By
Sikivu Hutchinson
I boarded the plane in
a fog of dream and nightmare with all the others leaving America for the last
time. Nursing mothers with squealing
babies in the row behind me, elders in front flipping through their bibles,
Ebony magazines and Readers’ Digests, eyes aglow like Christmas. On our stealth mission to the other side we
wondered, watched, drank in the shifting remnants of the cities and towns below,
demonic, beloved spaces that had held us close then betrayed us.[1]
A black female writer novelizing
Peoples Temple and Jonestown must weave through a landmine of memory and myth. The Jonestown canon, the reams and reams that
have been written, is like a country unto itself, a kaleidoscope of porous
boundaries incapable of containing the dead, the living, the in-between. In the decades since the mass murder-suicide
of over 900 members of the predominantly black Peoples Temple church at
Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978 it has been fictionalized to roaring
excess, ghosting into American popular culture as the grotesque culmination of
an oft-ridiculed decade. Like many I was
introduced to Jonestown through newsreel caricatures of bug-eyed cult zombies,
endless rows of black corpses and the Reverend Jim Jones’ aging
Elvis-meets-Elmer Gantry swagger. Jonestown
has become cultural shorthand for blind faith and cautionary tale about
religious obsession. But buried beneath
the psycho cult clichés is the power of black women in the Peoples Temple
movement. As the largest demographic in
Peoples Temple black women have seldom been portrayed as lead protagonists in
popular representations of Jonestown. Despite
the horror of Jonestown’s demise its representation cannot be separated from
dehumanizing cultural representations of black people in general and black
women in particular. While Jonestown as
cultural “artifact” is perversely sexy—the object of near necrophilic projection
and fantasy—Peoples Temple is a historical stepchild; its legacy an unwelcome reflection
of the lingering race, gender and class divide in “New Jim Crow” America.
Faced with this mythologizing
I began my novel, White Nights, Black
Paradise, at the end. It opens with
a lone child, identity unknown, partly gesturing to the loss of black girls’
voices, partly to the psychobiography of Jim Jones as lovelorn singleton and partly
to the naked terror that any child walking in the stifling heat among the
community’s dead and dying must have felt in the Temple’s final moments. The book’s title reflects the dual nature of
PT’s trajectory. White nights were
rehearsals/demonstrations of loyalty and collective despair. They evoked both the impossibility of a
worldly paradise and the (hollow) approximation of one via the church’s
multiracial social justice vision.
My initial research
into Peoples Temple was driven by what seemed to be one of the most basic and
egregiously unanswered questions—where are the black feminist readings on and
scholarship about Peoples Temple and Jonestown?? As historian James Lance Taylor remarked to
me recently, the erasure of black women is “a double victimization because the
people who were victimized get hidden by Jim Jones’ ego (and) it made them into
a bunch of freaks. It’s important to
bring out that this was a significant event and it needs to be registered along
the lines of major tragic events in black history.” Many of the literary portrayals of black
women involved in Peoples Temple have been limply one-dimensional. At stage right, the elderly self-sacrificing
god-fearing caregivers who opened up their wallets and deeded their homes to
the Temple with few reservations. At
stage left, the loyal “rudderless” young women who came up in the Black Church
and followed disgruntled family members into the Temple collectives. From Mammy to the trusty sage black sidekick,
we’ve seen these stick figures trotted out ad nauseum on TV and in film. They are serviceable (to use Toni Morrison’s
term[2]) props
to the main event—i.e., the mercurial path of the brash white savior/rock
star/anti-hero. The 1997 film The Apostle, starring Robert Duvall as a
disreputable white Southern Pentecostal preacher redeemed by a predominantly
black female congregation, wrapped up all of these Americana caricatures in a
nice countrified bow.
Confronting this
erasure of black women’s agency, the novel asks, what was the context of black
women’s involvement? What drove them to
join, stay, leave, resist and/or collaborate?
