“Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown” begins with words from a follower who dodged disaster

Author Annie Dawid employs a radio interview to introduce readers to the complex factors behind the real-life 1978 deaths of more than 900 followers of charismatic Jim Jones

Watts Freeman
San Francisco
November 18, 2008
10:05 a.m.

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview, Mr. Freeman. I know our listeners on KBBA, the Black Bay Area’s radio station, are very grateful. First, let me do a quick test. ‘Today is November the eighteenth, 2008, the thirty-year anniversary of the Jonestown massacre, and I’m Kenyatta Robinson. Test.” 

 Good.

Mr. Freeman…

I go by Watts. 

Okay, Watts. That tells us something important about you already, and we haven’t even gotten to the first question! Just relax; the lapel mike will catch everything. Later, we can edit out all the dead space and mumbling.  I’d like you to talk about what strikes you most on this date. But I do have a few questions to start with. For instance, can you tell us about when you met Jim Jones?

I’m a teenager, right? Don’t know shit, but I think I know everything. Think I’ve got the whole scam down cold, but really, I was deeply fucked up. Is it all right, me cussing on tape?

No problem. Like I said, we can edit later. Use whatever language feels most comfortable.

Well, English is all I know. [Laughter] Anyway, I was pretty much living on the streets back then. This was in L.A., Watts area mostly, but I actually didn’t see Jimmie Jones the first time in L.A. I’d come up here, to the Bay Area, with some friends, and we were looking around, thinking about moving since the cops in L.A. were seriously out of control.

How old were you exactly? And when was this?

Around 1968, 1969 maybe. I was born in fifty. Anyway, that stretch of time is pretty hazy ’cause most days I had a good buzz on. So me and my friends, we’re checking out Oakland, scratching around Hunter’s Point, and then we’re up in the Fillmore, and we see these buses, a whole parade of them, man, coming down Fillmore Street, and they’re full of brothers and sisters – some white folks too, but mostly brothers and sisters, and they’re waving. Waving at us, hanging on the corner, stoned into tomorrow. That was my first sight of Peoples Temple.  Didn’t see Jimmie Jones that day though. Mind if I smoke?

It’s your home, Mr. Freeman – Watts. Please.

But does it bother you? ’Cause if it does, I won’t. You a beautiful woman in your childbearing years; how do I know you ain’t pregnant?

(laughs) I’m not. You’re fine.

You pretty fine yourself. [sound of his palm slapping his cheek] Sorry. Am I making you uncomfortable? Shit. Same ol’ same ol’ Watts. Jimmie Jones figured me out in about five minutes, but the thing was, I figured him out in about four, so generally I was one step ahead.

I hope to hear more about that, Watts. But, to continue where we were, you say you didn’t meet the Reverend Jones on that day. So, when did that happen?

Nineteen-seventy. In L.A. I was selling dope and doing dope and not much else. My old lady at the time had kicked me out, so I go visit my grandma to get something to eat, and she drag me off to one of them healing services she love. I was too stoned to refuse. She always believing in something, my grandma, something to make her life feel better than it did: God or Jimmie Jones or Jesus or somebody else. So when she found God and Jesus wrapped up in Rev. Jimmie Jones, she was like to be in heaven. 

Can you describe your earlier life, growing up in Watts?

And growing up as Watts, right? [Laughter] I guess my father was a doper. Never knew him. He died when my mother was pregnant. A dealer too. It was never exactly clear whether he OD’d or got done on the street for ripping somebody off. Doesn’t matter – dead is dead, right?  My mother did dope too, and she didn’t last long. I moved around, from practically the minute I was born, from relative to relative in Watts, and some of those people weren’t in any better shape than my mother. They tried to be good to me; I can see that now. But it was rough, coming up like that. My grandma was working all the time, cleaning houses and such, so I couldn’t stay with her. I didn’t get to school much, and when I did, recess was where I started doping. I was 11, but I’d sampled all kinds of shit before then. Every now and again, I did stay with my grandma, but my mama and her didn’t get along ’cause Grandma always telling her what she was doing wrong, which was everything, of course, so, even though my mama was too fucked up – ’scuse me, too messed up, to take care of me herself, she didn’t like my being with her mama. So then after some big fight, I’d get sent out to somebody else’s place.

Sounds like your grandmother was a source of stability for you.

[Laughs.] My grandma, she like every other old black lady in Peoples Temple. Sweet. A serious backbone for work. At the same time, you could talk her out of anything you needed and decided she didn’t. Like money. Stuff to pawn. And I did. Just like Jimmie Jones convincing every one of them grandmas to turn over their Social Security checks every month. Yeah, I’m guilty too, but that was before the Jimmie Jones years in L.A. When the Temple finally got its own building there, she would’ve given every penny in her purse to those collections – sometimes they had four or five in one service – and her pitiful possessions too, but she died before they could completely rip her off. Before I could, too.

