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The House on Graceland | Peoples Temple Pt. 1 · Both Things Are True Crime

• ppls temple rerecord pt 1 2: The trial moves out of Indianapolis to Noblesville, right? And this happens in Hamilton County, 1925, in the fall. Will Rimmy, he's the prosecutor. He's already been elected Marion County prosecutor. And he's this young man and he ain't afraid of Stevenson at all. And the judge was Will Sparks. So the defense, they try to keep Madge's statement out. But the judge, of course, let it in because she met the standard. She knew she was dying, and she said so. And when the defense Makes the argument, you're probably already thinking, like she took the poison, he did not give it to her, she swallowed the tablets herself, so he couldn't have killed her. That's where you make it a little bit of it wrong, because even I did. In my first version of this, I called it the felony murder rule. And I have come to find out that that is the wrong name. Felony murder is a different doctrine. Felony murder is a different document, actually. a different doctrine. And it's about deaths that happened certain times. This cause was actually about causation. I was trying to get my notebook. Okay, so from what I can understand, here's causation in plain English. The question is not who's held whose hand held the poison. The question is, would she be dead if it not for him? And Was what she did a natural and probable result of what he did to her. And so the stage theory was that this his assault left her so injured, so badly in body and in mind that taking a poison was a natural result of what he did. That he put her in a room where the poison looked like the only door. And so the doctors testified that the poison and the untreated infection from his injuries killed her together. So so causation does not want to know whose hand, it wants to know who's doing. And that's the sentence. I think you should take that with you because I am. Causation does not ask whose hand, it acts who's doing. So then on November 14th, 1925, the jury comes back and they give him second degree murder. Life in prison. And he appeals. And in nineteen thirty-two, the Indiana Supreme Court affirmed his conviction. And the case is called Stephism versus State. And it is still apparently taught to law students, so they can even learn causation. and so the way to read a case citation, I'm gonna say it once, because I'm learning this stuff too. A citation is volume reporter page, and this one is two five Indiana 141. Which means volume two five of the Indiana Report starting on page one hundred forty one. And it is also printed in a regional book as one seventy-nine north eastern six thirty-three volume page reporter. I'm including that second one because I'm not completely sure which one is the right one. I just have notes for both of those. But after this, he waits for the governor to pardon him, Ed Jackson, you know, the man the Klan put in the office. Well, Jackson ain't returned none of those calls. So Stepherson did what men like that do, cause he had been keeping records on every politician he'd ever bought, and he starts handing them to a reporter in the Indianapolis Times. And over 1927-1928, the Times published what was in them. Mayor John Duval was convicted and served about 30 days. The governor was indicted for bribery and only got away because the statue of limitations ran out, and the Times won the Putzer Prize for public service in 1928. And the Indian a Klan, as a dues paying organization at least, fell apart. So the short version is that a 28-year-old literacy program manager from Irvington, with a court reporter at her bedside, took down the biggest state Klan organization in the country. Not the FBI, her. And I believe that. And I think she should be in every Indian history textbook, if you ask me. But here's the other thing, and this is the thing that I think. matters for Heysen. Because the Klan as an organization collapsed. But the Klan as a way of seeing the world did not. It's almost like it took off the robe and it put on a suit. It kept calling and keeping its job at the bank and the sheriff's office and the city council, but it stopped calling itself the Klan and instead started calling itself zoning or like lending standards or like neighborhood character, school boundaries. And that Brings us back around to the sun actually. A sundown town was a town where black people were not allowed inside the town after limits lit town limits after dark. Sometimes the rule also hit Jewish, Mexican, Chinese people, but overwhelmingly it was about black Americans. And you already heard one. Sand Mountain, Alabama in Heistness Memory with the sign that told you to get out before the sun went down and get out anyhow if you couldn't read it. But here's what people didn't expect. A lot of the sundown towns were not in the deep south. They were in the north. Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, places that black families moved to because they were supposed to be better. And the historian who did most of the work on this was James Lowen. His book is called Sundown Towns and it came out in 2005. I said in my first version that he documented tens, ten thousands of them. I was wrong. He estimated there were thousands across the country. And the ones he actually confirmed are a much smaller number. They're about hundreds. in Illinois and at least a hundred confirmed in Indiana. And I said Indiana had the most per capita, but I actually cannot really completely back that up. Loan usually points to Illinois. So I'm taking that back too. Indiana does not need to be number one to be bad though, okay? So here's how a sundown town worked, because most of them did not have a law in the books. A law would have gotten them sued. So first the real estate agent. A black family they want to know about a house, right? The house is suddenly under contract. The seller may have changed their mind. they lost your paperwork over and over until you just go somewhere else. Second, the bank. Same thing with a mortgage. Come back next week. Come back next week. And that just continues forever. And third, if somehow a black family got a house anyway, maybe through a sympathetic seller or an agent from out of town who ain't know the rules. the house got a visit. Sometimes a polite committee of neighbors, sometimes a brick. Sometimes worse. And the family almost always left and a white family quietly would pick up the house and buy it the next month. Fourth, say you're just driving through, right? And your car breaks down in one of these towns near dark. Child, you got a problem. You can't get a room, not a meal. The sheriff was not there to protect you. The sheriff was part of it. If you were lucky, he may follow you out to the town line and watch you keep walking. Sometimes there is also a whistle at six o'clock. Some of those towns that whistle actually blew in it for decades. And later they called it a curfew for children. But everybody knew who was really pho. And that is why the Negro Motorist Green Book existed. It came out every year from nineteen thirty-six to nineteen sixty six, and black families kept it in the glove compartment. And it was a map and a guide for which towns were safe to sleep in, which gas stations would serve you, which restaurants would feed you, which towns you had better be out before dark. It was basically a survival document. And the signs, they mostly come down in the nineteen fifties because Of course they look bad in news photographs, but a town don't need a sign to be a sundown town. They just need a memory, a realtor, a bank, and a sheriff. And here's something else. We're gonna talk about real quick. In nineteen thirty, in Marion, Indiana, two black teenagers, named Thomas Ship and Abram Smith were lynched in the front of a crowd of thousands. This was five years after the clan was supposed to be finished, right? And a photograph gets taken, and that photograph is actually what inspired if you guys know the song Strange Fruit. So a third young man, James Cameron, who was also in that jail, he survived. Later on, he founds the America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee. I have never looked at the photograph, and be honest with you. I don't ever really want to, but I'm just telling you kind of what happened in Indiana. The organization was gone. But the night work Did not need the organization. So here's where we are. We have a black woman named Hysynth is and she's in Indianapolis by 1920. She's babysitting across from Crown Hill. Her mom was buried there. Madge is buried there. The clan has fallen as a club and stayed as a habit. All around the state, out past the city, there are towns where a black woman like Hysinth could not safely be after dark. And in one of those small towns, a few years later, a boy is born. Lynn Indiana Randolph County? Ran Randolph County, East Central Indiana, near the Ohio line. We got about a thousand people. We got one main street, corn fields to the horizon. Really nothing look at but sky. And on May 13th, 1931, somewhere in the Great Depression, a baby named James Warren Jones was born nearby in Crete and his family moved to Lynn. Now, I said originally. On air that did not want to start with his childhood. And I still don't. I feel like most documentaries open on his childhood and they use it. And I don't know, I don't know. Some people, not all. I think they just kinda want you to feel a little sorry for him before you know the names of the people he killed. so I ain't about to sit here and do his biography. I'm going to tell you a few things about what that town made, and then we're probably just gonna leave. And if you want more, you can go to my original run of the series and I do like a lot more detail. But I don't feel like talking about him twice like that, okay? So the basics. His mother was named Lynetta Putman Jones. She's about 29 years old when he was born. And his father, James Thurman Jones, was about 15 years older than her. And his dad, Jim Jones, his dad, Jim Jones' dad, was a World One vet. And his lungs had been damaged in the war. And so he could really not even work a full day, right? And Lynetta, Lynetta wasn't some small town in. Housewife, okay? She wore pants. She smoked in public. She cussed. She wanted to be an anthropologist and she she wanted to travel the world, but instead she got in. And according to the story she tells, for the rest of her life, she believed before Jim Jones was born that Jim Jones was gonna be someone who would set the world right. Now I'm gonna be careful. 'Cause I'm not gonna blame a mother for what a grown man did, right? Plenty of mothers have big dreams for their sons, and those sons grew up to be insurance justers or something else, right? Lynetta didn't kill anybody, okay? But I think she kind of handed him a job before he could tie his shoes, and I think that job was to be special. They also had a rule in that house. When Lynetta was not home, the boy, Jim, he wasn't not allowed in the house. So he would have to wait on the porch in the rain until she came home. And I don't know. I just feel like that's not really a rule. I kind of feel like that's a message. Like this house is not yours. You're a guest who hasn't been invited. I a lot of us have homes that aren't even ours, right? An aunt's house, a neighbor's house, where we could let ourselves in. And this was his own house and he couldn't. So I don't know. I just felt it just felt like a little bit of a message that she wanted to make sure he got right early on, right from the get go. But then there was Miss Myrtle Kennedy. She's a really nice neighbor down the street to the Jones, right? And she sees in Jim this little strange weirdo. No, she didn't say weirdo. I'm saying weirdo. But she sees in Jim this little strange, intense, lonely little boy with this dark hair or whatever. And she does what a good neighbor does feeds him, takes him in when his mom has him locked out of the house. She sits him at her kitchen table. She takes him to church. And Myrtle Kennedy was Nazarene. So the Church of Nazarene is a holiness church. in my first version, I call it Pentecostal and I was wrong. It's not Pentecostal and it does not do speaking in tongues. It does run warm. They do like revival and altar call and the preacher pace. I didn't grow up in a church environment like that, so I'm not familiar with that. but like the whole room would like move together. And Myrtle wasn't grooming anybody. Myrtle was just being kind the