Seductive Poison Read Online Free Page B

whimpering of the famished children. We are shells of humans, waiting for our next instructions from Father.
Suddenly, Father informs us that we have been saved by a miracle: the mercenaries have departed and we are now free again to enjoy our lives. He dispatches a few of the kitchen staff to prepare a little sustenance for his entrenched warriors. Exhausted, we sip our rice-water soup and nibble on bread crumbs from an earlier meal. A new day hath arrived. Father begins to hum and the pianist begins her melodic accompaniment. He stands and sings, “We shall not … We shall not be moved. We shall not … We shall not be moved,” smiles and claps his hands. We all stand and sing. Once again, we have fought the enemy and won!

Since the destruction of the Branch Davidian cult, my mind has returned again and again to my past. It is brought back to this darkness because of the inquisitive questions of my six-year-old daughter.
“Mommy? Where is Grandma Nanni buried? Why can’t we visit her grave?”
The tightly wrapped secrets of my past are being cautiously opened. Secrets handed down from my mother to me. Untruths that spurred us both, while looking for answers, into another deceitful world, Peoples Temple.
I thought I could keep the past hidden forever, the way my mother did when I was growing up, but that is no longer healthy or possible. I must return to the suffocating confusion of my youth to understand my sorrow, make sense of my shame, and integrate the secrets of my unclaimed history. I must break the pattern of well-intentioned deceit passed from parent to child.
“Why is Uncle Larry in prison? He isn’t bad … is he, Mommy?”
How can I explain to a child that my brother became a pawn the moment I escaped from Jonestown? My mother was dying of cancer; he was the only hostage Jones could use to try and coerce me back or force me into silence. My brother must have been severely threatened, perhaps in panic, when he followed orders to shoot at people. Why is he the only one held accountable for the insanity designed by Jones and unwittingly implemented by a thousand of us?
I was one of them. On my own, with no one to answer to, I have kept my shame locked in a small compartment just beneath the surface. But my daughter’s innocent probing has emboldened me to face the horror again, after twenty years.
“Why didn’t you just leave when Jim got mean?”
I’m not sure. What took me so long to comprehend and finally heed the danger signs? Was it my naïveté? Perhaps it was my childlike belief in my own papa’s goodness that kept me from grasping the truth. Being a good obedient daughter seemed incompatible with having questions and doubts.
“Couldn’t the children have refused to drink their juice, Mama? I would have closed my lips tight and not allowed them to do it.”
How can I make her understand what people are liable to do under extreme pressure or in a desperate need to please? How they can choose to take their own lives rather than disobey and risk an even more violent death at the hands of either the “enemy” or the armed guards of their own group?
I’m propelled by my daughter’s innocence to turn inward to my cavern of painful, frightening memories. But facing them requires that I first learn how to cope with the shame. I must face my acts of treason against my mentor and friend, Teresa B., whose trust I betrayed for my own survival. In order to prove my devotion to the Peoples Temple, I devoutly reported her secrets, condemning her to a purgatory from which she barely escaped.
It does not help to explain that all of us were taught to spy and report on each other—our families, our loved ones, our friends. Loyalty to Father required it. Any longing for friends or lovers, any expression of love for our family, was a breach of that loyalty. “Thou shalt have no other God before me.”
I never dreamed of reporting on my mother. The only alternative was to withdraw. It took all my strength to