Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor’s Story of Life and Death Inside the Peoples Temple
No, that is not a typo; evidently, this is how they spelled it. Perhaps Jim Jones wanted to evoke some sort of global-village, all-the-peoples-of-God’s-earth vibe — although what Jones wanted, or more accurately, when Jones stopped wanting what he alleged to want for his followers, and started wanting nothing beyond their frightened allegiance and their savings, remains obscure. This, of course, is why anyone reads true-crime books, to try to get a handle on the hows and whys, but in the case of this specific tragedy, there aren’t any.
Deborah Layton, the author of Seductive Poison, was one of Jones’s trusted lieutenants before she made her escape months prior to the mass suicide in Guyana, and she does give some insight into how average, well-meaning people fell prey to Jones’s manipulations — how the cultural framework of the ’60s and ’70s in American culture, and individuals’ unsatisfying family lives, may have primed the members of the congregation to let Jones become this paranoid, power-abusing tyrant (who, had he not caused the deaths of nearly a thousand people, would seem vaguely ridiculous to us now — watching the PBS doc on Jonestown and listening to Jones’s hysterical imprecations, it’s difficult to believe anyone took his nasally-delivered guilt trips seriously). She also reveals what ended up happening to all the money Jones had squirrelled away.
Layton’s writing is overwrought at times — understandable, given the topic and her personal involvement, but her explanation of the distance she felt from her parents and older siblings, and why that in turn led her to seek comfort and kinship at the Temple, might have made more sense with a straighter telling. As it is, the correlation feels rather weak; “I didn’t feel loved by my mother because she missed her German homeland” is not necessarily bullshit, but…you know, the reasons people have for getting caught up in this sort of thing aren’t usually cinematic and on the nose, and a stronger writer might have been able to address that. As it is, the language Layton uses sets the reader up for a much darker motivation than “Mama felt sort of alienated and maybe should have had a job outside the house.” And her mother joined the Temple as well, and died of cancer in Guyana shortly before the mass suicide…it’s a complicated relationship that might have been better served by less purpling in the telling, is my point.
And Layton’s rendition of accents is so bad, it takes you right out of the book. Her version of an African-American grandmother’s speech is an amalgam of every ooky stereotype you might imagine, and Layton certainly isn’t a racist, but all the unnecessary contractions and “chile”s…she’s just not a good enough prose stylist to pull that off and her editor should have kiboshed it. The attempt to translate a British accent to the page is even worse — it’s unrecognizable.Since when is “aup harr” how a UK national would pronounce “up here”? And the person speaking is her husband. Just put in a reference to the accent and don’t try to dialect-ize it.
I got the book because I’d seen Layton on the PBS thing; you’re probably best off just watching that if you’re interested in this wretched chapter in human history. Books on the tragedy tend towards the floridly written and don’t give you much additional information. Plus, it’s morbid and makes for embarrassing commute reading, so let me take this one for the team.
Tags: books Deborah Layton Jim Jones
So spooky – I was JUST talking about this book the other night! I read it probably 8 years ago, long before seeing the PBS/ A&E/ History documentary. I remember so looking forward to reading it, and then getting totally sucked into it, and then being totally taken out of the story by her “impersonations” of other people. I wanted to find books by other survivors, but there just weren’t any.
(Also, yay, I can comment from work again!)
I saw The People’s Temple at the Guthrie – it’s a play based on many people’s memories of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple from the happy times to the end.
It completely changed my idea of what happened there. And then I watched the PBS documentary when it came out and the sound recordings are just eerie. I don’t consider what happened there a mass suicide anymore. There were guns. People couldn’t leave. Many were forced to take the poison. I see it more as a mass murder now.
After reading only the first few pages in B&N (and again just now on Amazon), my hat is off to you for making it through the whole book.
That shit happened on my birthday. I know all the shit that happens falls on SOMEone’s birthday, but that one was mine.
Thanks for the review – I hate dialectizing (is that a word?) so thanks for saving me from throwing a book across the room.