way small town church women were kind. And almost any other child, she would have been the warm memory of a whole life. Unfortunately, she took in a little weirdo who watched the room. Because Jim was watching what the preacher was doing to make the women cry and to make the men reach for their wallets. So he starts going to other churches on his own when he's young, right? And Jim Jones starts learning what crowds respond to. And when he was still a little boy, he would hold his own services for other children in a barn with a Bible and candles and holding funerals for dead animals he found. there's a story. about like a rock and a whole nother boy and stuff and I don't know. The the documented incident is a little different from what I can find and so I can only find one line to get confirmed and it was like as a boy he threatened a friend's father a friend with his father's gun. So I don't know, but I think you guys got enough of a picture of who Jim Jones was. But here's the part that matters for Hysen, okay? Because in July 1964, after Jim comes back from Brazil, the Indianapolis Recorder, which was the black newspaper in Indianapolis, they ran this long, admiring piece about him, right? And in the paper, he told them about Lynn. And he said that black people were not allowed in that town after sundown. And he said that he did not see a black person until he was 12, and he even described his own father as a Ku Klux Klan type. And this is Jones. Telling this to a friendly paper about his own childhood. Now I can't confirm the details of it. And he was a man who made up stories about himself for a living, but the sundown part is consistent with the region, and East Central Indiana was dense with those types of towns. But let's think about what that means, right? Cause a white boy grows up in a place where the sun going down is a rule for black people, right? And he grows up and he turns around and he tells black congregation that That he saw it and he hated it. My own father was a part of it. And the hard part is he's not wrong about any of it. The country was exactly as bad as he said it was. He told the truth about white Indiana, and later he used the truth as bait. The truth he told was real. The man telling it was not. Don't they say that the best li the best lies come from truth? Yeah. Jones loved that, I guess. So When Jones was about seventeen, right, around nineteen forty eight, Lynetta takes him and she moves into Richmond, the bigger town nearby. And this has about thirty thousand people instead of a thousand in a black community, which Lynn did not have. And at about sixteen or seventeen, he gets a job as an orderly at Reed Memorial Hospital in Richmond. And he is changing beds and linens, moving beds bodies to the morgue, and by his own later telling, watching how black patients and their families were treated and years later. He would tell black congregations. He knew what Indiana hospitals did to black people. Now, whatever else he made up, he had actually worked inside one. And at Reed Memorial, there's this young nursing student from Richmond, four years older than him, from a Methodist family, and she got steady hands, right? Her name is Marceline Baldwin. And we are going to meet her. And then we're going to go back to Hysynth. Because by the time this boy shows up in Indianapolis, Hysons has already lived a whole life, whole life without him, okay? So Marceline Mae Baldwin was born january eighth, nineteen twenty seven in Richmond, Indiana. And her parents were Walter and Charlotte Baldwin. They're Methodists, in the way Methodists meant something in a small town Indiana in the forties. They went to church every Sunday. They tithed. They sang their hymns. They believed that being a Christian means taking care of people who Who cannot take care of themselves. And her mother was the kind of woman whose casserole is at every funeral in the country and who never wants credit for it. And Marceline was very much her mother's daughter. And in the 1940s, if you were a good Methodist girl in Indiana, you wanted to be useful. And you had about four choices teacher, wife, secretary, teacher, nurse, secretary, wife, and Marceline. She picked nursing. And by every account, she was good at it. She had a body that didn't flinch, a mouth that didn't panic. She had hands that knew what to do before the brain could catch up with them hands. And at Reed Memorial, she met that orderly from Lynn, who was talking about race and poverty and injustice in a way nobody in Richmond had ever talked to her about. And he gave her Methodist taking care of people upbringing a political shape. And she fell for it. So they married on june twelfth, nineteen forty nine. She was twenty two and he was eighteen. And I want you to hold the shape of that, right? Cause she's kind of like the adult in the marriage. And she got the training and the steady income and the credentials. And from the very beginning, she was the engine. And around 1951, they moved to Indianapolis and he takes classes. And eventually he graduates from Butler University in nineteen sixty one. and I got that wrong too, I think, the first time because I think I may have thought he was a dropout, but he wasn't. And then through most of the n fifties, Marceline, she worked as a nurse and her paycheck basically paid the rent and the groceries, from what I can recall. But I'm gonna give Marceline more room in later part of this series because I think she does earn it, okay? But for now, this is the thing I want you to carry out of Richmond with me as we're talking. Because when that young man walks into Indianapolis, he's not really walking alone. He has a nurse with him who believes in taking care of people, and that nurse is going to make a lot of what he promised actually happen. But now We're gonna go back to Hysynth. Sorry if your head is spinning, okay? But we're gonna go back to Hysynth. Because while those two kids were meeting at a hospital in Richmond, Jim and Marceline, Hysynth Thrash is in her 40s at this point in Indianapolis and has already lived her whole life. Like I said. So, January twenty twenty-second, nineteen twenty six, Hysynth Edwards, she marries this man named John Thrash. And they get married in a judge's chamber on Delaware Street near the courthouse downtown. And honestly, my favorite like story researching this was this part, okay? She said that they were young and they were silly and they could not stop giggling in front of the judge. And the judge kept saying, like, Do y'all know what you're doing? Because this is serious business. And the judge even told him they may they should go maybe go home and stay with their parents for a while because they just sat there and giggled. And she said that every time the judge said it, she just giggled harder. And the judge was like, I don't think you're ready to get married, you guys. But he married them anyway, he had to. And See the thing is the first time they were supposed to get married, she actually stood him up. She just didn't show up. She said she was funny about love. She never let herself go overboard for anybody. If a boy was fifteen minutes late, she said she ain't wait. She said she ain't got it to do. And so John, he worked all the he worked for the city. And he was cleaning and digging holes and he would come home muddy. And he actually played shortstop on an all black baseball team from Brightwood that would travel from Elkhart. and South Bend and Kokomo and on summer Sundays she would like to ride along to watch. And she described him as being very nice looking and quiet. And she said she really liked that he was quiet. And she also could not cook when they married. She said one time she made an apple pie with baking soda. And that the baking powder, with baking powder and baking soda, that's what it was. And she said that it rose to the top of the oven. And she said they just laughed until they actually cried. It kind of reminds me of like the beginning of my marriage. but she also asked if her if if she could also let his sisters teach her to cook. And she said that she has sisters of her own that she did learn. She said that her papa, the railroad cook, It taught her hub his biscuits. That's what she had. That's said that's what I got for you, boo. Okay? I got some biscuits I learned how to make from my daddy. But then there was a hard thing. Because all of her friends were having babies and she kept waiting to be pregnant. And she was in a young mother's club in Brightwood because all her friends were. And she finally went to a doctor on Martindale Avenue and was told that she could not have children. And she said she cried for a month. Because she wanted five. Four boys and one girl. The girl for John. So after about nine or ten years, John starts running around with another woman and she couldn't take it. They separated. She said if she'd have children and her mama had been alive to counsel her, she might have stayed. But she was young and hotheaded and she said her pride was hurt. They'd also taken in John's little niece, Catherine, for about two years, and she called Hysynth mother when they separated. Catherine ended up going to her grandmother, and Hysen just really regretted it all. And this is me, okay? I love how honest she is about all of this. She doesn't make herself the saint of her own book. She told you she was stubborn. She told you she should have stayed with John. She told you she married a second man, Clifford Hughes, in 1947, that it lasted about a month because he was still running around with somebody b he had from before. And she said she didn't call it a marriage child. And she kept thrash. She said she didn't know why. Maybe she thought she'd marry John again. She said they did talk about it in the nineteen fifties before he got sick, about getting back with her first husband. And somebody once asked her if she had been too attracted to the man who ran the people's temple. Child Hyson said she wouldn't have had him if he was the last man alive. She said that is not why I joined that church. That man is I ain't looking at him like that. Her working life is literally the great migration in one resume, by the way. cause she did babysitting for white families on the north side, and then around 1930, through a Republican precinct man in John's family. she got a job running the elevator at the Indiana State House for $18 a week, which is some big money for them, okay? That time frame. She had never run an elevator. But he taught her in 15 minutes and said, It's all yours. She said she started sweating, then she got mad and decided that she was going to run that thing if it ripped right up at the state house. And she said by evening she was as calm as ever. Sometimes the judges didn't bring her candy. And during World War II, with the men gone, she actually cleaned streetcars for the streetcar company. They were working, they were looking for a man to do the work. and she said she had to go down there three times before they would give her the job. And she tells you about the men. a man of the house. One time he came into her room at night where she was living in as a nursemaid and she told him, if he didn't get out, she was about to tell his wife in the morning. And that got rid of him. And another man, she said, at the Severn Hotel, who told her she could make a lot of money. she said she was earning her money by the sweat out of her brow, okay? And a man who offered her an apartment in Cincinnati if she would come away with him. She told him, Go find somebody else. She said You just gotta talk right back to these men and mind your own business. She sounds like someone I know. But then she remembered there was a sign in this drugstore downtown, right? Hyton's talking about. This was around 1924 or 25. And they were advertising for a counter waitress with a light complexion. And she said all the girls working there was real light. and that she was too dark. And she said, I don't wanna I don't wanna wait tables anybody anyway. And I just love it, okay? I love that she always gets the last word in every single story. So she works that streetcar job for about four years until her body starts to give out and she had a nervous breakdown from an overactive thyroid and she had to end up staying in the bed for seven months and her leg was shaking and she was so scared to just go out and zip the spoiled baby, quit her own job. And stayed home to take care of her. And I do think that's interesting. I think it should hold that because the sister who everyone called