"Hurry, My Children, Hurry"

A recording reveals the death throes of the Jim Jones cult

First had come the numbing photos: nearly 900 colorfully clad bodies clustered near a vat of poison. Next, the anguished accounts of the bewildering tragedy by its few survivors. Last week, nearly four months after they had occurred, the mass deaths at Jonestown in the remoteness of Guyana's jungles took on a new and far more personal dimension. Americans sat in their living rooms and heard the actual sounds of the Peoples Temple dying.

In an incredible aftermath to a bizarre event, NBC television broadcast a tape recording of the Rev. Jim Jones' pleading with his followers to "die in dignity" by sipping a cyanide-laced drink. A few of the cultists protested. Some women screamed. Children cried. Armed guards took up positions around the camp to keep anyone from escaping. Other cultists, assembled around their leader's wicker-chair throne in an open hall, applauded as Jones implored in a high-pitched, agitated voice: "Please, for God's sake, let's get on with it."

Someone in the schizophrenic California-based cult, which hacked a spare living out of the Guyana soil while banking millions in secret Swiss accounts, had recorded the final 43 minutes of the colony's existence. The tape was found by a U.S. consular employee in Guyana and turned over to the FBI. Guyanese officials were given a copy. While both Guyana and the U.S. Justice Department refused to release the tape, copies somehow proliferated. The one obtained by TIME last week discloses that Jones' death decree was met with stubborn resistance as well as fatal acquiescence.

Jones had called his followers together after a two-day visit by California Congressman Leo Ryan. The Temple leader was outraged by the fact that a score of the cultists had asked Ryan to help them escape the colony. Ryan's party and the defectors had left Jonestown to fly home from a nearby airstrip. Jones knew of a plot by his group to shoot the pilot of one of the visitors' two planes. He was not aware, at first, that Ryan and four others in the party had already been ambushed and slain at the airfield.

Jones: We are sitting here, waiting on a powder keg. To sit here and wait for the catastrophe that's going to happen on that airplane -it's going to be a catastrophe. It almost happened here when the Congressman was nearly killed here. [A cultist had attacked Ryan with a knife.] You can't take off with people's children without expecting a violent reaction. [Some of the defectors were children whose parents had split on whether to flee or stay.] We've been so terribly betrayed.

What's going to happen here in a matter of a few minutes is that one of those people on the plane is going to shoot the pilot. I know that. I didn't plan it, but I know it's going to happen. And we better not have any of our children left when it's over. Because they'll parachute in here on us. [He feared the Guyanese army would retaliate.] So you be kind to the children and be kind to seniors, and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece, and step over quietly, because we are not committing suicide -it's a revolutionary act.

Cultist Christine Miller: Is it too late for Russia? [The colony had considered fleeing to Russia if life became too difficult in Guyana.]

Jones: It's too late. I can't control these people. They've gone with the guns. And it's too late.

Miller: Well, I say let's make an airlift to Russia. I don't think nothing is impossible, if you believe it.

Jones: How are we going to do that?

How are you going to airlift to Russia?

Miller: Well, I thought they said if we got in an emergency, they gave you a code to let them know.

Jones: No, they didn't. [Apparently to pacify the woman, Jones said he would try to check with the Russians, but doubted it would help.] To me death is not a fearful thing. It's living that's cursed. It's not worth living like this.

Miller: I think that there were too few who left for 1,200 people to give their lives for those people that left.

Jones: Do you know how many left?

Miller: Oh, 20-odd. That's small compared to what's here.

Jones: 20-odd. But what's gonna happen when they don't leave? When they get on the plane and the plane goes down? That plane'll come out of the air There's no way you fly a plane without a pilot. You think Russia's gonna want us with all this stigma? We had some value, but now we don't have any value.

Miller: Well, I don't see it like that.

I mean, I feel like that as long as there's life there's hope.

Jones: Well, everybody dies. I haven't seen anybody yet didn't die. And I like to choose my own kind of death for a change. I'm tired of being tormented to hell. Tired of it. [Applause.]

