past the end
45 years ago this week, on November 18th, 1978, over 900 members of the Peoples Temple were murdered in Jonestown, Guyana.
You have this memory of a man on your grandparent’s TV. You’re too young to know who he is or what story the image onscreen conveys, but it sears itself into your mind: he smiles as the world burns behind him, dark sunglasses hide his eyes.
Most people don’t believe they’d join a cult. Cults tend to reach public consciousness at their point of ruin, and when an introduction to something is its end, and if the end arrives with a body count, it becomes impossible for one to put themselves inside of. The unsubtle aftermath so offensive; those who give themselves over to the Obviously Bad Thing, who knew better. Who should have always known better.
You want your seventh novel to be about a cult.
You discover many fictional cult narratives circumvent reader judgment by enforcing sympathetic parameters: circumstance beyond choice, a lack of agency the protagonist can’t quite be condemned for. Characters born or tricked into realities so painstakingly separate from our own, readers leave these stories more assured of themselves than when they started. Those poor souls, they didn’t know—how could they know?
That’s one way to write it.
But what of the characters who do? The ones who choose The Obviously Bad Thing? How to ask readers to see past what they believe is the inherent weakness, the mindlessness, required to make that choice?
The challenge compels you. Something difficult to understand doesn’t make it impossible. It’s an empathy gap. Fill it with words, watch it disappear. Easy.
You’re an author. That’s what you do.
You research. NXIVM. The Manson Family. Branch Davidians. Heaven’s Gate. They all lack appeal somehow. How can you convincingly model a fictional cult off of ones you can’t even imagine yourself a member of?
You research. You end up falling down a rabbit hole, land on some grainy home footage.
A man.
Your grandparent’s living room.
The scratchy carpet against your legs.
A picture so alive across the old TV’s screen.
He smiles at the camera and you can’t see his eyes.
45 years ago, on November 18th, 1978, a thousand people died by suicide in the South American jungle, united in the sublime vision of their revolutionary leader. They lined up dutifully, one by one, drank poison in his name.
(Didn’t they?)
Something about Jim Jones convinces you he could be a revelation. You only want to know about him. The raven-haired reverend born in rural Indiana, a boy who ran with wild dogs, held sermons for neighborhood kids. He could never quite escape his own strangeness yet still managed to grow into someone greater and more terrible than anyone could believe—or were all too willing to.
They called him ‘Father.’
A thousand followers at his feet.
It excites you. This is what everyone gauges their potential susceptibility to cults against, isn’t it? The charisma of their leaders? You have to give them someone they can’t deny.
If Jim Jones is the answer, you’ll distill it into a novel.
It will be a revelation.
You research. You immerse yourself in biography, in writing, in sermons, interviews, lectures, footage and tapes, and if you close your eyes, you can almost see it, the greatness, HIM . . . before the image fades into a bloated, soured corpse rotting under the hot Guyana sun, death preceded by absurdities too numerous to count; a man convinced he was the reincarnation of Jesus and Lenin, who gave sermons about his life-saving sexual prowess.
A thousand followers at his feet?
The problem with books about a cult is that readers know it’s a book about a cult even if its characters don’t, and by sheer virtue of this knowledge, stories about cults can only ever start at their end.
You are the problem as you see it.
You know better.
You’ll always know better.
But you you write your book anyway and the first draft is a 400 page disaster your former editor hands back to you, marked up, and every question she asks is him?
You decide to pull the book, but even as you decide to pull the book, some part of you is still in Jonestown.
For all you think you know, you’re missing something.
That gap.
You research. You immerse yourself in biography, in writing, in sermons, interviews, lectures, footage and tapes, and if you close your eyes you can almost see it, the greatness, HIM, before he fades into the faces of—
A thousand followers at his feet—
You realize—
You’ve learned so many of their names.
45 years ago, Congressman Leo Ryan flew to Guyana to look into claims American citizens were being held in the jungle against their will. They were members of The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, better known as ‘Jonestown.’
Jonestown was supposed to be the Promised Land; a place where people of all races and backgrounds could live together in equality, where no one would go without. But now there was talk of the reverend sinking deeper into drug-induced paranoia, of subjecting his followers to hard labor, sleep deprivation, corporal punishment and suicide drills. He kept their passports from them, locked away.
They couldn’t leave.
They didn’t willingly line up.
There was nowhere else to go.