lazy, always called a headache, was there. Like when it mattered, you know. She stayed home for seven months and she fixed her sister's food. And Hyson said that when Zip liked something, she would work hard. And what it turned out that Zip liked was her sister. And I love that. Their dad ended up going blind in his last years and Zip stayed home with him for five years. And in nineteen forty seven, he died at that table in their house at eighty-nine years old. And the day before he told Feeney, he had said Feeney had came by. And Feeney is what they called their mother Josephine. And Hyson told Zip, that means she she's come to get him. And y'all know the next day he was gone? So then Heythens gets a job at Lane Bryant and she's running the elevator, she's cleaning, and she found out that there was a white girl who had been there one month making what she made after three or four years. And so she went and she talked to the boss about it. She said, we got to talk. And then in 1951 or 1952, she bought her a house, a double at four 40th and Graceland in the Butler Targeton neighborhood in the north side. She bought it for $12,000. And she bought the whole house herself and she lived in one side with Zip. And then on the other, she took in boarders. All men, all with good jobs. And she was real strict. She said, No liquor ain't no women. And when she moved in there, there was one white couple left on the block, right next door. And they would not speak to the sisters. When Hysynth and Zip came out of the porch, the white couple, they'd go inside. And there was also a black couple, both teachers. They had been the first to buy on that block. And then There was a forced sa sale sign in front of every other house, and she said that's how she got hers. And that house is the title of this episode. And remember when I talked to you about the Sundowntowns, the realtor, the bank, the visit in the night, that machine was built to keep a woman like Hysen out of a neighborhood like this. But she got in anyway, okay? With elevator money and streetcar money and lane Bryant money and a dollar or two at a time in a savings account, because as her husband used to say, She could hold a dollar to the Eagle Squawk. Squawk! Okay. And that house is not a small thing. That house is her whole life in woods and nails. And I want y'all to hold on to that. So she also volunteered, right? She zip and their niece, Nojirk, that's my grandmother's name. My great grandmother's name. they were in a woman's auxiliary at Central State Hospital, which was the state mental hospital. And they worked with 86 men on one ward. They collected clothes and they raised money at Lane Bryant for picnics, hams, potato salad, ice cream. She said that the doctors, the nurses would start clapping when they saw the women coming because they knew it was about to be a hallelujah time. I love that. These women were already doing the work before anybody preached at them about it. Y'all see what I'm saying? Y'all see what I'm saying? Y'all see what I'm talking about, this. I'm so glad I didn't have the opportunity, the chance to do. talk about this a second time in a second way because I already feel like I have talked about it a certain way in the original run. So if you want more of that detail, if you want to go from that perspective, you have two angles to go. And whether we say both things are true. Hey. So anyway. They also quit the church. In 1945, there was this new pastor who came to the Baptist church, right? And right away he starts saying, I want more money. He's like, I want a bigger salary. I want to be traveling overseas. Later, he's like, I want a bigger parsonage. I want me a maid. I want me someone to cut the grass. You can already see this isn't about to be Heysen type of preacher or pastor, okay? And so Heyson said she decided after one Sunday that. He wasn't getting any more of her money. And she said she remembered walking down the church steps for the last time and the dust rising off each step. Another pastor they knew was carrying on with the woman in the church, and everybody knew it. So for about ten years, Hysynth and Zip would stay home and listen to church on the radio and watch church on the TV. And these were not lost women looking for something to believe in. These were picky women who knew exactly what a pastor should be and they hadn't found one yet. And that I think matters for everything that comes next. So the young man from Lens Land in Indianapolis, right? By 1952. The newspapers are calling him the pastor of Somerset Methodist Church, a small church on the south side at about 3,200 Keystone. Some sources called him a student pastor. the building's also actually gone now. But at Somerset, he starts doing something almost no white pastor in Indianapolis was doing. He starts inviting black families to come to the Sunday service. And I want to say something here and say it clearly, because I feel like the historical record forgets it. When a black family walked into a white Methodist church on the south side of Indianapolis in 1952, they are the ones taking the risk. Not him. They're the ones being stared at. Their kids are the ones in the pews. Could be in danger. And I know exactly what it would have taken for like my grandmother to put on her Sunday clothes and walk into a room where she knew she was not wanted. Going to that church was integration work. And the families who did it were doing the work alongside him, not because of him, in my honest opinion. But the Somerset. Congregation did what you would expect. They pushed back. The pastor later told the recorder that bigots killed cats and threw them in the churchyard, and somebody sent was sent in to tell him to come out and look. And that is his account to a friendly pastor years later, but the shape of it fits everything else we know about what happened to white pastors who tried this. And in 1954, he was gone from Somerset. So the 1960 the same 1964 article, right? It says he while he was at Somerset, he also ran an integrated community center. I can't tell you much more about it than just that one line, but I did find that. But I but my whole point is I wanna point at the pattern before it gets a little too big, okay? What I'm trying to say is every room he walked into in Indianapolis, he did two things in it. He opened the door to black people, which was right, and then he made sure the fight about it was public and that he was standing in the middle of it. The first thing costs The black family's real courage. The second thing built him a name. So in 1954, there's a minister named Russell Windberg, and he invites Jim to come preach at the Laurel Street Tabernacle. it was called the Assemblies of Church God, Assemblies of God of God Church, which is Pentecostal. So this is like the whole room moving. And so his preaching drew crowds there, so did his healings. And he did something there. Like what he did at Somerset, right? 'Cause he opened the door to black people from the neighborhood around the church. The board didn't like it. And when he left, about half of that congregation followed him out the door. Well, Russell Winberg came with him. And Winberg would want be one of his associate pastors until nineteen sixty three. And so this same year, He rents a small building at Hoyt and Randolph and called his church first Community Unity. And then in 1955, he built a building, he bought a building at 15th and North New Jersey Street in a racially mixed neighborhood. And the corporate name on it was officially Wings of Deliverance. And by the end of 1955, the church was going by another name, as we know it today, People's Temple. So that's the address, 15th and New Jersey. And remember that because that is where Hysynth will be walking in. But let me tell you about what he was preaching in those rooms, because it's the part that made people stay. He would preach that segregation and worship is a sin, and that Jesus, as a poor carpenter, was persecuted by empire, and he would preach that the rich man goes to hell. And he told black congregations in plain language that the country had done them wrong, and that the white church had done them wrong, and that God was on their side and not on the side of the people who hurt them. And if you think about it, if you're a black woman in Indianapolis in nineteen fifty five, how many white men have you heard say that out loud in a pulpit? And it was true. Every word. And I think that is what makes this so hard. So June 11th through 15th, 1956, the pastor organizes the biggest event of his life so far, a religious convention at the Cadle Tabernacle in Indianapolis, which is a huge hall. And he needs a big headliner to fill it. So he brings in William Branham, one of the most famous faith healers in America. And Brandon was born in Kentucky and he lived in Jeffersonville, Indiana. And Branham's name filled the hall. And that is how one of the most important black members of the Indianapolis church walked in. And his name was Argia James. And Archie was born September 1st, 1913, in Davy County, North Carolina. His father was a sharecropper, and his family descended from people who had been enslaved. And he had gone to Bible school. He was a pr pastor in a church called the Church of God, Body of Christ. And by 1956, he stepped away from the ministry. So in June 1956, he comes to Indianapolis as a follower of William Branham to hear Branham Branham preach. And he heard the young white preacher who had organized the thing and he stayed. And the Jonestown Institute put it in a way I keep thinking about. So Archie standing in front of Upfront with the pastor was as much of return to religion for Archie as it was a proof of integration for the pastor. And I think both of those things are true at once. For the pastor, a black man in the pulpit was a statement he could point at. But for Archie, it was coming home to the thing he had been called to. So Archie of James becomes an associate pastor and he was a carpenter and he knew how to build things. And over the next 10 years, he became one of the most trusted people in that church. And when he talked, people listened. And in 1960, it was Archie who actually pulled pushed for the People's Temple to join a mainline denomination. And this was the Christian church, Disciples of Christ, which was headlined or headquartered in Indianapolis. And this gave the church more respectability. And but in 1964, the pastor was ordained by the disciples, and Archie took part. And I want you to notice something because that respectability that protected the church for the next 20 years, the thing that made reporters and politicians trusted later. was partially really built by a black man who believed in it. And that's not on Archie. That is what was done with what Archie built, in my opinion. So the woman who wrote Hysen's book, Marian Towney, she was a member of the disciples community in Annapolis herself. And in her preface, she actually says that the disciple members who ordained him and supported his work there were serious, sober Christians. And she says she met educators and integrationists Who knew him and worked with him and believed it was a credible and much needed ministry at that time. And she says that it made her realize how good people can become participants in something evil while trying to do something good. So I'm gonna keep that in my pocket for this whole series probably. in this version of it. I don't know. It's just like it's not just the black grandmothers who believed him. It was the domination, the judges, the newspaper. Nobody in this story was stupid if you get where I'm going. I couldn't find Archie's own words from these years to read you, so I'm not gonna put any in his mouth. if I do quote him, it'll be because I found it and I'm still doing research like on this yuck. But let's go back to 40th and Graceland, okay? So now we are somewhere in the mid-50s. And Heyson's in one room. Zip is in another. She's watching church on TV the way they have been doing for years. And so Zip, she come up running in the other room, right? And and in Hyson's telling Zip is shouting that she has found her church. Cause what Zip had seen was a white preacher and behind him an integrated choir. Black and white people singing together on television in Annapolis. And years years later, actually in Guyana, Zip wrote a letter to the man on that TV. A lot of people actually wrote him letters in Jonestown. and a lot of those letters were requested. So I read them knowing where they were written. But in