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They live together in Brooklyn in a neighborhood that is changing. It is November, 1996. Interspersed among the old guard—the Jamaican ladies with their folding chairs, the churchy men in their brown polyester suits—are the ones who have just arrived. It is subtle, this shift, almost imperceptible. When Maria blurs her eyes right it doesn't appear to be happening. They dance together at house parties in the dark. If I ruled the world, they sing, their voices rising as one, imagine that. I'd free all my sons.
Maria is writing a dissertation. She has been granted a small fellowship to live on in this final year, so she can focus on completion; it isn't enough to foot their bills, but Khalil carries the rest. Khalil works in computers. He makes enough as a part-time technology consultant to support them both. His real passion is the business he and a friend from college are trying to get off the ground. Khalil has explained their plan to Maria—it will be an online community of like-minded souls, modern tribalism at its best. He says it will make them rich someday. He is looking for investors.
Maria spends her days at the social science library on 118th and Amsterdam, poring over materials from a long-gone time and place. It is already late fall and she has come to rely on rituals to get her work done. She wears the same peacoat and the same red gauzy scarf. She stops at the same deli and orders the same thing from the burly guy behind the counter, a buttered bialy and a coffee, light and sweet. She keeps the same assortment of snacks in her purse: a bag of salted cashews, a chocolate bar, a bottle of water. There is a window beside her carrel where she sometimes pauses to watch the cold air sharpening the edges of buildings. She has decided all university campuses are alike—the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and poverty.
The photo on Maria's university ID is now four years old. It was taken the year she and Khalil moved here from California. In the picture she looks like a different Maria. It isn't just the golden brown of her skin, and it isn't just her bangs, which hang long over her eyes. It is her smile, crooked and loose, and the expression in her eyes, some barely contained hilarity. She looks preserved in the moment before you burst into laughter. She can no longer remember what was so funny.
Maria's subject is Jonestown, the Peoples Temple. She entered the program planning to study seventies-era intentional communities—the bonds of kinship forged among unrelated people. Once she started investigating Jonestown, she could not look away.
She knew then only the most basic facts, the ones that had become part of the detritus of the culture: That Jonestown was a cult. That the group's leader, Jim Jones, wore sunglasses everywhere. That he and his followers committed mass suicide together one day in the jungles of South America by drinking the Kool-Aid.
The question that guided her then was the most banal, the one posed by all holocausts: How does such a thing happen? She was guided by a line from Juvenal's Satires: Nobody becomes depraved overnight.
Now, so many years into it, her focus has shifted. She wants to know not how they died but how they kept themselves going. There is no memorial to the people of Jonestown. The remote jungle in Guyana that they cleared, where they built a society, has long been reclaimed by vegetation. The last visitor to the site reported finding only the barest remnants of what once was: a tractor engine, a rusting file cabinet, the metal drum they had used to poison the liquid before they drank it.
The music they made—the tapes they recorded—are all that is left of the people who lived there. They sang in the early days in Indiana where the church began. They sang while they rode the fleet of Greyhound buses from Indianapolis to Ukiah, California. They sang when they arrived in Guyana, while they cleared the cassava and palm trees with machetes. They sang while they cooked the rice and oily gravy that was their main diet. They sang while they cared for the children in the Cuffy Nursery. They sang in the beginning and they sang at the end. It is all on tape.
From New People. Published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group USA (LLC). Copyright © Danzy Senna, 2017.
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