. Marcy’s already spent four years at nursing college. If you decide on medicine, that’s easily ten years before you get your M.D.”
Jim’s face fell. “Ten years! I can’t wait that long!”
Marceline smiled. Her Jim was impetuous. He would become her Jim, whether her parents liked him or not. He had so much energy. Unlike her father, the quiet Methodist rule-follower, Jim would make his own rules.
“There are lots of ways to help people, of course,” said Mrs. Baldwin, a petite woman who wiped her lips with the corner of her napkin after each bite of her egg salad sandwich. “You’re already doing that here, as an aide. And although bookkeeping has no great merit of its own, I try to do my work so that people’s bills are manageable. While being fair to the hospital, of course.” Her gray-blond hair in a neat bun perched high on her head, Mrs. Baldwin looked around the cafeteria to check if anyone was listening.
“You’ve got a bit of the Samaritan in you, I see,” Jim said loudly, winking at Marceline.
“Well, of course; it’s part of our creed, to help others.”
“Which church do you belong to?”
“Methodist,” said Marceline, her first entry in the conversation. “My father has the ministry at First Methodist on the East Side.”
“What church did you attend growing up?” asked Mrs. Baldwin.
“My family didn’t belong to any, so I did my own exploring. Tried all of them in Lynn, Indiana, and Crete, where I was born. My neighbor, Mrs. Kennedy, she took me to her church plenty of times, the Nazarenes. I liked their services. And the Pentecostals, too. So exciting. Not like those sleeping, snooty congregations where no one says anything with real freshness, or that’s what it seemed like to me.”
Mrs. Baldwin pushed her tray away. “Pastor Baldwin and I have never been to a Pentecostal service. It’s possible you’ll find my husband’s sermons a little too … perhaps too tame for your taste.” She bit her lip. “Don’t they speak in tongues?”
Jim grinned. “You don’t like that idea.”
As if they were already conspiring, he smiled broadly at Marceline. Before Mrs. Baldwin could reply, he added, “You’d be amazed at the spirit you find in those churches. I’m kind of a preacher myself. Not like your husband, of course, but I’ve preached to the kids in my neighborhood since I was a kid. You know, dog funerals and kitten baptisms and such. I can tell when people are listening and when they’re just pretending. And boy, those Pentecostals drooling and babbling aren’t pretending anything. You have to see it to appreciate it.”
Marceline worried that he had gone too far. She admired his rebelliousness, but she wanted her mother to like this boy.
“You know,” she said, looking at her watch, “I wish we could keep talking, but I have to relieve Betty upstairs, so she can take a late lunch.”
To her relief, Jim rose and extended his hand to her mother.
“A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Baldwin. I hope to hear your husband’s sermon very soon. Maybe this weekend”
Mrs. Baldwin smoothed her hair and pursed her lips. “I’m sure he would like that. Everyone is welcome in our church.” She turned her cheek for Marceline to kiss. “Honey, I’m going to get some coffee and read the newspaper.”
Leaning down, Marceline pecked her mother’s cool skin, feeling somehow older than she had yesterday at their after-lunch ritual.
“Don’t rush, Mother. I’ll see you later.”
Again, Jim rested his hand lightly on Marceline’s shoulder, making sure her mother saw. “Goodbye, Mrs. Baldwin. See you Sunday.”
On their way back, Jim kept touching Marceline’s elbow, opening doors, flashing his wide, powerful grin. “I like your mother,” he said. “I think she likes me too.”
Marceline laughed. “Oh, you don’t know her. She’s hard to gauge sometimes.”
“I bet she gives all your boyfriends a hard time. But that’s okay. She should.” Jim whispered in her ear, “You’re a treasure.”
Shaking her head, Marceline turned away, and announced, in an unnaturally high voice, “There’s Betty, waiting for me. See you later, Jim.”
All afternoon, Marceline felt glad she had resisted her impulse to always tell the truth, to confess she’d never had a boyfriend, not ever. Sally was now married to Michael with two children and pregnant again. Impatient to “do more,” Sally had married her high school boyfriend at eighteen, and in some ways, it seemed her life had ended there, as a mother. Marceline didn’t want that life.
