What Lawrence Wright Learned About Jim Jones By Talking to His Sons

What you said made me think of one of the hardest stories I ever did. I did an article for The New Yorker about the sons of Jim Jones. Not everybody died in Jonestown. He had three sons, two of them were adopted, and they were playing a basketball tournament in Georgetown, Gianna. This story took place when I ... You remember the Branch Davidians? Yeah. Now that you're a Texan, you know, just up the road. Way to go. My editor at The New Yorker at the time was Tina Brown, and she asked me to go write about the Branch Davidians. And I said, Tina, there are more reporters than Branch Davidians up there right now. I couldn't ... But what ... I had been watching the news coverage, and just before ... The place was called Rancho Apocalypse, which has turned out to be really appropriate, but they sent ... Before the conflagration, they sent out a van with children who had grown up in this community. And these kids, they drove past the ATF and the FBI lines and then the media line, and you could see these children looking out the windows. They were leaving behind everybody they knew. They were leaving behind the only world they knew, and they were going into what? And I thought, what happened to those kids? This must have happened. What will happen to those? It must have happened to children elsewhere. And so I started doing some investigation, and I found out that Jones had these three kids, three young boys. Well, they were young men. There was Jim Jr., who was black, and then there was Stephen, who was the natural son, and then there was Tim Jones. For whatever reason, they hadn't talked to anybody, and they agreed to talk to me. Perhaps it had to do with the Branch Davidian thing that was going on at that same time. So this was in the early 90s? Yeah, it was 15 years after Jonestown. Actually, almost exactly 15 years. And there's a cemetery in Oakland where many of most of the 900 bodies were buried. And they took an earth mover and took a hill down, half of a hill. And then they stacked all the caskets up and covered it again, but it still has this distortion. And you can see what remained of the Jonestown followers. But it was interesting to me that the people who joined the Jones cult were all good people. They were all ... It was started in Indianapolis, and then it moved to the Bay Area. And it was largely black. Jones was very, very progressive on race, but a lot of good-hearted people involved in it. And he was a big figure in San Francisco at the time politically. His support was sought after. He was admired as a community leader. But he was totally crazy and paranoid and suddenly decided he had to remove the entire group. He said, I can't tell your family. He can't tell anybody. He sent his sons down to Guyana to clear the jungle so they could make this village. And then overnight, they moved nearly a thousand people to South America and leaving behind all their friends, their jobs, and stuff like that. One day, they've been removed. They've been raptured off to South America. And so I was interested in learning more about it. But these young men were totally haunted. But you would certainly relate to Tim Jones. He was physically very powerful. He curled a hundred pounds with either hand. But he couldn't get on an elevator. The last time he tried to do an airplane flight, I mean, this had been years ago. I don't know if it's changed for him now. But he made the airplane turn around and dropped him off at the gate, which is hard to do. But when you're as physically overpowering as Tim was, he's kind of a formidable figure. So he just had all sorts of anxieties. So I went to talk to him. And he said, I'll do it on one condition. We have to do it in a public place, a restaurant, someplace where I won't cry. And I want my wife there because I never told her about it. Wow. It's a little hard for me to tell this story because we went to a restaurant. And within five minutes, he was crying and pounding the table. And the waiter was keeping his distance. People in the restaurant were frightened. And he told the story of going back. He's the one who had to identify 900 people. His natural birth parents, his adopted parents, he had a wife and children. Then, too, they were all dead. Everybody was dead. And I've never forgotten the power of a religious belief in a personality like Jim Jones who could persuade all those people to stay with him, train them in this, you know, suicide drills night after night, you know. And then one day it's real. And, you know, the boys felt guilty because they thought if they had been there, they might have been able to stop it. But probably not.