Miller: But I look at all the babies and I think they deserve to live.

Jones: But don't they deserve much more? They deserve peace.

Miller: I think we all have a right to our own destiny as individuals. And I have a right to choose mine, and everybody else has a right to choose theirs.

Jones: The best testimony we can make is to leave this goddam world. [After applause, more argument breaks out in the crowd. Jones' voice, remarkably controlled, begins to rise.] Everybody hold it! Hold it! Hold it! Lay down your burdens. Down by the riverside. Shall we lay them down here by the side of Guyana? When they start parachuting out of the air, they'll shoot some of our innocent babies. Can you let them take your child?

Voices: No! No! No!

Man: I'm ready to go. If you tell us we have to give our lives now, we're ready; all the rest of the sisters and brothers are with me.

Jones: I've tried to keep this thing from happening. But I now see it's the will of sovereign Being that we lay down our lives in protest against what's been done. If they come after our children, and we give them our children, then our children will suffer forever. [Cultists returning from the airstrip tell Jones that Congressman Ryan has been killed.]

Jones: Please get us some medication.

It's simple, there's no convulsions with it. Just, please get it. Before it's too late. The G.D.F. [Guyanese army] will be here. Get movin', get movin'. Don't be afraid to die. Are you going to separate yourself from whoever shot the Congressman? I don't know who shot him.

Voices: No! No! No!

Jones: How many are dead? [One of the airstrip party reports that others were killed.] Aw, God, Almighty God. It's too late. They're all laying out there dead. Please, can we hasten our medication?

Woman: O.K. There's nothing to worry about. Everybody keep calm and try and keep your children calm. Let the little children in and reassure them. [The children are given the poison first.] They're not crying from pain; it's just a little bitter-tasting.

Jones: It's hard only at first. Living is much, much more difficult. Raising in the morning and not knowing what the night's bringing.

Woman: This is nothing to cry about.

This is something we could all rejoice about. I'm looking at so many people crying. I wish you would not cry. [Applause.]

Jones: Please, for God's sake, let's get on with it. We've lived as no other people lived and loved. We've had as much of this world as you're gonna get. Let's just be done with it. I want to see you go. They can take me and do what they want, whatever they want to do. I don't want to see you go through this hell no more. No more.

Man: The way the children are laying there now, I'd rather see them lay like that than to see them have to die like the Jews did, which was pitiful. Like Dad [the cultists called Jones "Dad"] said, when they come in, they're going to massacre our children. And the ones that they take cap ture, they're gonna just let them grow up and be dummies. And not grow up to be a person like the one and only Jim Jones. [Applause.]

Jones: Let's get gone. Let's get gone.

We tried to find a new beginning. But it's too late. I don't know who killed the Congressman. But as far as I'm concerned I killed him. He had no business coming. I told him not to come.

Lay down your life with dignity. Don't lay down with tears and agony. It's just stepping over into another plane. [Crying and screaming in background.] Stop this hysterics. This is not the way for people who are socialistic Communists to die. Children, it's just something to put you to rest. Oh, God. [Continued crying.]

Mother, mother, please. Don't do this.

Lay down your life with your child. Free at last. Keep your emotions down. Children, it will not hurt. If you be quiet. [Music in background. Children still crying.] I don't care how many screams you hear; death is a million times preferable to spend more days in this life. If you knew what was ahead of you, you'd be glad to be stepping over tonight.

I call on you to quit exciting your children. Stop this nonsense. Hurry, my children, hurry. Quickly. Quickly. Quickly. No more pain. No more pain. All they do is take a drink to go to sleep. That's what death is, sleep. Have trust. You have to step across. This world was not our home.

The tape ends in a long period of silence broken only by mournful music that is made more eerie as the tape recorder's batteries seem to run down. The sound stops before the crack of the pistol shot that killed Jim Jones, presumably fired by his own hand. --

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