My Turn | 'I Am A Survivor Of The Jonestown Massacre'
I was introduced to the People's Temple at 15 years of age. I had organized a march to walk out of school on Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, which was not a holiday at that time, and my mom could see that I needed some guidance. So, she suggested I went to see Jim Jones speak at a junior high school in 1972.
At the time, Jim Jones was traveling between Guyana and the Temple. The few times we did have conversations were because I was in some type of trouble that required I be in front of the audience. Wednesday nights included"catharsis" which was when issues would be worked out. You weren't allowed to defend yourself. You had to take the accusation and it would be discussed.
In files compiled by the Temple, that I was able to get years later, it says:"Eugene Smith will not fight for the cause, he will fight for his family." So they separated me from my family. They sent Ollie over to Jonestown first, she was 6 months pregnant at the time, as well as my mother and some of my friends.
We also had"white night" that same night. Whenever there was a white night, which meant we were under attack and it's an emergency situation, everyone would run to the pavilion and Jim Jones would talk and prophesize and go off on his rants and raves for hours and hours. He was strung out. I was on the wood crew, so I was able to leave Jonestown every day and go out into the bush. But if you weren't able to leave, Jones babbled all day long about what was happening on, how the U.S. was being destroyed and how you should be so happy you were there in the promised land. It was constant indoctrination.
I spoke to Ollie on the 17th, but it was brief and on the evening of the 18th, I was at the movie theater when the usher came down and told us there had been a shooting at Lamaha Gardens. I was thinking that it had to be an errant bullet because we were across the street from the defence force base. When we got there, I could hear people calling my name; two of my friends were in the elephant grass. I asked what was going on, and they said that they were killing the children upstairs.
My belief is that my mother most likely took the poison, but that Ollie didn't and she wouldn't allow Martin and they were two of the murders; the people who were injected with poison. But I never got to bury them. It was not possible to go to Jonestown to identify them, and many cemeteries or churches in the U.S. would not accept the bodies from Jonestown. Eventually, Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland accepted hundreds of bodies in a mass grave.
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