“And who’s the young man?” asked Betty, a grandmotherly type in her sixties who kept tabs on staff social relations. “I never saw him before.”
“He’s new.” Marceline flushed.
“I see.” Betty smiled. “Isn’t he a little young for you? I mean, he’s awfully handsome, but handsome can be dangerous.”
“He’s only four years younger!” Marceline retorted, then wished she hadn’t.
Betty blinked. “Miss Baldwin, you’re both very young people. Don’t rush into anything.” With a knowing smile, Betty took her purse and left.
Marceline wondered what Betty meant by dangerous. All this is silly, she told herself, as she commenced the afternoon’s tasks. It was just this morning she’d met him, this good-looking Jim who reminded her in his earnestness of her young cousin, though he looked nothing like the homely, sad Jimmy she’d always loved and pitied. “Concentrate on your work,” she told herself.
Still, she couldn’t scrape him from her consciousness. She checked on Cinnamon and was gratified to find her resting, fever down. Marceline couldn’t let go of the sweet image of Jim holding this brown-skinned baby, his kindness to a sick child. Warmth filled her as she held the sleeping baby, swaying and humming. Perhaps one day she would have a baby herself, a girl like this one. Playing with the infant’s dark tight curls, she thought of Jim’s thick black hair, which he wore longer in back than most men, and how she wanted to touch it. The warmth she felt now wasn’t centered in her groin but farther up, in a place that sometimes revealed itself in church when her father quoted from the Psalms, or when she read something profound. Where her spirit resided, she thought, though it didn’t dwell in one fixed spot, but lodged itself somewhere between her heart and mind. She remembered when Sally insisted she read Wuthering Heights, which her friend had devoured for the third time.
“It’s so amazing, this incredible love they have for each other, even when they’re not together. Even when she’s dead!”
“Don’t give the plot away,” protested Marceline. They were sixteen then, and she found herself appalled by the bond between Heathcliff and Cathy. He was uncouth and violent, but something about him compelled her. Something powerful made Marceline root for him in his quest to win the heart of the upper-class girl, and against Edgar, who, despite his gentleness and obvious love for Cathy, appeared a little boy by comparison. Marceline remembered how she had wished for a love like that in her own life, doubting that such a connection with a man was possible. It still seemed impossible.
At dinner, her mother told her father about the new male orderly and his interest in hearing Pastor Baldwin preach on Sunday.
“What’s he like?” asked Laura, Marceline’s younger sister, who was already engaged, terribly romantic and impatient to see her big sister in love. “What’s he look like?”
Marceline’s father waited. “Well, Marcy? Laura and I are curious.”
Marceline looked to her mother for help. Mrs. Baldwin shook her head. “You tell them.”
Suddenly her soup, Campbell’s tomato, seemed especially fascinating, and she probed its red-orange depths, as if seeking an appropriate response therein. She didn’t like this feeling of being observed as if she were a cellular organism.
“You’re blushing!” shouted Laura, pleased with herself. “Come on, Sensible Sister! Tell us already.”
Laura was the pretty one, the boy lure, as her parents called her, a term they’d shortened to “boiler” as a joke. The boiler wasn’t interested in going to college or having any kind of career. When Laura had read Wuthering Heights, at Marceline’s insistence, Heathcliff disgusted her. “What a beast!” she said. “I can’t believe Cathy would want to be within a hundred yards of that guy. He’s awful!”
“Well, he’s got nice eyes,” Marceline said finally, more to her soup than her sister. “Big and dark.”
“And a good head of hair, too,” added Mrs. Baldwin. “I wonder what kind of blood he’s got in him. Black Irish, maybe?”
Marceline shrugged. What did it matter? “I have no idea, Mother. He was born in Indiana, like me.”
“Tell them how old he is.”
She knew her mother’s teasing was not malicious, but she couldn’t help being defensive.
“What? Is he an older man or something?” Laura asked hopefully.
“No. He’s younger than me, that’s all.”
“He’s still in high school!” announced Mrs. Baldwin triumphantly, and everyone laughed except Marceline. She surveyed the room, its well-appointed oak furniture and graceful pewter chandelier suspended over the dining room table. The Baldwins weren’t rich, but they were … tasteful, Marceline thought. If she continued to live at home after Laura’s wedding, Marceline feared she might suffocate.
