Twenty-five years ago, a young woman in central Mississippi who was either extremely sadistic or extremely dim purchased a copy of Newsweek at the Piggly Wiggly checkout stand on her way to work. She tucked the magazine into her wooden purse and drove eight blocks to the elementary school where she was employed as a teacher. After the 11:00 bell, when her 20 or so fifth-grade students–none of whom had travelled outside the country and few of whom had even ventured beyond the Mississippi border–had seated themselves and stowed their belongings in the proper cubbyholes, the woman perched herself on the edge of her desk and proceeded to read aloud the magazine’s cover story about incomprehensibly gruesome events that had transpired thousands of miles away in a country none of the children could have identified on a map.
Before long, most of the woman’s students had placed their heads on their desks. Some had quite clearly broken out in cold sweats. None were particularly hungry when the lunch bell rang at noon. All were terrified by thoughts of Kool-Aid and death and parents feeding poison to their children. One boy in particular was haunted for years by dreams in which a series of faceless tyrants attempted to murder his three brothers; he alone was able to save them, and as often as not, he failed. These dreams were eventually supplanted in late junior high by an equally disturbing series of nuclear holocaust nightmares, but to this day, the former remain vivid in his memory.
And that’s how I remember Jim Jones and the Jonestown massacre.
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