What were the complex motivations that kept some tethered to Jones and
the movement until the bitter end and how can these decisions be recuperated as
rational? How, ultimately, did black
women shape Jim Jones and vice versa?
When she was introduced to Peoples Temple in the early seventies Los
Angeles member Juanell Smart “had given up on religion, church and ministers
because I had been married to a Pentecostal preacher for a number of years and
knew the ins and outs of the church.” (Smart, 2004) Smart’s comments imply that she might have
been disillusioned with the sexism, corruption and moral hypocrisy that plagues
organized religion. Nonetheless, when she
attended her first Peoples Temple service Jones’ criticism of abusive relationships
resonated with her. Smart lost her four
children, her mother and an uncle in Jonestown.
Her article on
the Alternative Considerations of
Jonestown site captures her ambivalence toward Jones while she was a member
of the Temple planning commission. She
notes that, “I have always been a skeptic so it was hard for me to be a true
believer for any length of time.” Smart’s
skepticism and questioning of authority led her to break from Peoples Temple. In a recent conversation with me she identified
herself as an atheist.
Mainstream
stereotypes of black hyper-religiosity have always precluded more complex
representations of black faith and religious skepticism (Hutchinson, 2011). Hy and Taryn, the two fictional African
American sisters who anchor White Nights,
Black Paradise, represent a mix of religious/skeptical belief that is
rarely seen in literary portrayals of black women. Hy is a spiritual agnostic; her sister Taryn
an openly identified atheist. Because
neither of them subscribe to the dogmas and social prescriptions of the
traditional Black Church they find the communal solidarity of Peoples Temple
appealing. Throughout its lifetime
Peoples Temple was variously described and viewed as Pentecostal, Christian,
millennialist, atheist and spiritual.
These shifting, and, frequently conflicting designations were evoked (and
exploited) by Jones according to context and expedience. All attracted different segments of the
community who were willing to accept the Temple’s unwieldy diversity for what
they deemed to be the greater collective good.
Yet there has been little examination of spiritual or religious
diversity among the African American women members of the Temple. My re-envisioning of black female agency
seeks to rectify that. For those who
professed diehard Pentecostal beliefs Peoples Temple’s provisional secularism
(with idolatry of Jones substituted for that of a supernatural deity) was a
radical departure and compromise compelled by oppressive socioeconomic
conditions. Jones’ denigration of the
Bible forced the most religious African American women into a new reading of
Christian ethical obligations. The
absence of justice and equality in the world around them made this reading
palatable. Jones challenged the
existence of a just God in the midst of rank poverty and obscene wealth. Peoples Temple critiqued the persistence of
anti-black racism against African Americans, the nation’s most devout Christian
population. Echoing Epicurus, Jones and
Peoples Temple emphasized God’s irrelevance and rejected redemption in the
afterlife. Grappling with these
contradictions, many traditionalists in the PT congregation agreed that God was
indeed lacking if not fictitious.
The black women
protagonists in White Nights, Black
Paradise come to California at the tail end of the Great Migration in the
1970s. They are driven by the same “Promised
Land” fever that spurred African Americans’ decades-long exodus from the South
to the North. Originating as an
unabashedly interracial church in the 1950s, Peoples Temple was a beneficiary
of this movement. The church’s 1973 transition
to the Fillmore community in San Francisco was itself the third leg of an
internal migration that would culminate in Guyana. In a period in which most mainline churches
were white supremacist, Peoples Temple’s leadership was able to capitalize on
blacks’ yearning for inclusion and cultural validation. In an era in which many Bay Area black
churches were accused of bourgeois conservatism, People Temple touted the radical
progressive rhetoric of black liberation struggle. That said, as Taylor and other historians
note, the movement was ultimately insular.
