Over the course of five years of research into Jonestown, the author has discovered countless examples of widowed or divorced Black women who found safety and comfort within the Temple and among fellow congregants. In fact, more than 50 percent of the single members of Jonestown were divorced or widowed Black women. For her part, Murral was a girl from a small town in a bustling new city. How could she know where to start rebuilding her life?
The Temple and its structure saved Murral. It helped her feed and clothe her children. It had a team of lawyers on staff to help her file for divorce. Indeed, hers was finalized in January 1969. Though the composition of communal living groups changed often, it always included people willing to play with or babysit Murral’s kids. There was even a public school, Opportunity High, that many of the Temple children attended.
This story doesn’t have a happy beginning or ending. But it has an inspiring middle. Murral, against all odds, rebuilt her life, carving out a place for herself and her children. She forewent Minnie for Luna, her middle name, to mark this new chapter, and took up work nursing the Temple’s elders and children. She was beloved by fellow church goers and is said to have exuded a unique, gentle, and caring maternal aura; both she and her kids were well-mannered and kind. They moved to Jonestown in August 1977 and lived in Cottage 3, one of more than sixty houses spread out on nearly 4,000 acres. There were gardens, crop fields, a school, even a hospital complex. At the center of the site was a pavilion where Temple members assembled in the middle of the night at Jones’s request. It’s also where members lined up at gunpoint and drank cyanide-laced Flavor Aid, taking part in a “revolutionary suicide.”
Why would Murral, so strong and brave, take her own life? Having endured so much, why did she decide to end it all in Jonestown?
According to Sharon Amos, Jonestown residents “have an air of happiness and confidence about them,” which she attributed to the few months they lived communally in Guyana. The Peoples Temple succeeded, at least for a few years, in creating a place where co-workers, friends, couples, and singles, old and young worked toward a shared goal of demonstrating that there might be a better way to live together. They built a family. Survivor Kathy Tropp explained to the author that “[w]e were not there for Jim Jones, or the revolution. We were there for each other. We were one living and breathing organism, caring for each other.” Murral died for the family she made within the Temple, whose community saved her when she was in the direst of straits.