november 18, 1978

Her name is Christine Miller: she is African American, 54, and amidst the perverse, raw insanity of the final forty-five minutes of Jonestown--recorded by Jones himself on a cassette tape--she tries, again and again, to thwart a massacre in the making.

Calmly, she engages Jim Jones (his speech thick-tongued compared to her clear declarations) in a battle for control of Jonestown. She plays his own beliefs off against him--"I feel as long as there's life, there's hope. That's my faith", she says, quoting Jones back to himself--and points out that surely the defection of only twenty members isn't worth the whole community dying.

Surrounded by guards with guns and bows and arrows, she insists that she should be given a chance to follow her own destiny, that the children should be allowed to live, that their contact in Russia be called for an emergency airlift--all rebuffed by Jones, increasingly urgent in his demand that one and all surrender to the joys of Revolutionary Suicide, a suicide the community rehearsed over and over, in fear and awe of this day.

And then the tone shifts and the crowd turns foul and ugly--shouting her down, insulting her--even as Jones praises her for being an honest agitator, for presenting two sides of an argument; as if it were a debate society, not a death wish blooming. As if Jones had never held a gun to her head and then lowered the weapon, stopped by her insistence that he could kill her, but he would first respect her. As if love had never been part of his message; as if none of it had ever happened.

And then her voice disappears from the conversation, and she is gone, silenced by a treat given to children at birthday parties, a treat laced with poisonous drugs, none of them--as Jones falsely promised--kind-in-death: convulsions and pain in a paper cup. She is gone, replaced by babies screaming and Jones hissing "Hasten, hasten, hasten with the medication!" as the music playing in the background slows down, the generator dying.No farewell, no note to those left behind who loved her, no way to touch anyone who didn't understand why she followed Jones into the jungles of Guyana, or what drove her so far from home: just gone, gone, gone.

But even as she stood in the presence of a madman she once followed--a madman who now kept his flock imprisoned within the filthy walls of a latter day concentration camp--she still claimed her right to challenge and speak as she saw fit: she is the other side of Jonestown, and her name is Christine Miller.