It provided social programs, health care, housing and jobs (in exchange
for total allegiance) for its members, but did not forge lasting coalitions
with like-minded movements. In the
novel, Taryn meets her lover Jess—a licensed clinical social worker whose
family settled in the Fillmore community of San Francisco during the 1950s—in
Peoples Temple. Jess’ lineage represents
the Fillmore’s postwar shift from a predominantly Japanese American community
to an African American one. Similar to
their counterparts in Los Angeles, African Americans migrated to the Fillmore
in search of jobs in the booming wartime industries. Both Los Angeles and San
Francisco transplants found that the liberal façade of these cities hid an
inveterately racist sexist power structure.
This mix of
paternalism and progressivism is a source of deep ambivalence for the
characters in my novel. In her book Slavery of Faith, Jonestown survivor Leslie
Wagner alludes to this dialectical relationship vis-à-vis Jones’ public
posturing. Jones dubbed her his “little
Angela Davis”, connecting her to Davis’ radical activism while playing on the
still nascent identity of a young person whose life experience revolved around
the church. Wagner delighted in this
comparison. Davis, after all, was a
revered figure in the Temple’s political pantheon, an ally and a powerful role
model for many young black women during that era. Ever the savvy showman, Jones successfully
manipulated the revolutionary aspirations of young African Americans reeling
from the fading promise of the Black Power movement. Peoples Temple’s rainbow coalition optics
(epitomized by Jones’ own mini-United Nations’ style family) deflected
criticism of Jones’ motives. The
church’s association with Davis, the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement
leader Dennis Banks and even the reactionary Nation of Islam lent it
credibility among younger more politically progressive and radical blacks disillusioned
with traditional black religious organizations.
Jones, the “anti-racist racist” (Taylor, 2013), played the part of the
white savior, but it was not without the imprimatur of his predominantly black
congregation, steeped as it was in a heritage of white supremacy inflected
through pop culture. In a nation shaped
by minstrelsy and appropriations of blackness, Jones’ performance of black
liberation struggle was a familiar one. From
late nineteenth century blackface to Elvis’ theft of black musical traditions
to Norman Mailer’s exaltation of the “White Negro” and white America’s multi-million
dollar consumption of hip hop—whiteness has always been defined by the specter
of black otherness. Jones was simply one
in a long line of white minstrels who mined black idioms and Pentecostal
religious practices. Yet what was
perhaps most seductive to his black audience was the way he deftly combined
white power and privilege with the stagecraft of Black Power.
This interplay was
also appealing to some black folk because of the devastation of the Fillmore’s African
American community by urban redevelopment projects (Hollis, 2004; Taylor, 2013).
As Hannibal Williams contends:
The times were
right to produce a man like Jim Jones.
The circumstances of a community that is broken up, when the
relationships that bind people together fall apart the time is always right for
a religious scoundrel to take advantage of our credibility. Justin Hermann
literally destroyed the neighborhood and in the process he made the
neighborhood ripe for anybody with any kind of solution. People were desperate for solutions, for
something to follow. (Taylor 2013, p. 92).
In his article “Breaking the
Silence: Reflections of a Black Pastor,” J. Alfred Smith argues that “The 1970s
were a dark age for the Black church in San Francisco.” (Smith, p. 139). Taylor maintains that progressive black
pastors like Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial and physician/publisher/activist
Carlton Goodlett embraced Jones precisely because they deemed most black
churches in the city “irrelevant.” (Taylor, p. 101) Jones and Peoples Temple’s ascent in the
political hierarchy of San Francisco reinforced their legitimacy among Bay Area
African Americans.
Yet although there
have been numerous portrayals of PT’s shrewd politicking, the racial politics
of gender in the movement have gotten relatively short shrift. In my book, Peoples Temple is not only symbolic
of progressive black social gospel traditions but of a racially divided secular
women’s movement. It is no secret that
white women called the shots in Peoples Temple and that their leadership was
resented by some of the black rank and file.