Sars, if you dig true crime stories & ever have time to kill, crimelibrary dot com is chock-full of serial killers & crime sprees & whatnot. Sometimes the writing is overly dramatic, but the stories are fascinating anyway.
My mother would never let us drink Kool Aid growing up (not that that’s a bad thing) because of her negative associations with Jonestown & the poisoned Kool Aid.
In my own time, there’s been Jim Koresh/Waco & the Heaven’s Gate cult. The only observations I’ve made are the obvious ones – vulnerable people searching for something to belong to can be easy prey for these loopty-loo sociopaths who feed off controlling others.
All I know is, any group that tells you to believe what one person says without question and follow their every order is NOT a group for me!
A couple of years ago, I read an excellent book called Feet of Clay by Anthony Storr, which had a chapter on Jonestown. Really fascinating, especially in concert with the other Gurus covered by the book. The common behaviors pointed out are eye-opening.
aup harr… what? I can think of ONE dialect that would work for and it’s really, really rare. O.o
There was a fascinating article on ESPN (i think? possibly linked somewhere – no, wait, it was a SF/Oakland paper) ANYWAY – Jim Jones’s adopted son and how playing basketball saved him from drinking the kool-aid and now his own son is playing high school basketball, and good enough to be recruited. Just, dude, Jim Jones, Jr is a hard name to carry, I think.
Oh, Margaret in CO? I totally get it! What happened on the day I was born? The deaths of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
I wonder how many people make drinking the Kool-Aid jokes and have no idea what they’re referencing?
I don’t know about embarrassing, but lifting my copy of Helter Skelter and burrying my nose in it got me out of more unwanted conversations in my Greyhound Riding days.
I remember reading a book, published maybe 3-4 years after Jonestown happened, written by his “adopted” daughter – maybe it was the same one, but I don’t remember the atrocious dialectizing – that gave quite a bit of insight. Only now I can’t remember the title at all, nor seem to find it from Google or Amazon.
Let me talk to my mother tonight, she may well remember it.
When I was in 10th grade, my Social Studies teacher decorated one wall of his classroom with the covers of every issue of Time magazine published since his first day of teaching. My desk was against that wall, and right next to my head, at perfect eye level, was the cover featuring a picture of post-massacre Jonestown, complete with a vat of Kool-Aid and mottled legs of some of the victims lying on the ground. I still sometimes have nightmares.
Well I thought I left a comment here, but I don’t see it, so I’ll leave another.
Jim Jones’ “daughter” wrote a book almost 30 years ago that was quite informative. Here’s the link: http://www.biblio.com/details.php?dcx=114604454&aid=frg
Don’t know if it is still in print, or if you can only get used copies of it, but given her position, and the shortness of time between the happenings and the publishing of the book, I would think it might portray a more accurate picture. I remember it being a very good read (of course I was only 15 at the time, so that may not be the case anymore).
I saw the Peoples Temple production Kari mentions at Berkeley Rep ( … twice, it was so moving). I highly recommend it to anyone who has a chance to see it – it was created by the people who did The Laramie Project, and it’s amazing.
One thing outsiders sometimes miss is that a lot of coercive groups exploit people’s desire to change things for the better. Jonestown was (ostensibly) all about breaking down racism and destroying poverty. They ran a lot of job programs and other social programs, which benefitted Jones in three ways: they provided a veneer of good works and respectability (major California politicians, including Dianne Feinstein, supported Jones and his good works, which no doubt made it harder for those officials to see the dark side of his activities); they provided visible programs people could give money to; and they kept members donating their time and commitment.
It’s hard to leave a group of people who’ve become a second family, but it’s much harder when you think you’re all saving the world together, and leaving means you’re shirking your responsibiility. Shame is a powerful motivator.
I’ve been a critic of Scientology for years. There’s a lot of the same stuff going on there: a sense of dedication to changing the world for the better through Scientology’s (bogus) drug rehab programs, literacy programs, and anti-psychiatry groups. Many of the people I’ve met in Scientology, and former members, really believed they were saving the world.