Their stories emerge from the shadow of Jim Jones, asserting life beyond the obscene coverage of their deaths and what they have to say is a revelation.
No one version of events the same, all of them true.
In Peoples Temple, anyone could belong and anyone was welcome to live in God’s love, light, and acceptance. Members worked together. It was Matthew 25:35-40, it was food, shelter, and care for those in need. It was protesting injustice, fighting for civil rights, living and breathing a greater good. Jones met each member the way they needed to be met, and as he slowly perverted their pupose, claiming his place as a God beyond their grasp, many of his children reached for each other.
Sometimes you see yourself in the wry skepticism of one survivor’s account, in the raw belief of another’s, and in the ones caught in between. Sometimes you don’t see yourself at all, and that’s when you realize the impossible scope of what they were up against.
It could happen to me because I am you—
It would happen to me because I am not you.
You’re confronted by the insidious duality, the contradictions, and complexities of a community that hurts you less than the world outside of it, and keeps you warm inside the pain it causes you.
Who wouldn’t bear it?
They thought they’d make heaven on earth.
In 2003, 25 years After, Laura Johnston-Kohl, Jonestown survivor, sat for an interview with NPR. Host Melissa Block played the testimonies of the long dead promising to lay down their lives in the name of Jim Jones.
After they listened, she asked Laura to explain it.
I just loved being in Guyana . . . I really loved it, Laura cried.
I have to tell you, Block replied, it’s hard to reconcile those two things: your love for this place and this time, with the knowledge of what happened which was both suicide and murder.
Laura did not adequately explain it.
Finally, she offered an almost perfunctory statement about how important it is not to give yourself so wholly to someone else.
It wasn’t enough.
I wonder, Block said, if there may be people listening to this who would say the time for that knowledge would have been well before November 18th, 1978. That it was very clear where this was headed.
Ryan’s visit brought Jonestown to its knees. Several Temple members secured a flight home with him and, unable bear the thought of losing even one of his flock, Jones ordered a handful of his followers to attack the airstrip, resulting in the death of the congressman, three journalists, and a defector.
Jones then declared it time to go.
Some took a bullet. Most were forced to drink ‘the potion’—a mixture of cyanide and Flavor-Aid—as they’d rehearsed so many times before. Tricked, murdered by a madman, yet when you ask people what they know about Jonestown, they describe the empty-eyed and open-mouthed fools, a thousand lives reduced to whatever amount of time it takes to tell a Kool-Aid joke.
But they thought they’d make heaven on earth.
Few want to see their frailties reflected in the pages of a book unless they’re made special enough to claim. That isn’t something you’ve ever known how to do. But you wrote it anyway, the most human story you could about a cult, anticipating the vulnerability of its main characters charged as weakness, stupidity, when it was very clear where this was headed.
You promised your readers a revelation, something that will make them reconsider everything they think they know about who they are. But the secret to that was always this: they have to be willing to receive it.
To be brave enough to see past the end of the story and place themselves at its start.
But most people refuse to believe they’d join a cult.
You think, often, of the remaining survivors of Peoples Temple longing to be remembered for more than how it ended. Not as cultists, but fully realized individuals, with hopes and dreams of their own.
You think, often, of them sitting with the media November after November, bartering for the humanity they and their dead have been so long denied by our fear of a choice we all exist on the edge of.
You think of that widening empathy gap, what it says of the rest of us.
How little we know.
And there, in the distance, a man smiles as the world burns behind him, our reflection in the sunglasses hiding his eyes.
A version of this essay was originally published on CrimeReads.
Recommended reading:
Raven by Tim Reiterman
Stories from Jonestown by Leigh Fondakowski
The Project releases in paperback November 21st and is available for preorder. Order from Pocket Books to receive a signed bookplate and stickers while supplies last; preorder by November 20th to receive an additional 15% off.
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You manage to break my heart again and again, even in an email. And what a gift it is.
courtney, i have no words. you are simply incredible. you've been a favorite since i first discovered you in my small-town library left alone to my own devices. i've always been enraptured by cults in media both literature and other mediums, and i am so excited for this project. i, too, want to eventually work with a cult for a novel, but that will come later. you are just a literary force. i am so excited about this novel. (i waited for the paperback bc i'm biased lol) every day i am so thrilled by the idea that you read my publication because you are just such a voice. thank you for being who you are and congratulations <3