Peoples Temple memoir excerpt (1 of 3): Mother.

So I finished reading a fourth Peoples Temple memoir, Deborah Layton’s Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor’s Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple. 

(I’ve also read the classic biography of Jim Jones, Raven, which isn’t a memoir per se, but you could say I’ve read up five stories of Peoples Temple members.)

The author’s mother was a German Jew who was sent to the U.S. by her family in the late 30s and had survivor’s guilt; eventually, she too joined the Peoples Temple, and she died in Guyana of untreated cancer a few weeks before the mass suicide.

In the memoir, Layton reprints a letter from a friend to her mother in 1939, at a time when her mom was alone in New York and having a difficult time (p. 14):

The memories of the past are there, and you feel that you will rebuild your roots.  If you have a devil within you, don’t hide him but put him in front of your wagon so that he will use up all his energy by pulling you forward.

I find that last sentence very beautiful.