Remembering Pat Parker, and Her Poem "Jonestown"

The author of "Debunking Henry Ford" discusses Pat Parker (1944-1989) and her protest poem "Jonestown."

Of course I remember Pat Parker.  I knew her personally, somewhat, when we both lived in Oakland, in the late 'Seventies and early 'Eighties.  My debut reading of what I now call "Debunking Henry Ford," and her debut reading of her protest poem "Jonestown" happened to take place on the same program, at a bookstore in San Francisco.

The occasion was a promotional reading for Judy Grahn's anthology, True to Life Adventure Stories. There were six or seven women reading, including Judy, Pat, and myself.  All the readers had stories in Judy's anthology, but most of the participants read something else, such as a newer piece, from a manuscript, or a notebook.  I noticed just before we started that Pat was making last minute little scribbles on her piece, which was exactly what I was doing.  It turned out, we were both reading major pieces in their debut presentations.

What did Pat Parker say about Jonestown?  She was in disbelief that these deaths were entirely a mass suicide, which was the initial public interpretation.  She skeptically and doggedly pondered this in her poem, and she has been proven right.  Suicide was an element in the Jonestown calamity, but murder was also an element, and a grey area was also present.  Pat Parker probed this grey area too.

More that half the people killed at Jonestown were Black people, and Pat Parker's poem was Black centered.  Something she had heard in her childhood kept gnawing at her.  "Black people don't commit suicide," a sweeping generalization, but nevertheless an impetus to her critical thinking.

"and all the dead

are singing to me

Black folks do not

Black folks do not

Black folks do not commit suicide."

Black participation in a giant group suicide was contradictory to her understanding of her own people.  There had to be more to it.  How had this situation come about?  What else was involved?   How did Jim Jones get such power over his flock?

According to Pat Parker's interpretations, paraphrased, social inclusion was the carrot that kept Jim Jones's Black parishioners attracted to him, coming back to his church, not seeing through it, not leaving when they still had a chance to escape.  According to Pat Parker, the daily grind of racism, the demoralization, the toll that ordinary common racism takes on Black people was implicated in their involvement in this self-destructive enterprise.

She ponders how did this happen, dismissing in sequence the various answers being given around her, until one rings true.  She reports a snippet from an interview with a survivor of Jim Jones's church:

"'Why did you join?'

'Well, I went there a few times

and then I stopped going, but

the Rev. Jones came by my house

and asked me why I quit coming.

I was really surprised.

No one had ever cared

that much about me before.'"

What a sorry situation this is that a person is so chronically lacking in social attention that they are sucked in by a calculated "caring"  affixed to maintaining good attendance.  People who are deprived of something often lose the ability to judge the quality or value of that which addresses their deprivation.

Pat Parker essentially identifies social inclusion as the reward that made Jim Jones's parishioners susceptible to his authority, although she did not use that expression and she unfolds her thoughts poetically rather than telling them concisely.  Moreover, Pat Parker identifies Jim Jones's parishioners as already having sustained an inner death as a consequence of enduring endless daily racism and deprivation under commonplace racism.

 

Pat Parker unfolded her assertion that these parishioners had already been murdered, metaphorically, by people who didn't care -- by teachers, social workers, police, shopkeepers, and politicians who didn't care, repeatedly didn't care, until the  people so treated went to Jonestown inwardly dead and deadened and therefore susceptible to Jim Jones's massive death-dealing.

This would make Jim Jones the lethal exploiter of his parishioners' vulnerability,  and indeed he was.  Jim Jones was the choreographer and perpetrator of a massive deadly violence whose preparation period was all about gaining power over vulnerable people then abusing that power to the point of death.

I lived in Oakland during this period.  I saw the publicity that Jim Jones did for his church, the Peoples' Temple of the Foursquare Gospel church.  I saw what he bragged about, his carrot of promotion: that he had achieved an integrated caring community of Black and white, an integrated harmony of different colors.  There may have been a semblance of this at his church, but ultimately his church yielded a blood bath.

 

 

He betrayed the potential goodness of integration, with an authoritarian path and an outcome of corpses.

He also appropriated and exploited some of the rhetoric of the Black power movement, which was a concomitant with and competitor to integration politics within the civil rights movement.  I do not know exactly what Erika Huggins and Huey Newton meant when they spoke of "revolutionary suicide," but I am sure it was not throwing one's life away for the egotistical paranoia of a commanding (white) power-tripper.  I think that the Black Panthers who used that phrase were risking their lives to fight racism in a bold way, risking a deadly counter-reaction.  Their usage may or may not have been flawed.  But Jim Jones' usage certainly was odiously flawed.

Jones had groomed his parishioners for a possible massive event of death with rhetoric of "revolutionary suicide," and practice sessions called "white nights."  He did not spring death upon them, but guided them cleverly and charismatically, manipulating and commanding them.

Eventually some outside family members were worried enough to seek help. Leo Ryan, a  U.S. congressman from San Francisco, responded to their concerns and travelled to Guyana with an investigative team.  Their fears were confirmed, but Ryan, and five others, were killed at the airport, as they tried to depart.   

There was no successful intervention.

More than nine-hundred people lost their lives at Jonestown.  Almost a thousand people died.  All the minors are legally regarded as having been murdered.  There is video tape of children fighting with all their might against lethal injections.  The adults were both more and less co-operative and many drank poison as they were ordered.    There were very few escapees.

   

2.

          

It is a deep loss that Pat Parker died prematurely, from breast cancer.  She was a wide ranging, talented, thoughtful protest poet, and her poetry lives on.  She was a Black poet and a lesbian poet.  She was a revolutionary, and a mother.  She was personal and political both, often in the same poem.  I think her temperament inclined her to protest.  Her style was accessible.   

But her premature death deprived her readership of the work and wisdom she potentially would have had in her old age.  What journeys would she have taken as a writer, if she had lived a longer life-span?  (What early mistakes and skill gaps would she have remedied?)

 

With regard to Jonestown, her persistence in asking hard questions is a tradition that continues, in her memory.  How did Jim Jones get away with this calamitous death dealing?  What vigilance is required of us now?

       

As the author of Debunking Henry Ford,  I would like to ask, do I see some analogy between Jim Jones and Henry Ford?  Yes, there is a limited analogy between them.

They both had better reputations than they deserved, they both were inflictors of mass death, Ford on an mega-massive level, Jones on a shocking but numerically smaller scale.  Henry Ford was a national and international hero, who perpetrated treachery toward the Jewish people through his massive propaganda campaign and through helping Hitler in Europe.  Jim Jones was locally, in the San Francisco Bay area, accorded a prestigious status, and that helped camouflage his treachery until it was too late.

 

Henry Ford was over-appreciated and idealized for having mass produced cars, and for having given his workers a five dollar day.  Jim Jones was over-appreciated and idealized for having an integrated church, for having included Black people into a social unit of alleged caring and sharing.  But Henry Ford mass produced death-dealing, as well as cars, and Jim Jones lead his parishioners into a deadly end game.

These are difficult histories, but with lessons to be learned, and preventative value.   

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more about Pat Parker -- a more personal poem, "My Lover Is A Woman," read by the poet  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFFTb6Jh5cI

more about Jonestown

Jonestown Memorial in Oakland

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jonestown-memorial

Jonestown happened in Guyana

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/12/21/the-jonestown-we-dont-know/