Before the Frost

After the terrible events in the jungles of Guyana he could recognize a false prophet: a man with smooth black hair and even white teeth, who surrounded himself with light. Jim Jones had feared the dark. He had cursed himself countless times for not seeing through the guise of this false prophet who would lead them so astray — to their deaths. All of them except himself. This had been the first task God had assigned him: to survive in order to tell the world about the false prophet. He was to preach about the kingdom of darkness, which would become the fifth gospel that he would write to complete the holy writings of the Bible. This too was foretold at the end of John’s letter: “Having many things to write unto you, I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be complete.”

This particular evening he had been thinking about all the years that had gone by since he was last here. Twenty-four years, a large part of his life. When he left he was still a young man. Now age had started to claim his body. He took care of himself, ate sensibly, kept himself in constant motion, but the process of growing old had begun. No one could escape it. God lets us age in order for us to understand that we are completely in his hands. He gives us this remarkable life, but as a tragedy so that we will understand that only he has the power to grant us mercy.

He stood in the darkness and thought back to all that had happened. Everything had been what he had dreamed of until he followed Jim Jones to Guyana. Even though he missed those he had left behind, in the end he had been convinced by Jim that this loss was necessary to prepare him for the higher purpose God held in store for him. He had listened to Jim, and sometimes he had not thought about his wife and his child for weeks at a time. It was only after the massacre, when the whole community lay rotting on the fields, that they returned to his consciousness. But by then it was too late. The void created by the God that Jim had killed in him was so devastating that he could not think of anyone but himself.

He had retrieved the money and papers he had stored in Caracas, then took the bus to Colombia, to the city of Barranquilla. He remembered the long night he spent in the border station between Venezuela and Colombia, the city of Puerto Paez, where armed guards watched over the travelers like hawks. Somehow he had managed to convince these guards that he was John Clifton, as his documents stated, and he even managed to convince them that he didn’t have any money left. He had slept with his head on the shoulder of an old Native woman who carried a small cage with two chickens on her lap. They had not exchanged any words, just a look, and she had seen his exhaustion and suffering and offered him her shoulder and wrinkled neck to rest his head. That night he dreamed about those he had left behind. He woke up drenched in sweat. The old woman was awake. She looked at him and he dropped back against her shoulder. When he woke up in the morning she was gone. He felt inside his shirt and touched the thick wad of dollar bills. It was still there. He wanted her back again, the old woman who had let him sleep. He wanted to lean his head against her shoulder and neck and stay there for the rest of his life.

From Barranquilla he took a plane to Mexico City. He washed off the worst of his filth in a public restroom. He bought a new shirt and a small Bible. It had been confusing to see the rushing crowds again, this life that he had left behind when he followed Jim. He walked past the newsstands and saw that what had happened had made the front-page headlines. Everyone was dead, he read. No one was thought to have survived. That meant they must think he was dead too. He existed but he had stopped living, since he was presumed to be one of the bloated bodies found in the jungle.

He still didn’t have a clear plan. He had $3,000 left after paying for the fare to Mexico City, and if he was frugal he could get by on that for quite a while. But where should he go? Where could he find the first step back to God, out of this unbearable emptiness? He didn’t know. He stayed in Mexico City, in a small hostel, and spent his days attending various churches. He deliberately avoided the large cathedrals as well as the neon-lit tabernacles run by greedy and power-hungry clergy. Instead he sought out the small congregations where the love and the passion were palpable, where the ministers were hard to tell apart from those who came to listen to their sermons. That was the way he had to find for himself. Jim hid himself in the light, he thought. Now I want to find the God who can lead me to the holy darkness.

One day he woke up with the overwhelming feeling that he had to leave. He took a bus going north the same day. To make the journey as cheap as possible, he took local buses. On certain stretches he hitched rides with truck drivers. He crossed the border into Texas at Laredo, where he checked into the cheapest motel he could find. He spent a week at the public library catching up on everything he could find that had been written about the catastrophe. To his consternation he found that there were former members of the People’s Temple who were accusing the FBI and CIA and the American government of fostering hostility toward Jim Jones and his movement, thereby inciting the mass suicide. He started to sweat. How could they defend the false prophet?