this one, Zip says it was not by chance that she turned her TV on that Sunday morning he was there. She says she knew right away that she found what she had been looking for. And she says she made a pledge that as long as she lived, she would never leave. That was zip. Heysen was more careful. Hyson's she was she wasn't about to go off the strengths of TV show, okay? She ain't she wasn't about to, okay. Now this is me. This is my thoughts. Think about what an integrated choir on television screen meant in Indianapolis in the 1950s, because most of what screens shows black women then was not them. Or it was them in an apron, maybe. And here comes a choir, black and white. Singing side by side on a Sunday. And that's not a small thing to see. That is the picture of the world you were promised as a kid in a four month school and never got it. And Zip saw the thing that she had been waiting for her whole life to see, and she ran into the next room to tell her sister. I don't think Zip was foolish. I think Zip was right about what she saw. But I think she was wrong about who was standing in front of it. So Hysenth and another niece, Eline. They went first to check it out, okay? Eileen never joined. And I'll Eileen in Hysenth's words never joined any church. Everybody got a family has Eileen too, okay? But as far as Hysinth, she liked what she saw. And the preacher invited them back. A month went by, and then one day a flyer showed up at their doorstep saying that the pastor and twelve members would be on their block on Wednesday night calling on people. And he came. He came to their house, he held their hands, he prayed with them. Hyson said it was wonderful. And I want you to think about what that is. These are women who walked out of a church because the pastor wanted a maid and a bigger parsonage. And here's a pastor who comes to your street on a Wednesday night and holds your hand. So in 1957, Hysen Zip and their niece Mildred, they all joined the People's Temple at the same time. And Hyson said that when the pastor announced that he was going to integrate all but ninety-five of the white members left. So when the sisters joined, the church was really small. More than a hundred people, she said, and quite a few black families. And so she gets baptized again, this time in Jesus' name, and this church of Tenth and Delaware. And that was a formal synagogue the church based to be bought around in. And she said that she came up out of the water and she spoke in tongues. So the girl who stood outside the Pentecostal church in Brightwood, looking in the windows, who didn't understand at all that shouting came up out of the water, speaking in tongues. Life is something, right? And then there was the work. Heyson said he started out real good doing for folks. They brought canned goods and made up baskets for people who needed them on Sundays. They fed 200 people at a time at Tenth in Delaware, street people. People with drinking problems, people passing through, everybody came. Hysith worked in the kitchen. And Archie James and a woman named I cannot pronounce her name. Is her last name is Beam. Her first name is R H E V I A N A. They would take the station wagon down to the farmer's market and get overripe produce, basically. And the meat that would end up spoiling at the stores held over the weekend. And that is Archie with his sleeves rolled up, picking up meat on a Saturday, so someone he'll never meet. Can eat on a Sunday. That is who was in that church. And they did something else. On Sunday mornings, they would actually hold their own service. And then the whole integrated group would go visit white churches around Indianapolis to witness to integration. They would just all walk in together. Heyson does go over over what happened. At one north side white church, the pastor started singing old black Joe. And she said that really hurt her. And at another church, she said they raised all the windows to try to freeze them out. And then at another, a man got up and asked why they hadn't said they were coming, because they would have roped off an area for them. Heisen said roped off like we some cattle. And at a south side church, a man stood up and he said the church was gonna be bombed. So they left. And the pastor went out and preached in the field. And Hysen was afraid and she said she took the streetcar home, that she couldn't really take it anymore, that they couldn't integrate churches, that God would have to take care of it. And Then she said God did. That it's a lot better now. And she said in so many words that all she ever wanted was to just be treated like a human being. And that's the real thing. That is the part of people's temple that was not a con. Black women from Alabama in their 50s, putting on their good clothes and walking into white churches in Indianapolis to be stared at, frozen out, threatened with a bomb. They did that. Not him alone, them. The work was real. And here's another thing, and I'm gonna keep saying it. The man at the front was already somebody else. And we're gonna see it in pieces. But first, I need to tell you about May 1959 because the city of Indianapolis showed exactly who it was that week, and the people of the church are the ones who paid for it. So Sunday, May 1959, we got a car load of church workers from People's Temple driving home from service in Cincinnati. And this is an interracial car load, right? Black and white women from church and two children. The driver is Miss Stewart. She supervised the church's nursing home on North College Avenue, and she is from Scottsville, Kentucky, and had lived in Indianapolis since 1929. And on the road, she starts to pass another car. An oncoming car ends up hitting her broadside. And I'm gonna read you their names the way Indianapolis Recorder print printed them, because that is what the newspaper gave us. And I could not find the first names in the article. Miss Stewart, who ran the nursing home. Miss Payne, who worked at Western Electric. She was from Montecello, Kentucky, and had lived in Indianapolis 26 years. Miss Nance, a church a nurse in the church's home. She had moved to Indianapolis that December from Wheeling, West Virginia, and she was training to be a missionary in Africa. Miss Dallas Johnson, a social worker at the Indiana Women's Prison, and a little girl named Stephanie. Stephanie was a Korean child the Joneses had adopted. And her name before she came to them was Kun Yoon Soon. The paper said she was for. The pastor called her an exceptional child and that she had already spoken English fluently. A young man in the other car, Robert Zenzer, 18, was killed too. And a ten-year-old boy was the only person from the church car who lived. Jim, the pastor is not in car. He was still in Cincinnati with his wife when she when his wife called to tell him that four of their close friends and their little girl was dead. I cannot ever imagine that phone call. But Marceline had to make that call and she lived with that call for the rest of her life. And then the city of Indianapolis did what it did. The headline in the recorder was this segregation pursues crash victims into graves. The pastor said he could not find a cemetery in all of the Indianapolis that would sell the church a place where members could be buried together. Black and white. He said that they would have taken Stephanie in the white part of the cemetery despite her color. But they could not allow a place where All of them, dark skinned and white, might be buried in the future. So he decided, he said, to stay with his people. And he had his daughter buried in the colored section. And there was a joint funeral at the park for Miss Stewart, Miss Payne, and Stephanie, and Stephanie was buried at Floral Park. And now this is me, 'cause I want to be really careful here, but later in the series, this man is gonna tell this story over and over from the pulpits for his own purposes. But In May nineteen fifty nine, as reported in the black newspaper of the city, here's what is true. Five people from that church died on one road on one Sunday, and the cemeteries of Indianapolis would not let the living and the dead of that church lie together. And I just kinda see the sun down again just at a cemetery gate. And when you notice who's in the car, Miss Stewart, she supervised the church's nursing home. Miss Nance, she was a nurse in it. By the early nineteen sixties, the recorder was reporting that the church sponsored nursing homes and the pastor operated two. And in nineteen sixty four, the recorder said one of them, the people's nursing home, was struggling because it was integrated. White families who found out black patients were admitted wouldn't put their pay parents there. And black some black families didn't use it either. The paper called it the fineness in the city. So the help was real. And it was mostly women, honestly, women driving home from a service on a Sunday so they could be at work on a Monday. Remember the next time somebody tells you that this church was one man, that it was never one man. And the care homes in California, they're coming up in part two, okay? With women like Miss Stewart. But I want y'all to think about who was in that church and what they saw that week, okay? Black women who had grown up under four month school years and signs on Sand Mountain and they watched their white pastor try to bury his daughter with them and get told no. And they watched him choose the colored section. And if you were hycenth in your 50s, sitting in that pew in 1959, what would you have thought of that man? I know what I would have thought. I would have thought finally, finally. So January 6th, 1961, the mayor of Indianapolis, Charles Boswell, appoints him director, Jim Jones, appoints him director of the city's human rights commission. And Jim Jones was 29 years old. And I'm gonna tell you how this happened because it's not as gorgeous as as as he made it sound later, honestly. according to Tim Retterman's book Raven, the mayor had seven thousand dollars to fund the job. And they spread the word about it. And in several months, they got exactly one applicant, Jones. A committee interviewed him, a rabbi, a black judge, and a priest. Nobody did a background check. Nobody knew about the healing services. They knew him as somebody who fought for poor people and black people. And so they recommended their only candidate. And the mayor appointed him and told him, Keep a low profile, dude. As we know. Jones don't do low profile, so he didn't do it. Instead, Jones gets on radios and televisions and he's making speeches. And within two months, the mayor and some of the commissioners are telling him, dude, can you slow down the publicity? But of course, he didn't. So then the backlash comes. In 1964, he tells the recorder that for three months after he took that job, people threw rocks at his house, called him on the phone with slurs, told him to get out of town, threw explosives in his yard. wrote racist letters to civil rights leaders and signed his name to them so people would think he wrote them. And again, that's his account. But I do find this account to be consistent with reports of attacks on his house at two three two seven Broadway. So there could be something to it. But I want to talk about Heistens really quick 'cause there's something about her that I love, right? She says that she took her Zip and Mildred with him to human rights commissions meeting. And she said that some people in the church put it out that she took them because they were well dressed and acted intelligent. And but the Heiston tells us like it's gossip. I don't know. I I hear a little differently. I hear three black women from Alabama dressed exactly right, sitting in the government office in nineteen sixty one, so that the room has to look at Jones. some of the whites at those meetings did not like what he was doing, she said. And she said they call him a troublemaker. But the job wasn't just meetings. Biographers describe him pushing restaurants and businesses that refuse black customers. Sometimes he would show up with integrated groups from his church. Which was typically his whole method, to kind of like walk in together, sit down and make them say no to your face. And when you remember who's sitting down, we have church members, the women in the clothes. Every time a group from people's temple walked into a place that people didn't want them, the people taking the stairs were mostly the black members. Jones got the title, they got the stairs. And this is me, and I just I want to label