Some of the survivors of Jonestown who still contribute to the Jonestown Report continue to work for social justice – only now, they’re doing it outside of the coercive, manipulative group that once held them.
I wonder how we can learn how to separate positive traits (responsibility, caring, commitment) from programs and people in their lives who would exploit them?
I just saw a really interesting piece on ESPN’s Outside the Lines about Jones’ adopted son, Jim Jones Jr., who escaped the massacre because he and the other members of the Jonestown basketball team (including Jones’ other, biological son) were away playing in a tournament. Jones had agree to let them go to the tournament in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, to try and get some good publicity for the Temple. (strange plan but whatever…)
Jim Jr.’s son (Jim Jones’ grandson) is now one of the top High School basketball players in San Francisco.
You can read it here:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=3047543
Also that “aup harr†sounds less like a British accent and more like that Chingy song “I Like the Wayâ€â€¦I like the way you do that right thurr(right thurr)…
The most interesting web resource I’ve found so far on Jonestown is here, hosted by San Jose State and maintained by a woman whose sisters were fairly high-ranking Peoples Temple members and died at Jonestown. It’s good both for data (demographics, names of people who died, etc.) and for a slightly different, more-sympathetic-to-Jonestown take. There’s at least one essay, possibly more, arguing that just because Jones was paranoid didn’t mean the CIA wasn’t keeping tabs on him and promoting the Stoens (the couple that split but left their child in Jones’s custody and fought to get him back; their claim was among those that Leo Ryan went to investigate).
That site also has a transcription of the “death tape,” which… it’s available on YouTube and Google Video, if you want to hear it. I’ve started, but keep turning it off well before you start hearing what’s denoted by “[babies screaming]” in the transcript.
I find Jonestown more fascinating, personally, in the context of utopian communities (Oneida, the communes of the 60s, etc.) than in the context of religious movements. I don’t know of any scholarly treatments of Jonestown off the top of my head that are able to look at Jonestown without being stopped short by the sheer gruesomeness of it.
I used to work with Debbie Layton. She’s an administrative assistant now at XYZ Company, and she is a complete and total LOON. I couldn’t even make it through a phone conversation with her without wanting to stick pencils in my eyes; forget about attempting to make it through the entire book.
Oh, and she’s kind of, um… not terribly bright, either. So your review does not surprise me very much at all.
Oddly enough, Netflix shipped me “Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple” today (spelled that way, too).
I saw a weird documentary a few months ago on Bravo or A&E or something about it. Very creepy re-enactments, but overshadowed by too much doom and gloom music. I’ll probably be skipping the book, though.
I have a bunch of books on various cults–the Unification Church (“In The Shadow of the Moons” by Nansook Hong is awesome), Heaven’s Gate, the Peoples Temple, Aum Shinrikyo, the one that practiced “flirty fishing,” or sex for Jesus–and yes, this one was pretty florid, but an interesting peek into the mechanics of the cult. I’m up for more if anyone has any recommendations.
My mother was actually a friend of Karen Layton’s (Jonestown staff member, died there, apparently a terribly sweet girl, though I get the impression she wasn’t a terribly bright button.) She was among the people Jones tried to recruit to Jonestown…luckily she was too smart for that shit. I’ll likely check the book out just to hear it from the POV of someone who was there, but I’m not expecting much.
(Different Molly than the one above, by the by.)
Nora –
There are a bunch of good (and so-so) books about Scientology collected online (with, I believe, approval from authors and publishers) at the Scientology booklist. I especially recommend A Piece of Blue Sky. The Scandal of Scientology is dated (it was written circa 1970, the first major expose), but worth a read; it rattled Scientology so much that they sent themselves bomb threats in an attempt to frame the author, Paulette Cooper.
If you’re not into reading books online, you can at least dip into these and see which ones are worth finding a physical copy.
My birthday, too. Which I usually forget until Somebody brings it up….
I also hate books written in the vernacular. I find it to be very distracting and annoying. And, perhaps, a wee bit insulting.