What better way to control your kid than by sending her to a compound on an island in the middle of the Caribbean, confiscating her money and passport, where she will be forced to comply with the program if she wants to leave?

In Berkeley, California is no sense of the "white way being the right way." Parents also come in every variety - mixed race marriages, gay partners, divorced moms. We all love our children and want to do right by them, and that's what matters most.

Jim Jones started out as a civil rights crusader in Indianapolis. As a young preacher in the mid-50s, he used members of his congregation to integrate lunch counters and all-white churches in rich neighborhoods; they'd just march in and sit down at the pews and see what happened. Often they were received with racist insults, and once with a bomb threat. But the fact that you had this charismatic, white man, aggressively promoting racial equality, was a huge draw for African Americans, many of whom felt the Civil Rights Movement had stalled by the late 60s.

I only wish my brother David had survived to experience Berkeley as well. No one would flinch here if we were to walk down the street together, whereas in Indiana we were constantly met with hostility. I don't believe in heaven, but this is about as close to heaven on earth as I imagine getting.

Before I went to Escuela Caribe, my parents showed me the school's brochures featuring smiling kids at the beach or on horseback. The propaganda was greatly appealing to a kid from rural Indiana who hated her high school anyway. I also got reassurances that I could return if I didn't like it. But shortly after the gates closed behind me, I learned I'd been deceived; the beach was far away and I couldn't return home until I'd completed the program.

I was pregnant with my youngest child at the time, writing about mass death while I'm growing this precious little life inside me. Here I am, worried about everything I eat and drink and whether I walk past a smoker, and meanwhile I'm writing about an event where almost three hundred children were slaughtered. Most were never identified and are buried in a mass grave in Oakland. It was surreal. But it felt good to give Jim Jones's victims a voice, especially ordinary church members.

In California, Jim Jones even staged a shooting of himself. The lesson of this was two-fold. One, that he was a god - he could heal himself. He had these magic powers. A large segment of his congregation came from a Pentecostal tradition that believed in faith healing and already believed Jones had the power to cure others. And two, the "shooting" made him seem important. Civil rights leaders were being gunned down - MLK, Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X - and he longed to be considered as heroic and important as they were.