it, okay? Because I think he took them because they were well dressed and acted intelligent. I think both reasons people gave were true. I think he took them because he believed in integration and he wanted the room to see it. And I also think he took them because they made him look good. And I think one of those is a principal, one of those is a prop, right? And a lot of times with this man, it was both in the same room at the same meeting. This just to me does not make the women props, because the women were there and they were real and they knew what they were doing. They had a mission and I understand it and I respect them for it. So let's get to fall 1961. We're at the Methodist Hospital in Annapolis. This is one of the biggest hospitals in the cities, right? And the director of the R Human Right Commission, Jones, is admitted for about a week for a checkup. Okay. And Jones is in real discomfort. Later accounts, he said it was an ulcer. And his doctor is Dr. Edward P. Thomas, and Dr. Thomas is black. And the recorder tells us what happened when he was getting admitted into the hospital, right? so the woman doing during intake, she got confused because she's like, There's a white patient with a black doctor. So she goes through like two stacks of cards and she like actually don't you're not colored, are you? Two stacks of cards. One stack was for black patients and one stack was for white. And in 1961 at the Methodist Hospital, I found out that the system has two stacks of cards. And the 1964 recorder article in Heyson's book both say that he was put in the black ward because of his doctor and that he refused to be moved to a white ward. And a hospital official came and explained, and she said that it was the last vestige of segregation at Methodist. But Jones, he asked, he said that they still had patients. whether they objected to sharing a room with someone of the other way race. Because the theory was that it gave patients peace of mind and helped them recover. So the official gave an example. The other night he said a white woman who came in was actually hemorrhaging. She was bleeding. And she said if she were to be put in a room with a black patient, she would leave the hospital and go home. She said she would rather leave a hospital bleeding than to share a room. Don't ask me my opinion, because both things won't be true here. Bye. But that is the peace of mind they said they were protecting. So according to the recorder, the official Promised the practice would end. And the reporter checked with several sources later that reek and wrote that it had. Wards and rooms that had been all black at the beginning of the week were made interracial by assigning white patients to them. And while he was there, the paper said, he made his own bed every day and went around making other patients bed too. Later retellings add that he also emptied bedpans. I can only confirm the bed. I think in my original episode I said that he pushed hospital beds of black patients into a white hallway. from what I can see, that did not happen. He was a patient, but he refused to be moved and he made the beds. And like I know some people may think, like, he's so like quick, go. Like, look at him. But like that you know, don't don't forget that was his job originally. That was like his first job was like he did this type of work. He was very used and accustomed to doing this type of work. Again, it didn't bother him. He didn't have an issue doing like, you know, like orderly type of work. That it his job was literally orderly. So whatever. but did he integrate Methodist hospital? I think the honest answer is would be more so that a policy changed while he was lying in one of his beds and he made sure the black city's black newspaper knew about it. And I also kind of think so what? Because the policy changed a black grandmother who had came into Methodist the next month Did not have to be on the second stack of cards. And I think that's real for her. And again, I think the work was real and the man knew exactly how to get his name on it. Both things just always be coming up true, don't it? So then in November 1961, a probate judge in Indianapolis named Joseph G. Wood approved the final adoption of a black baby boy in by Reverend and Miss James W. Jones. And they name him. James Warren Jr. James Warren Jones Jr. And the recorder printed what the judge said from the bench. He said, here is a preacher who practices what he preaches. And then the judge said he lived in a neighborhood that had become integrated and he intended to stay there. I do like the judge for that, because the judge didn't have to say the word. But you'll hear it said that this was the first black child to be adopted in white. A white by white family Indiana. Now I can't confirm that it might be true. It also might be the kind of thing people said because it felt true. But I will say that it was very rare and it was public on purpose and it made the newspapers. the paper said that the Joneses had already adopted four children, including two of Korean ancestry and one of their own, their own son, Steven, who was born in nineteen fifty-nine, the same year they lost Stephanie, and they called it a rainbow family. And every account From the children who grew up in that house, says Marceline was the one who raised them, fed them, bathed them, took them to the doctor, held them when they cried. They said the love in that house is real, and most of it was hers, but the publicity was his. So I'ma say it the way I said in my original run. I feel like he used them kids as billboard billboards, and I feel like Marceline loved them anyway. But now we have Hysynth, right? In the same year, and this is another part I just kind of can't stop thinking about. So her grandniece. Catherine Wallace, she had just adopted two children of mixed race from Korea. And really so there was the Korean War and it left a lot of children fathered by American soldiers, right? And so Heisens was kind of thinking, I could do that. She had never been able to have children. She had a good job. She didn't have a husband. So she really wasn't sure if they would let her, but the pastor was always saying people should adopt instead of having their own. So she actually went to go ask him about it. And right away, before he thought about it, He told her she shouldn't get the white she couldn't get the white ones. And then he realized what he said and he tried to straighten it out. And Hysen told him she didn't want the white ones anyway. She wanted black children, ones followed by black soldiers. And she said she knew there was plenty. And then she says this, and I'm going to give it to you in her words because it's the whole thing in one sentence. She said you can tell a whole lot about a person by a slip of the tongue. And then she says she should have left the church right there. So sit with that. Cause I think that's just interesting, right? Now I'm doing my the re research. The same year, the same man in November, a judge is praising him from the bench for adopting a black baby and in a church office a black woman who never got to be a mother asks him the same question and the first thing out of his mouth is a line about what she's allowed to have. One of those is the public man. One of those is the man in the room. And Heisen saw the man in the room in 1961, but she didn't leave. She tells you she didn't. And I'm not gonna judge her for it because I know the kind of thing you see and fall away because the rest of what you see is just that good. And at the same time, in the same church, Archie James, the associate pastor, was saying something else. When everybody was talking about white families adopting black children, Archie said that to be consistent, black families should adopt white children too. And Archie was not playing. Archie meant it all the way through. Integration for Archie was not a photo. It went both directions. And for him, it wasn't real. So in one church in 1961, you got Archie saying it should go both ways. You got Hysen asking to raise a child and getting told what she can't have. And you have a man at the front getting praise from the bench. And this is the church. All of that at once. Isn't that interesting? And there was another thing happening in those same years. Jim was making trips east to Philadelphia to study a black religious leader who had built something enormous. Hysinth dates the beginning of the change to those trips. Archie even begged him not to go. We're gonna go there next. But homework. Cause you cannot understand what people's temple became without understanding the man the pastor went to study. Father Divine was born George Baker, sometime around the late 1870s. The exact date and place are argued about, but he built a religious movement called the Peace Mission. And this was the first in New York. He built it in the 1910s and the 1920s, and later he headquartered in Philadelphia. And at his height, this quote had many thousands of followers. Most of them were black and poor. And he told them out loud for decades that he was God. He didn't say I was a messenger or a prophet. Now he said I'm God. And his followers believed him. Now, here is why the mission the peace mission drew people. And I want to be fair to them as well, because the people who followed Father Divine were not stupid either. So his residences were called heavens. And in the 30s and 40s, when almost nothing in America was integrated, black and white followers in those heavens lived together. And they ate together and worked and worshipped together. Their meals were shared. Property was held in common. Members working in peace mission businesses, healings were the public face of it, and he fed people during the So when you look at the list, right, you have communal living, integration as the central sacrament, hailings out front, a leader who says he's more than a man. You're gonna see every one of those in people's temple almost unchanged in the years to come. And see, most accounts say that the young pastor from Indianapolis visited the peace mission in Philadelphia in the late 1950s. One account, plus a visit to July. So he watched. He took notes, Jones did. He brought members. He did the homework. And here is where Hysenth comes in because she has an opinion about it. And it is a strong one. Hysinth believed the change in Jones started with Father Devine. She said after he went to visit Father Devine, he was a changed man. She said that she saw him change before her very eyes and that he got mad for power and riches. And in her telling, she places the visit in New York. The peace mission headquarters was in Philadelphia by then. And she's remembering decades later, so I'm not gonna hold her to that to the city. But I'm gonna hold on to what she saw because she saw a man who came back differently. And Archie James, he tried to stop it. According to Hysen, Archie pleaded with the pastor not to go see Father Divine. He said Father Divine is crooked, this man be taking people's money. And that's Hysent's memory of what Archie said. So it's secondhand, you know it'd be hearsay. But notice who is warning them. We have the black associate pastor. The man who had come back to the ministry for this church. And he's standing in the doorway saying, please don't go alarmed from that. But of course, Jones couldn't help himself. He went anyway. And I want to give you how Hysinth explained it herself because it's her theology and it's not mine to correct. So Hysenth believed that there's a good spirit and an evil spirit. And she believed the gift of the spirit is real and that it can be used for good or evil. And she believed that he had a gift. Jones, a real one. And got the wrong spirit. And that he got so far out that he couldn't come back. And that he tried to heal people later and didn't have the power anymore because God took the gift away from him. And she said he was called of God and she didn't know what went wrong. Now, this is me. I don't share every piece of that. I'm not gonna lie to you. I don't share most of it. But I understand why she needed it, I think. Because I think if you believe the gift was real and then the healings were real and then the Wednesday, the not left was real, and the twenty one years you spent aren't a waste. I think the thing went bad later, but it was good when she walked in. And honestly, I think that's not far from what I've been saying like this whole series and but just in different words. I think the work was real, but he was already somebody else. I s Tyson's