The movement’s veneer of interracial “sisterhood” was compromised by the
reality of white female paternalism. Wagner
alludes to this in her book, and the infamous 1973 “Gang of Eight” manifesto suggests
that the climate of white (female) power, control and favoritism hamstrung
socialist progress. In WNBP black
women’s suspicion of white women’s dominance is symptomatic of the racial fault
lines in second wave feminism. As with
the power struggles of the women’s suffrage era, the largely white middle class
leadership of the women’s movement (represented by groups like the National
Organization for Women) was willfully ignorant of if not downright hostile to
the intersectional experiences of women of color. At the core of second wave white feminist
ideology was Betty Friedan’s Feminine
Mystique, a text which universalized the experiences of white middle class
women pushing back against the narrow confines of domesticity, marriage and
motherhood. While revelatory for many
white women, the Feminine Mystique
elided the realities of women of color who not only had to work but often
served as maids and domestics in white women’s homes. Unspoken in white women’s critiques of gender
and power in the home and workplace was the fact that postwar wealth massively
advantaged white families. New Deal
institutions like the Federal Housing Administration, the GI Bill and the Veterans
Administration agency allowed working class and “ethnic” whites to move from
inner cities or working class suburbs into more affluent suburban subdivisions
protected from the dark other. Further,
while suburban white women took advantage of job opportunities opened up by the
Civil Rights Bill of 1964, black women were shut out. This fact was compounded by redlining
policies which excluded blacks from buying homes in suburban communities with
greater access to white collar jobs. As
a result, when it came to equitable access to homeownership and professional
jobs, black women were only nominally more “liberated” in the Promised Land
than they were under Jim Crow.
Thus, for many
black migrants, rigid de facto segregation on the West Coast turned the postwar
“dream” of escaping Southern apartheid into yet another bitter miscarriage of
justice. In both Los Angeles and San
Francisco African Americans of all classes were tightly confined to working
class black neighborhoods in South L.A., the Western Addition/Fillmore and Bay
Point. White privilege conferred the
white women in Peoples Temple with mobility, prestige and decision-making power
over their black female counterparts.
These tensions
inform the power structure of both the novel and the real world of People
Temple. Black women in the book actively
question and challenge white women’s authority.
They draw on the reality of their marginalization both within mainstream
society and the church hierarchy. The slights
and indignities they suffer are not just due to racism but sexism, homophobia
and transphobia. Historically, black
women of all sexual orientations, unlike white women, have never had the luxury
of being considered pure, innocent and feminine. This dichotomy was capitalized on by Jones
and his white female regime; thus eliminating any real possibility of power
sharing with the very black women who comprised the backbone of Peoples Temple. Throughout the Peoples Temple/Jonestown canon
the specter of the “uneducated” African American is contrasted with that of the
“educated” generally middle class to affluent white woman appointed by Jones to
a leadership position. Certainly black
women like Wagner, Smart and Christine Miller (a Los Angeles member who was the
only recorded challenger to Jones on the so-called Death tape of November 18,
1978) did not fit the monolith of the “downtrodden” poor black woman. But this contrast insidiously helps establish
the agency, expertise, dynamism, and altruism of white women.
For example, Mary
Maaga’s book Hearing the Voices of
Jonestown examines the complexity of white women’s roles in People Temple
but essentially flattens black women into supporting characters whose proper
names merit no more than passing reference if at all (case in point, Maaga
badly flubs the name of Shanda James, a young black woman who Jones sexually preyed
on in Jonestown and drugged into submission).
White women like Carolyn Layton, Grace Stoen, Maria Katsaris and Annie
Moore assume center stage as lead protagonists in a chapter ironically entitled
“Restoration of Women’s Power.” There is
no substantive exploration of white female racism and complicity in the white
supremacist cultural politics of Peoples Temple. And Maaga goes to great lengths to evoke
white women’s heroic management of Jonestown in the face of Jim Jones’ physical
and mental decline. Painting a picture
of the selfless white savior, Maaga concludes that “Leading Jonestown was
constant work, and neither Jones nor the members of the community seemed to
appreciate the long hours and dedication of the (white female) inner circle.”