You sound bitter.

Mostly, I’m pissed at myself. I was a nasty character back then. Hope I’m not so nasty anymore. Anyway, my grandma passed from natural causes – she wasn’t one of them widows lying face down in the mud, swollen up like a goddamn balloon in Jonestown. I’m not sure if dying of a heart attack in a rat-hole project in Watts is necessarily better than that, but at least she got buried proper.

So, did you join up that day – with your grandmother? You were twenty then?

Old enough to know better. Nah, not that day. But Jimmie Jones talking about how he’s a (n-word) like the rest of us, and how the government hates black people. Second part of that is true anyway. He says look at the Japanese – they had money, he says, they owned a chunk of California – and they got put into camps here ’cause they’re not white. Not so long ago, either. Like the Jews in Europe. He says, don’t think it can’t happen here. And he goes on about how the white man wants us to be drunk and stoned and wasting our lives, and how we play right into their pale ugly hands when we get messed up on dope and booze. Asks us who own all the liquor stores in the ghetto – white people, right? He still right. ’Cept now it’s mostly Asians. Anyway, he’s talking like his skin is brown as yours or mine. Which I think is weird, because the man is white; he’s not mixed, not Indian, like he claim. He a white boy. He got that dark hair from Wales, not no Cherokee Nation. [Laughs] Anyway, he’s talking about this program they have at the church to get people like me, like a lot of young folk, off the dope and out of jail, to help us be useful in the community. It’s not like I never heard what the man said before, but he got a good rap and a fine delivery, and it’s penetrating my stoner head. Then my grandma gets on me, and she won’t quit razzing me until I say yes. Now, I’d done rehab already, and I’d been to jail already, and you know, I didn’t have nothing going on that was worth keeping going on. My girlfriend say she don’t want nothing to do with me ’cause I’m too fucked up – sorry, too messed up – too much of the time. So, Grandma says I can stay with her if I enroll myself in that program.

So it worked? The Reverend Jones straightened you out?

Kenyatta – that your name, right? Kenyatta, you gotta remember I was young at the time. And dumb. Dumb about dope, especially. But it wasn’t Jimmie Jones who got me off the dope; it was the people in Peoples Temple. Man, they were some fine people. Some very fine people. That’s what always trips me up. To this day it does. Trips everyone else up too. All those good people. They weren’t crazy like Jimmie Jones. Anyway, the nurses running the program, the other folks helping us get through the first days, like Jim McElvane, the guy everyone called Mac, and Archie, and of course some of the other dopers, like Rufus – they got me through. 

Can you talk more about that, about what you call the “fine” people and how you still find it hard to understand what they did, three decades on?

Well, you know how they showed us in the media – not first-hand of course, you too young – but you must have checked out the newspapers and the magazines, and the shit they had on TV.

Yes. I did quite a lot of research for this interview. And I’m probably not as young as you think, Watts.

You way younger than me, that’s certain. Good old Watts hit the big five-eight this year, no thanks to Jimmie Jones. A miracle just the same, though. Never thought I’d get to be 28, much less 58, not what I was doing back then, the time we’re talking about. What I was saying was that the news media made all of Jonestown into psychos and sickos and brainwashed, brainless zombies. So far from the truth, Kenyatta. You know, that group of black people about the most together bunch of black people I ever saw. True then and maybe truer today. It was the Reverend himself, as you call him, who was crazed and drugged out and sick. The inner circle, what I call the “white chick circle,” though there were some dudes in it too, mostly white – they like slaves to their master. “Yassuh, Dad.” Yassuh all day and all night. “Yassuh, Dad. Whatever you say, Dad.” He build himself such a bunch of yes men and yes women that if he say night is day they say, “Yes Dad, that’s right: Night is day.” He say day night, they say, “Thank you Dad – Day sho’ nuff is night.” You want a cigarette?

No thank you. I don’t smoke. But go ahead. It really doesn’t bother me.

You sure you not pregnant? Maybe you should say you are so I won’t smoke so much.

Okay, Watts. Let’s say I am, then, for the sake of your lungs.

You funny. You a funny, smart lady, talking about my lungs. What I already put my body through it don’t make sense I ain’t dead. Now I think the diabetes gonna kill me in the end.

I read that the Reverend Jones – Jimmie, as you call him – was actually very ill during those last days. Is that true?

Hard to say for sure. He a star hypochondriac for certain. Had his wife checking his blood pressure every five minutes, and he announce his fever over the P.A., going up one degree every hour on the hour. Make people feel sorry for him. I don’t think he any sicker than the rest of us in that Jonestown heat, with the bugs and the worms and the water sometimes giving us the runs. And he did like his dope, especially that last year, after his mama died. 

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