just said it in a language she grew up with, I think. And that's just me. I think a pastor learned something specific in Philadelphia and it wasn't theology. It was that a movement built on integration and food and healing could hold people's whole lives, their houses, checks, their bodies. That if you fed people and you told them the truth about America and laid your hands on them when they were sick, they would give you just about everything. And I think he understood something else that Father Divine never had to think about. That, the same model, with the white man at the front, and a country built the way this one was built, would get him into rooms Father Divine could not even walk into. Newspapers, City Hall, All of it. I don't think he was more of an original thinker than Father Divine. I think he was whiter. And I think he knew what that was worth. And that's just my opinion. And I'm labeling it. But I'm a stand on it. And Father Divine is gonna come back in the series. There's a moment years from now in 1971 when the pastor Jim Jones tries to take over Father Divine's people. Heists was there for the aftermath of that one and she laughed about it. And I'm gonna tell you why when we get there, okay? But for now, just hold this. By the early nineteen sixties, the man in the front of the people's temple was wa has watched How a Movement Takes Everything and he has started reading about the end of the world. no. So January 1962, Esquire Magazine runs a article called Nine Places of the World to Hide, and it was a Cold War panic piece. The kind of magazines that they were running all the time in those years. like that it was like, where would you be safe if the United States and the Soviet Union had a nuclear war? And two of the places that matter on this list, and I wanna get them right because I didn't get it in my first run of talking about this, the list said Eureka, not Redwood Valley, not Yakaia, but Eureka. On the up on the north coast of California and the church would later settle a few hours south of there in Yokaya, but the magazine said Eureka. but the two places on that list that matters is Belo Horizonte in the interior of Brazil in Eureka, California. And so he takes Marceline and the children to Brazil in nineteen sixty two to first to go to Bello and then Rio de Janeiro, if I said that right. So the Human's Right Commission's job was done. He had served about a year. He left the church in Indianapolis in the hands of associate pastors, Archie A James and Russell Winberg. Hysinth didn't want him to go. She says she didn't send him any money for the orphans he was helping. And then she says this, and it kind of surprised me. She said while he was gone, she and Zip quit. The church almost split up while he was away people dripped it, and Hysen and Zip even stopped going. But then Zip worried her into going back. So we kind of got zip again. The one who ran into the room shouting about the TV, the one who wrote that she pledged she would never leave. Heisen looked back on that moment later and said, It would have been good if their eyes had been open. And I want you to notice what that means because Hysen had a door open in 1962 and she walked through it, and her sister walked her back. And I'm not blaming Zip, I want to say that so clearly. Zip loved that church, she loved her sister. Zip wanted them together in the thing that she believed in. And I don't think you leave your baby sister, right? You don't leave your babysister by herself. You go back so she's not sitting there alone. And that's not foolishness. That's love. And it's going to be the reason over and over in this story that people stay. Meanwhile Brazil, what exactly Jones did is a little murky. Later on, he said he taught and fed two hundred poor children in a school in a villa. He also later told his congregation a story about sleeping with a rich white woman to get money for orphans and making her walk through the streets in her fine white clothes. I don't know. Heistens repeats the story in her book, and you can literally hear her side eye through the page, okay? Cause both of those stories are Stories about himself, and I can't confirm either. He kind of really just made up stories about himself for a living. It's a little exhausting. But here's a detail from the recorder I didn't expect. When Archie O'James took over as assistant minister in December 1963, the paper said that Archie and his wife had been missionaries in South America themselves. And they had actually founded a clinic and a school and about a half dozen churches. And it it said that his daughter Bonnie was studying at a missionary training school. And a minister, the pastor met in Brazil, Edward. He also became one of the associate pastors. And I I can't tell you exactly what little column where South in South America where Archie was or when, but I can tell you that Archie wasn't just sitting up in Indianapolis waiting for the white pastor to come home and tell him what do, okay? Archie had his own missionary life. Archie had built things before it would be building things after this man. But while he was gone, the fear he had been preaching it really did become real for everybody because in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. So for about two weeks, the whole country thought that bombs might actually fly and kids were doing duck and cover under their school desk. So when a pastor stands up and tells the tells them that the world's about to end and fire and he knew where to go, he ain't sound crazy in nineteen sixty two. He sounded like the evening news. Now Hysen tells a funny one. she says that the pastor reported that he had just asked Fidel Castro to take the church in and Castro refused. And Castro would only take the pastor and Marceline, and the pastor said, Not rest of them, but that's just his story through her. but I do want you to notice that even in his made up stories, Jim is often the one who gets saved. Like, my gosh. Anyway, so back in Indianapolis by the Jonestown Institute's count, Russell Windberg, stopped serving as an associate pastor in nineteen sixty three of June. Hysinth remembers him still around the church later, so I can't tell you exactly when he was gone, but in December nineteen sixty three, the recorder ran a small item in the church column. Reverend Archie O'James had begun duties as an assistant minister of the People's Temple of The People's Christian Church, Disciples of Christ at Tenth and Delaware. And the article said that the church was feeding about a thousand needy people a week. It had found workers who helped people to find jobs. It was sponsoring a nursing home and that anybody who had clothes, shoes, or food could give them to bring by the church any day from nine to five. And at the bottom, it said that the church's minister and wife were on missionary duty in South America and expected back that month. So the pastors in Brazil and the churches in Indianapolis is the one feeding a thousand people a week under Archie. And that's what I mean when I say the work was real. The work kept going without him. The work was Archie and the woman in the kitchens and the station wagon at the farmer's market. And he came back in December 1963, and in July 1964, the recorder ran that long admiring profile. Champion for Negro rights. The rocks at his house, the Methodist ward, the dead cats at Somerset Lynn after sundown, the integrated nursing home nobody would use. And by then the church was smaller than it had been. It had been meeting for a while at the Broadway Christian Center at 17th and Broadway. Jones was also on the radio too, WIBC. Heysens and Zip, they went down to the station on Illinois Street and sat in the studio while he preached with his choir along. She remember he praised Gandhi. And not long after that, she said, the station took him off the air. And he told it like it was because he was getting out too far. And then in 1964, the disciples of Christ ordained him. So that's the official stamp, right? Archie took part. And Hysen tells you with her whole chest that she heard about it, but it didn't go. Not many from the church went, she said. It wasn't really a big deal. But I think that's interesting, right? Because the official ordin ordination of the man who would one day call himself God in Hyson Thrash couldn't be. Bothered to attend. But somewhere in that same stretch in 1964, a woman went to her yearly checkup. And now we are back to where we started. 1964, Heist and Thrash on a exam table, Dr. Dill finds a knot in her breast and tells her it is cancer. She feels it herself, it's hard like the top of a table, and she thinks she is going to die. But she tells her sisters not to worry, that she's worrying plenty. And that Sunday she goes to church. And before she says a word to him, Jim calls her name. And he says he knows she has had bad news. He's like, I've been fasting all day. We will pray. And he lays his hands on her. Another church member does. And another Monday, she can still feel it. Tuesday, she can still feel it. And Wednesday, and I'm gonna give you this in her own words because it's hers, and I promise you at the top that I would tell you the way she told it. She said on Wednesday my breast was loose and the knot was gone. So she goes to Saint Vincent Hospital, right? And she said seven doctors examined her, x-rays and everything in the tumor was gone. The doctors asked her how she explained it, and she told them, divine healing. And she said they just smiled, didn't say yes, didn't say no, and when they left, one of them, Dr. Mueller, told her it was a miracle. You know, a a nurse even danced with her in the hall. And she never had a knot again. So, okay, now I need to say a few things and I hope you hear all of them. First, I'm not gonna litigate that woman's body. I don't know what that knot was. Nobody has a pathology report on a podcast, okay? Lumps are found and turn out to be benign all the time. Some go away on their own. Doctors are sometimes wrong in an exam room. I ain't a doctor, I ain't never gonna be one, and I'm not gonna pretend to be one in order to win an argument with a woman who's not even here to answer me. However What I can tell you is what she experienced and what she believed, and what she believed is the hinge her whole life turned on. Secondly, can we remember the little girl in the farm by the Koozy? Seven or eight years old, putting her hand on her own forehead and feeling the headache leave, hearing a voice telling her where she dropped the scissors. That girl grew up into a woman who had already believed that some people carry God in their hands, and what the man at the front of her church had When he put his hands on her and that knot was gone by Wednesday, he wasn't asking her to believe in something new. He was confirming something she had already believed her whole life. And I think that's why it worked. I think it fit her. I think it fit the way she understood God inherently from a child. And thirdly, and this is the part I have to tell you, even though it hurts to put next to her. He knew about the bad things before she told him. In her book, that's one of the reasons she believed. And he knew things about her life he shouldn't have known. About her mother, how her mother got her brother Alvin things in her nephew's room that he had never seen. And this is the thing. Former members of People's Temple later described how this worked in the church over the years. So people in the office would gather information about the members, what doctor they seen. What they'd been told, what was in their house, this is why HIPAA had to be for him, right? Sometimes, however, they also did it by going through trash or visiting, and that information would go to the pastor gym before services. And the former members also describe stage healings, where somebody was basically made to appear to pass a cancer, which would typically just be like animal tissue palmed by an assistant. And I can't tell you that any of that happened to Hysynth in 1964. I can't. Her book doesn't say it, and I'm not going to put it there. But what I can tell you is that the man who laid hands on her was the same man those former members described. And I can tell you that a woman who also had a doctor's appointment then set in church that Sunday and heard her own bad news come out of the pastor's mouth, and she was sitting in exactly the kind of room those members later described. Both things, you guys. She was healed in her body, in her own mind, and nobody gets to take that from