(Maaga, p. 99) Maaga’s portrayal
valorizes the white female leadership in PT/Jonestown while leaving their all
too intimate role in the exclusion of black women egregiously unexamined.
One of the ways
that I attempt to address this lacuna is through the amplification of black
journalism, symbolized by Hampton Goodwin (modeled after Jones’ ally Carlton
Goodlett) and Ida Lassiter, a community organizer and muckraker. A trailblazing publisher and physician who
espoused radical left politics, Goodlett printed Peoples Temples’ publications,
treated Jones as a patient and served as his adviser. Lassiter is a fictitional character who mentors
the young Jones then publishes exposés on the church’s inner workings in its
later years. She is the voice of
independent journalism and a conflicted witness to the church’s downward spiral. As the publisher of the influential black
paper the Sun Reporter, Goodlett’s
complex relationship with Jones is a historical curiosity. Why would an eminent black leader become entangled
with Jones and how did his involvement help boost and solidify the media
profile of Peoples Temple? For black
people looking at PT through a twenty first century lens, the enigma of black
complicity is a question that continues to confound. It is inadequate to say that blacks were
duped, hoodwinked or even “brainwashed” into staying in Peoples Temple’s “cult”
of the white savior. That narrative
ultimately undermines cultural and sociological analyses contextualizing black
women’s particular stake in the movement. But it also undermines the interplay of
passion, desire and revolutionary longing that informed their involvement and
ultimate migration. In the novel I
suggest that black women were especially vulnerable because of their history of
sexist/racist exploitation as well as their
long tradition of spearheading social justice activism in the church. Black women civil rights activists often faced
sexist opposition from black men and racist opposition from white women
“allies”. Historically, the narrative of
the charismatic black male civil rights leader has marginalized black women’s
contributions to the civil rights and Black Power movements (Giddings 2007;
McGuire 2011; Theoharis 2014).
For some black
women migration was an act of positive self-determination. In White
Nights, Black Paradise, sisters Taryn and Hy leave segregated Indiana for
segregated California. Taryn finds that she’s unable to advance at her Bay Area
accounting job because she’s not a straight white woman. Hy becomes disgruntled by the city’s limited
job market and its climate of racist police violence. Frustrated by these realities, their appetite
for adventure is whetted by the prospect of Guyana. Ernestine Markham, a middle class school
teacher loosely modeled on Christine Miller, leaves because she believes it
represents a better alternative for her troubled son. Devera, a Black-Latina transwoman writer
whose family is wrapped up in Peoples Temple, yearns to be a pioneer at the
Guyana settlement. Markham speaks of her desire to teach in a school system
where black children aren’t taught to hate themselves. Each woman is politicized by the times, her
experiences in Peoples Temple and the context of being black and female in “white
supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 1996).
Faced with the
ashes of stateside revolution, the betrayal of the liberal California dream and
a “socialist” movement that preached first world apocalypse and third world
redemption, migration to Guyana could be viewed as a life-affirming rational
choice, a tributary of black diaspora (Harris and Waterman, 2004). The final recording of the PT/Jonestown
community reflected the trauma of this peculiarly black odyssey. Christine Miller’s lone plea on the Death
tape was part of a long tradition of black female self-determination. Speaking for the voiceless, her final act of
courage was a metaphor for black women’s complex role in Peoples Temple. Submitting to the “will” of the majority,
Miller and the unidentified black women who shout her down pass into
myth—reluctant “exceptional” heroine versus brainwashed minions. It may be
comforting for mainstream America to believe that the black voices extolling suicide
were simply gullible bystanders but the truth is shaded in gray. In the Jonestown of black feminist imagination,
the agency of both the living and the dead demands that these ambiguities be part
of history’s reckoning.
Sikivu
Hutchinson is the author of Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels,
Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender
Politics, and the Values Wars and the forthcoming White Nights: Black Paradise.
Works
Cited
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Peoples Temple: Religion and Revolution
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Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 103-122.
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bell. Killing Rage, Ending Racism
(New York: Henry Holt, 1996).
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