Seductive Poison

Last week I read Of Mice and Men to be able to discuss it with my son. This week, I read Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple by Deborah Layton alongside one of my daughters. I think it's time for a family book club! I bemoaned the fact that of my three children, only one has become a reader in adulthood. Staying safer at home during a pandemic now has all three of my kids reading and I am thrilled! We keep joking about family book club, but maybe someday, it might happen. I tend to read lighter material than my kids, but I think we should be able to find a book that all three of us might enjoy.

I remember the horror of the Jonestown mass suicide, but until I read Deborah Layton's memoir, I didn't really know much about the Peoples Temple, about Jim Jones, or about his colony in Guyana. What I knew was that the Peoples Temple was a cult, Jim Jones was the cult leader, and a bunch of people committed suicide by drinking Kool-Aid.

The Peoples Temple started out as a church with Jim Jones as the leader. Was Jim Jones inherently deviant? Or did something make him that way? That's something I wondered as I read the book.

Deborah Layton had a happy enough childhood thanks to her older siblings and a loving father. She never felt like she connected with her mother who seemed to be keeping secrets. Things got terrible for her as one after another her older siblings left for college and their adult lives. She started getting into trouble at school, was sent to live with her sister-in-law's family for a short while and was eventually sent to boarding school in England. When she returned to California, her brother Larry introduced her to charismatic Jim Jones and the Peoples Church, an organization connected with the Christian Church. Jim Jones was anti-racist and anti-capitalist. He was for the people. Debbie was seduced.

The Peoples Temple, for how horrible it turned out to be, allowed Debbie to turn her life around. She was a responsible, hard worker who learned a lot. Every once in a while, it seemed like she was questioning some of the premises of the organization and her role in it. But she stuck with it. She spent less time with her family and had no outside friends. She worried about how she would be treated if she ever left the organization. Over time, it lost its association with the Church, but continued as an anti-capitalist organization. Jones had a desire to find a place outside of the US, away from capitalism, to create a utopia for his followers. It was once he settled Jonestown in Guyana that things really began to unravel.

Layton's story gives insight into how cults grow and what it's like to be part of a cult. She was one of the lucky ones to escape in time to avoid being a part of the mass suicide. Her telling her story was a way for her to come to terms with all she had experienced. She didn't want to carry on the pattern of secrecy that haunted her relationship with her mother... and her grandmother before.

My daughter was a sociology major in college so our discussion gave a nod to social deviance. Because I wanted to understand my daughter's point of view, I learned a few new things about what it actually means to be socially deviant. Reading this book with my daughter became a huge learning experience.