her. And the man, at the same time, the man, those former members said, staged healings. And here's what it bought him. Heisen tells you herself much later that the healing was one of the reasons she hung on. And he did wonderful things, she said. And so they hung on to him. Her close friend Essie Clay had cancer too, and a pastor prayed over her, and Essie said he knew all about her life. See, listen, a healing like Hysen's does not just happen to one woman. It doesn't keep one woman, right? It keeps her sister, it keeps her friend, it keeps the woman who watched it happen. It is testimony, and a church runs on testimony. And I know what testimony is. It's the part of the service where somebody stands up and tells what God did for them this week. Be it good or bad. And the diagnosis that came back clear, that job that came through, the son who came home, it's not a lie. Testimony's not. Most of it is a person telling you as honestly as they can something that happened to them. And that's what Heysen's healing was in that church. It was true testimony. The problem was never the woman testifying, the problem was a man who understood what testimony does to a room and built his church around naked. not happen. So the Sunday I opened on was not the beginning of her faith in him. It was the nail. Y'all see where I'm going with this? Seven years in after the Wednesday visit and the casket, the baskets and the white churches and the crash and a and the ward and this is the Sunday that nailed it down. And now I'm gonna stop narrating for a moment. Because this is the place in the episode where I'm gonna say something about myself. When I first made this series, I told it through Edith Riller's journal. And part way through, on my California episode, I stopped and talked about it because somebody left me a comment. And the comment pointed me to a podcast by a survivor named Leslie Wagner Wilson. And it did something that was just accurate. That the woman I had chosen to tell the story through was white, that she was elite or elite adjacent and she was administrative. And it pointed me towards Black Jonestown, which was Leslie's work. I told y'all then that I didn't feel attacked. I felt added to. And I meant it. And I told you the truth about why I had done it. I chose Edith because of access. Her journals are one of the most detailed day-by-day records that exist from inside people's temple. Day by day, who set where, who was sick, what got said at that meeting. The sheer amount this lady wrote down just kind of kept reshaping my plan. And she just kinda became my lens. I also told you I didn't want to do it through Edith. I really wanted to do it through Miss Heiston's thrash. I wanted to tell this through a black woman, but I talked myself out of it because I just felt like narratively I could tell it a little bit better through Edith. I d I knew the one thing I didn't want to do was tell it through Jim Jones, okay? That's the listen, that's the one thing we was gonna be picking a somebody, most likely a woman, to be honest with you. but we sure wasn't be about to be picking him. Anyway. But then at the end of the sentence of the series, I found the sentence. I was rereading Hyacinth's book, and I hit the part about the school by the Cozy. Four months, a year, books from white school, and then history was all white. And she said that about the books they handed her in Alabama in 1910. And a hundred and some years later, I kind of feel like I sat down to make a series about a church where most people were black and I reached for the most complete record I could find, and the most complete record was a white woman. And at that time I didn't really stop and ask why. And that's the part that kind of gets me, not that Edith wrote it down. Edith did a great thing. It's the most complete record. It's just that the most complete record is a white woman's. And I picked it up without asking why it was the most complete. And come to find out, this is why I think kind of because she was a white educated woman who worked in the office and she had the time and the training and the paper to write every night. Hysinth was a black woman who went to school four months a year. She ran elevators, cleaned streetcars. She never had the paper or the hours. Hysinth's record exists because near the end of her life, another woman sat with her for sixty years and wrote it down. So it's almost like not even on Edith's purpose, but the record is lopsided on purpose, a little bit on America's. And if I tell it only through the most complete record, I feel like I'm then now letting the four-month school year pick my narrator for me. So that's kind of what this rewrite is. It is two women because I didn't want to throw Edith out. I want to put her next to Hysynth. One who wrote it while it happened and one who remembered it after it was over. Because Edith can tell you what happened at a meeting on a Tuesday, but Hysen's story can tell you what it felt like to walk into a white church and hear them singing old black Joe. And I think we need both. And I think they see each things, they each see things, saw things that the other one can't. And concretely, here's what I mean. Edith was not even in Indianapolis. Edith never saw the kitchen at Tent in Delaware. Like this is what I started really to like realize when I was rereading Heiston's book. And honestly, like I started recording this like six months ago and I I I feel like a whole different person. even at this point, every time I research and look back into the people's temple and and I have been doing this since I was a kid. Which feels a little ridiculous. but I have been. This has always just kind of captivated me. and I've always just wanted to learn more. Especially when I saw that so many of the victims looked like me. And I think that was the first thing I ever really saw about this situation was I think probably some very salacious and awfully written documentary or something. And then I started to slowly find out the real truth of what occurred. And it was always just like a shocking revelation the more and more I started to find out. and it just really shaped me lot of different points of my life. Like as I got older, you know, you go to school, you go to middle school. It has one type of a library at school where you have access to certain material. Then you go to high school, which has like an like another level. And then the public library was sometimes of another level. And like I just r always remember like looking and trying to find as many books as I could as possible about the People's Temple when I was growing as I was been growing up. but this time redoing my more research to do the rewrite for this, I really just started to realize that Edith wasn't in Indianapolis, right? Like, if I only had Edith, the Indianapolis church would almost be like a rumor, like a founding story. Somebody told her. But Hysynth actually saw all of it. And she knows what the pastor was before he was actually even the man Edith met when you really think about it. But here's what Edith has that Hysynth doesn't. She Edith does have dates. Hysinth was telling her life to Marion Towney in her late 70s and into her 80s after the worst thing that can happen to a person happens. And so her memory moves things around. She puts Father Divine in New York, she tells the last day in Guyana more than one way over the years. And that's not lying. That's what a memory literally does, especially after something like that. She lost everybody. But Edith wrote it down that night. So Edith can almost kind of tell you which Tuesday. So I'm not gonna let each of them correct the other out loud when they disagree. And when they disagree, I can't tell who's right, and I'm gonna tell you that too. And about Leslie. Miss Leslie Wagner Wilson is alive and she survived and she has her own voice, her own book, and her own platform. Her memoir is called Slavery of Faith and it came out in 2008. There's also a film based on it called No Church in the Wind. In the Wild. she's gonna come into the series later. At the time she lived it, and when she does, I'm only going to be using her own published words. She can tell her own story. She's been telling it, and I'm not going to tell it for her. and again, to whoever left that comment, I remember you, thank you. If you ever Come on to this side of the me talking. I don't know why I don't know if you should listen to me again. Because I feel like I talk a lot. but you changed the shape of this for me. So thank you to the YouTuber who left that comment. I can remember your face, your icon picture, but I can't remember your YouTube name at the moment. And I do apologize. But while I'm being honest, one more thing. There's a sentence in Hyson's book that I read on air in my finale, and I messed it up the first time. So I wanna go back and say it right. On the looking back, she said the pastor seemed to go after the black members who were gullible. And then she said, We always did believe whatever the white man told us from slavery slavery on up. And she put herself in that sentence. And this is a woman who ran elevators at the state house. She owned her own house. She left two husbands who did her wrong, and she walked out of a church over a pastor's maid, and she kinda called herself gullible. I don't think she was right About herself. I think she was describing something that was done to her, and I kind of feel like she was carrying it like it was hers. And I know what that's like, my love. I'm not gonna narrate my own version on a true crime show, but I'm just saying I know what it is to carry somebody else's doing like it's your own fault. But it's her book, and she gets to say it. I just get to say out loud too, I don't agree with her about that, okay? I don't think she was gullible, I think she was picky, and I think she was right about what she saw, and the man was lying about. Who he was. Alright, we good? Alright, back to 1965. So 1965 is the year everything leaves Indianapolis, and it is a year Heysen's body stops letting her go anywhere. When she was about 20, she had actually ended up falling out of a truck she was riding on. I didn't even plan to talk, but we talked about this real quick. it was a joy ride, she said. And Miss Heyson thrived, she said she didn't tell anybody because they have said that she shouldn't have been in that truck in the first place, and she ended up landing on her back, right? Decades later, her leg goes lame and a neurosurgeon finds a tumor on her spine. So in nineteen sixty five, she had to stop working at Lane Bryant for the operation. And the operation hit a nerve and she was paralyzed. And so a rehabilitation center called Crossroads, they come in, they start her therapy. And she said she made real good progress. They worked with her, she worked with them, and she said later that if she had stayed in Annapolis and going to California, she believed she would be walking. And that sense kind of breaks me a little bit, because she doesn't say if I never met her, she says if I had stayed. And here's kind of the timing. The operation was after he had already left for California, right? Zip called him to tell him Hysen's was gonna have it, and he said he'd pray. And Hysynth thought, said she thought he was only like that he was losing out by then, that he was losing his gift kind of. That somehow he had gotten off on the wrong track. So hold those two pictures. Next to each other, right? In nineteen sixty four, the knot leaves her breast on a Wednesday and the nurse dances with her in the hall. In nineteen sixty five, she's paralyzed after surgery and the man is two thousand miles away saying he'll pray over the phone. And she doesn't say he failed her. She says his gift was leaving him. That's how she held it. And I think that reframe is very important. And then I think about the surgery, what the surgery had to everything else, because she didn't work anymore. So she retired on disability at about two hundred and forty dollars a month, she said, not a full pension. And this is a woman who had been working since she was a teenager. Babysitting, elevators, hotel rooms, Lane Bryant, a woman who could hold a dollar till the eagle squawks, squawk. And now her body had decided for her that she was done earning. So when a man 2,000 miles away says Come out here, I'll have a job for you in a care home, I'll take care of you. Think about who he's saying it to. A paralyzed woman on two hundred and forty dollars a month who has never once in her life not had a