Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown

Synopsis

Watts Freeman, an African-American man from Los Angeles, flees Jonestown on the day of the massacre, Nov. 18, 1978. Thirty years later, he is interviewed for an Oakland radio program on the rise and fall of the Peoples Temple. This interview intersects the novel as Watts reveals more and more about life under the influence of the Rev. Jim Jones and his “white chick” inner circle.

Marceline Baldwin, daughter of a Midwestern minister, an altruistic and inexperienced young woman who plans to use her nursing skills to heal the world, meets the charismatic Jones in Indiana, 1949, and spends the next three decades as his wife and primary workhorse of the organization. When the church moves to California from Indiana in 1965 after attacks on the integrated congregation, she is instrumental in the smooth exodus of dozens of families, black and white, including infants and the elderly. While the couple adopts many children and has one natural child, Jim begins his lifelong sexual promiscuity, sweeping both men and women into his magnetic orbit, all the while preaching sexual restraint. Taking amphetamines to accomplish more and more good works, he becomes dependent on drugs. During this transformation of her husband, Mother Marceline turns the other cheek, works diligently, is faithful to her husband, and makes a profitable business setting up eldercare facilities. Even when her husband impregnates one of the flock, the chief “white chick,” Marceline continues to look at the larger picture: improving lives for the poor, the elderly, and the children of the church who need practical help. She is by her husband’s side up to the lethal last day.

In the mid-1970s, Virgil Nascimento, Guyana’s ambassador to the United States, finds himself drawn to a white American Peoples Temple officer, Nancy, who makes herself available to him in the capital of Georgetown, a 24-hour boat trip from the Peoples Temple jungle home of Jonestown. The group has fled the United States and in 1974 re-established itself in this English-speaking South American nation. Unbeknownst to Virgil, Nancy’s interest in him is purely political; she is one of the many women the paranoid Jones persuades to work as spies, to glean information and influence policy in the nascent and corrupt Marxist government of the former British colony. In Washington D.C., three years after the massacre, destroyed by the ruination of his country caused by the death of nearly a thousand Americans in Jonestown, Virgil will kill Nancy and their child before taking his own life, leaving behind a journal indicting Jones and all who collaborated in the nightmare of Jonestown, including himself.

Decades after the massacre, Truth Miller, who was in the group’s San Francisco office when it happened, will travel to Guyana for the first time and find herself a Guyanese man to impregnate her, all the while pining for what she perceives as a vanished paradise of an interracial utopia in the jungle, which might have thrived had not the U.S. government persecuted Jones and his followers to their tortured end. Despite all evidence, Truth will go on believing in Jones as savior, spiritual father of her son, though life’s difficulties will find her back in New Jersey, a single mother leading an ordinary life trying to pay the bills, remembering the glory days when Jones and people like her could sway an election, helping George Moscone become mayor of San Francisco.

The novel ends with the airing of the interview with Watts, a broadcast which illuminates the story of the Peoples Temple and its spectacular demise while continuing the media exploitation which followed Jim Jones and his followers all his life and well into the aftermath, still powerful today, 37 years later.

Paradise Undone draws on extensive research and interviews, creating a fiction that uses historical fact to tell a cohesive and credible story of the United States’ greatest single loss of civilian lives in the 20th century – 919 American citizens died that day in the jungle. Four protagonists -- two dead and two living, two men and two women, two Blacks and two Whites – tell their stories here, illuminating the formerly shadowed places populated by those who believed in Jim Jones.