The Onliest One Alive: Surviving Jonestown, Guyana

The Onliest One Surviving Jonestown has been a collaborative project of Catherine (Hyacinth) Thrash and Marian Towne since 1982, when Mrs. Thrash returned to Indianapolis from the Los Angeles area, where she had lived following the mass murder-suicide in Jonestown on November 18, 1978.It is the result of 60 hours of interviews and is the only published first-person account of a poor, African-American, elderly, disabled woman survivor of the tragedy. Yet is not primarily a story of Jonestown. It is the life of one who, for various reasons (from her childhood in Alabama through her adulthood in Indiana) became attracted to Jim Jones' Peoples Temple and followed him to California and Guyana, but early enough realized the demonic character of the movement and was able to distance herself sufficiently from it psychologically, enabling her to survive physically.