Excerpt from New People by Danzy Senna, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Maria brought the brochure home from the library the other day. The girl on the cover is not somebody Maria recognizes from any of the other pictures she has seen of the collective. The girl is maybe fifteen years old and stands in the jungle, smiling, cradling a tiny sloth in her arms. The creature stares into the camera with sad humanoid eyes. Over the picture are the words A feeling of freedom.

Inside is a montage of photographs advertising the compound. The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana was only two years old. After the earliest arrivals had spent months clearing the remote jungle outpost with machetes and tractors at Jim Jones's behest, hundreds of Americans— members of the San Francisco Church—relocated there. They lived together in the simple wooden cottages together, among the macaws, harvesting their own food. They even had a mascot, a chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs whose cage was next to Jones's own cottage.

Maria has stared at this brochure many times. She knows it was used to recruit new members from up and down the California coast. In the picture she stares at now, an old man stands beside an orange grove over the caption Everything grows well in Jonestown, especially the children. Below him is another image showing a smiling blond boy of ten or eleven holding two plump brown babies on his lap. On the next page, two women in kerchiefs sit on the ground of a nursery, tending to a row of toddlers who lie side by side in cots. The testimonials from those who have arrived sound ecstatic.

People are so free here and they look so different . . .
This is a new world—clean, fresh, pure—
Man, the Fillmore has seen the last of me!

The brochure goes on for sixteen pages. On the final page is a picture of a young man with his hair in neat cornrows, standing with his arm around a young woman, her hair in a wide Afro. Maria recognizes their faces. She knows they are siblings. She knows their names. Ronnie and Shanda James. She knows the exact brutal details of how their story will end. But in the picture she stares at now, it is still just the beginning.

From New People. Published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group USA (LLC). Copyright © Danzy Senna, 2017.