“All right, Mother. You’ve had your joke. So, he’s eighteen. We all were, once. Laura’s only nineteen, for goodness’s sake. I think he’s pretty mature, really. I mean, he cares about the world, which you don’t find in too many people that age.” She glared at her sister, who was winking at their mother and wasn’t listening.
Pastor Baldwin sighed. “Okay, everyone. Let’s stop making Marcy uncomfortable. I’m sorry, honey. It’s just that we’ve never seen you excited about a boy before. I’m pleased you’ve met someone you like.”
“He seems a fine young man,” said Mrs. Baldwin. “He’s just a boy, that’s all, and impetuous. But I think his heart’s in the right place.”
Marceline excused herself and climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She loved her family, but sometimes she wished she were independent enough to have her own apartment or that she could share with another nurse. Her sister would go from father to husband; no doubt her parents expected the same from Marceline. While lying on her bed, calculating if her paycheck could support a monthly rental, plus groceries and utilities, the phone rang. When she heard her mother calling, “Marcy! Telephone for you!” she knew exactly who it was.
The heavy black phone rested on the kitchen counter by the door. She was grateful to her mother for leaving the dishes to allow Marceline privacy.
“Marceline? It’s Jim.”
She liked how he used her full name, not the annoying diminutive. “I knew it would be you,” she whispered, smiling into the phone.
“You did? How?”
“Just knew.”
“I was thinking about you, so I thought I’d call. Actually, I can’t stop thinking about you.” He laughed. “I’ve never felt like this before.”
Breathing in, she felt light-headed. She wanted to say she felt the same but didn’t dare.
“Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“You know, after one day at Mercy Hospital, I felt like most of the people who work there don’t like Negroes. You were the only person I saw being nice to a colored patient.”
“I thought the same thing about you!” This was a safer topic. “I don’t understand Mercy. They’re so hypocritical, pretending they’re there to help the poor,” her voice rose, “but when the poor are Negro, they’re not so helpful anymore. I’m glad you noticed it too. My mother thinks I’m overly sensitive. But,” she lowered her voice, “my mother has a lot of her own prejudices, too. Though she’d never admit it.”
“We all do though, you know? Raised in good ol’ Indiana, heart of the Ku Klux Klan. My father was a member.”
Marceline gasped. “You’re kidding!”
“I’m not. I have a lot to atone for in this life, if you know what I mean. He threw me out of the house when I told him I found a Negro ancestor on his side of the family. And he was in the war, I mean the first war, gassing people. He was gassed too, so I guess he got what was coming to him.”
For reasons she couldn’t identify, Marceline wanted to defend Jim’s father. How could Jim speak so derisively of his own blood? “Was he really hurt, then, from the gas? Sometimes we see veterans like that at Mercy. They have so many health problems.”
“My old man was a louse before the war. And so lazy. My mother’s always worked. Usually in the factories. She was hardly around when I was growing up, or that’s what it seemed like to me. She’s from Kentucky, dirt poor, so her family thought she was coming up in the world by marrying James Thurman Jones. They didn’t know she’d end up supporting us all.”
In her parents’ gleaming kitchen in their brick, middle-class home, Marceline felt ashamed of all she had taken for granted. When she and Laura were children, her mother had always been there, keeping their house proper and clean, sitting down with them over tea and cookies after school, checking to make sure the girls did their homework and buying them new school clothes every fall. She’d had an easy life. “Where are your parents now?”
“My father’s dead. Mom’s still working at the factory. She’s head of her union now. I’m proud of her.”
Marceline had never known a labor organizer. A couple years back, some outsiders tried to unionize the workers at the hospital, but she hadn’t paid much attention. Most of the women were against it, and the effort failed. Often her father spoke against unions, saying they were infiltrated by Communists, and though the intent of the union was Christian, to make sure everyone was paid a decent wage and worked in a safe environment, in practice they were full of crooks. She wondered if her father had any direct experience, or if he was merely parroting what the newspapers said.
“I’d like to meet her,” Marceline said, pleased by her own boldness.
“Oh, you will,” Jim laughed.
Where did he get such confidence, she wondered.