job. Mama love, you were not gullible. So by the end of nineteen sixty-four and into nineteen sixty five, the sermons have changed, okay? The pastor, Jim, he was talking about nuclear war and a safe place and getting out of Indianapolis and Heisence remembered that he predicted a nuclear holocaust for a specific date. In 1967, she also said she ain't believed it. She said some of the older people did, however, and they were like terrified. also, he said that Indiana was racist and was trying to kill him because someone put gas in his coal bin. And Hyson said that by then she thought he probably should move because he really might get killed, because there was a lot of unrest in Annapolis in the 60s at this point. So it took until 1965, but around that summer they leave. And the pastor, his family, and a large part of the congregation. Drive up to Redwood Valley, a farming area in Mendicino County, California, North Yakaya. in my original video, I think I said that I believe it was about a hundred and forty people in my original episode, which is the most common number. Heyson says about 150, other sources say a hundred or or eighty-five, seventy. Some say somewhere between a hundred and forty, by the most common count, I guess. And it may have been fewer, but it was mostly families, a lot of them black. They all sold their houses, quit their jobs, and drove two. thousand miles and now in my first version I give you a lot of details about that drive. I think I talk about the highway and how many nights and sleeping in cars at rest stops. you can go back and listen to those okay but what I can tell you is that the black families driving across the American West in nineteen sixty five in a mixed group of white families would have needed exactly the kind of knowledge that was in the green book because this child they need to know which get towns, which gas stations which motels will say no Everything I taught you probably an hour ago about Sundown Towns was still out there on those roads. but I have another correction that I do want to say. in my original run, I told you that Hysinth Thrash Zip Ria Edwards were that caravan. Looking at it again, they were not. Hysinth was recovering from a s that spinal surgery left her paralyzed. And in her own book, she said it plainly. He left Indianapolis in 1965, and then she and Zip left in 1967. So about two years later. I just wanted to correct that. But picture the house at 40th and Graceland on the summer of 1965, right? The church people are packing cars, a lot of their friends are leaving, and Hysinth is in that house learning to work with a body that won't do what it did. And who is taking care of her again? Zip. And Zip had already been out to California once to look with her nephew Harold, and she told Hysenh it was pretty, but out in the country, and she didn't know if Hysynth would really like it. And Hysenh said Zip didn't know how much she even liked the country. So Archie O. James, he stays behind for a while and he tries to keep the church going in Annapolis. And Heyson said it just wasn't the same with Jem Gone. so Archie left for California about a year before the sisters did, and then their niece Mildred, the one who joined with them in nineteen fifty seven, she was planning to go, but then she got diabetes. And Heyson said the pastor just kept calling her, telling her to come out or something terrible would happen. She was dead within two months. And I'm not gonna make that mean more than Hysenth made it mean. She just put those two facts next to each other, the calls, and then Mojar was gone. But who was in those cars? I mostly can't name you with certainty from Indianapolis Records. I'm not gonna guess. But Hysenh did name some of the friends who went ahead. She named like Alfred and Mary. They were a white couple from the church. They left before the sisters did. Mary had adopted a Korean child as well. it was the same as Hysenth's grandniece. And a black family named Parks from Springfield, Ohio. They had heard the preacher preach in Indianapolis. those are the people who were basically waiting on the other side when Heist and Zip finally came. These are the people who they sat with on a porch in Annapolis and they would then sit with them on a porch in Yakaia. And I want you to understand just kind of what was in those cars. Because it it wasn't followers, you guys, it was neighbors. And the people who went and stayed in Indianapolis, they watched the building at 10th and Delaware go crazy. It. The old synagogue where Hysen came up out the water. Remember, we talked about that? She was speaking in tongues, where 200 people were eating on Sundays, and that building stood until after November 1978, and then it was torn down. I don't know who decided that or why. I just think it's worth knowing that the city didn't keep it. The kitchen where the work was real was now just gone. And there's one more death I do want to put on the calendar. on September 10th, 1965, two months after the caravan left Indiana. Father Divine dies in Philadelphia. So the man the pastor had studied is now gone. And the people, his people, are still there. And if you can put a pen in that for me, please do, because we're gonna talk about it again when I talk about nineteen seventy one. So Heighthes and Zip, they have had two years in Indianapolis without him, which I've just really thought is an interesting learning about more of this. Two years with the church mostly gone west, two years where the door was wide open. And they went anyway. And I'm gonna tell you why, and I'm gonna give you her reasons, not mine. Okay. One, the pastor guaranteed them jobs in California. He was setting up care homes for patients being released from a Disney O state hospital. And she couldn't work at Rick Lane Bryant anymore. And she loved helping old folks. And Zip kept worrying her to go. And their friends were out there. And she said that it wouldn't have been a bad move at all if they stayed in Redwood Valley. Now their family in Indianapolis, they did not want them to go. Their sister, Rosie, she begged Heistens not to go. And Heisten said they couldn't do nothing about it. After all, they're grown. They weren't children. But then she says looking back, she sees it was a mistake, but they couldn't see it at the time. You know what? I love that she says both. We were grown and it was our choice. Both are true, right? And it was a mistake. She d doesn't let anybody make her a child in that sentence, not even when she's looking back. She made a grown woman's decision with what she knew. And this is where I kind of tell you where what the decision cost her because it is the title of the episode. The house at 40th and Graceland, the double she brought herself for twelve thousand dollars. In a neighborhood, the whole sundown machine was built to keep all. Her out of it. Hysons counts that house among what went to him. Later, a care home she and Zip bought in California would sell to, and that money went to Jim. And by her counts between the two sisters, over 21 years, Jim got about a hundred and fifty thousand from them. Two houses, bank accounts, insurance, pensions, social security checks, and their thighs, thighs, which she says. He raised from 10% to 25. And that is the thing I want you to see in this part one. Nobody came and took the house on Graceland in that night. Okay. Nobody forged anything. She signed, zip signed, every signature was real. And a woman was still emptied out, one signature at a time, with her own consent, by a man she trusted because he told her the truth about the world. The technically legal answer and the true answer I have found to not always be the same answer, okay? And we're gonna keep finding that in series. So here are the two sentences though, and I'm gonna say them in a row, and I'm not gonna soften either. One, okay, because the church on New Jersey Street was real, y'all. It fed 200 people every Sunday and a thousand a week, and it walked black women in their good clothes into white churches that saying, Ugh, black Joe at them, and it buried his dead in the color section rather than leave them, and it changed a hospital in a city that had been the capital of the clan. And the man at the front is already telling a childless woman What she was allowed to have, already learning from Father Divine how a movement takes the house, and already the man who would take Hythan's thrash. And I ain't asking you to pick one. I'm telling you to keep both systems accurate, okay? Because Hysen was right to walk into that church, and the church was walking her one Sunday at a time towards losing everything she had built. Both things are true. And I wanna leave you where this episode kinda keeps leaving us. Crown Hill. Her first job in Indianapolis was across the street from it, remember? She was too scared to walk past it at night. Her mama, Josephine, was buried there. Madge Oberholzer is buried there. The woman who took down the clan from her bed. And Hysinth is buried there. She came home to Indianapolis in 1982, and in her last year she lived at Mount Dion G Gi Gi Geriattic Center on North Graceland Avenue, the same street as her house, two blocks from Crown Hillsgates. And in nineteen eighty three, she got a check from the court appointed receiver who had been dividing what was left of the People's Temple money among the people who had given it. And out of everything she and Zip gave. The check was for two thousand seven hundred fifteen dollars and thirty cents. She said she didn't know whether to take it, but she says she took it because she needed burial money, so her family wouldn't be stuck with it. She used it to pay for her grave at Crown Hill. She died on november eighteenth, nineteen ninety five, seventeen years to the day. That was one. Her grave is in section one hundred lot forty, according to the Crown Hill Heritage Foundation. There it has no marker. the woman who paid for her own grave with the scraps of what he took from her is lying in an unmarked plot in the same cemetery as the woman who brought down the clan. The cemetery she was afraid of is a girl two blocks from the street where she brought her house. I don't have anything clever to say about that. I just think somebody should know where she is, you know. And I wanna say one more thing about Madge and Hysen, because I didn't plan this, but I can't stop seeing it, right? Madge Oberholzer, knowing she was dying, sat up in that bed she grew up in and dictated her story to a court reporter so that it would outlast her. And it did. It took down the clan. And then Hysen Thrash back home in Indianapolis near the end of her life, sat with Marion Towney for about sixty hours and told her story so that it would outlast her and it did. It's the first book length account of Jonestown by a member. of that community. So you have two women in the same city, same cemetery, about 60 years apart. Neither of them had a gun or a newspaper or an office. Both of them had their own words and the sense to get those words written down by somebody who could keep them. Magistratement put a man in a ha in a prison. Hyson's book is the reason I can tell you about the knot and zip running in from the other room. They both made a record and I think that's how you fight a man who thinks he's the law. You make a record. So in 1967, Heistens up, they pack up the house and they paid a moving company $919 to send everything to California. The rakes, the cards. She gave the picture, she gave away the figurines rather than move them. And they drive out to Route 66. They picked it up in St. Louis through Tulsa and they still Tried to stop and see Oral Roberts. He was a faith healer, but they missed him. Their niece Eileen came along with her son. They had a cooler full of food and they stopped along the way to make some coffee, eat some cake. Hyson said they made some travelers hungry. And she said it was a fine time. And next time, we followed them in, Yakaia, Redwood Valley, a ranch house with a well and a pump and pears so white, child, you think they came out of can. And somewhere in San Francisco, there's a white woman named Edith Roller. Born the day after Christmas in 1915. She hasn't walked into People's Temple yet, but when she does, she's gonna start writing it all down every single night. Part two is California. Heistens remember is it? Edith writes it down. And for the first time, we're gonna be talking about both of them. So say their names. Heisten thrash. And make sure you say her names too. Her sister's name too. Zapariah Edwards.