The Road to Tama Re
October 27, 2016 11:58 AM   Subscribe

 
Yep. As a Georgia kid, I remember this place well. Rolled up into Tama Re once upon a time when I was a teenager, with my girlfriend and her brothers. We pulled up in my Corolla. The guards carried rifles and were ripped as hell. One of 'em said "Y'all come on in. Even you, Snowflake." (That was me. I was "Snowflake" that day and have remained "Snowflake" in certain circles every day since then.) We walked around awhile. Earth, Wind, & Fire was playing on loudspeakers mounted on telephone poles. There was a Sphinx, some pyramids...it all looked like a low-rent mini-golf type of situation. None of us had any idea what kind of darkness and evil was being enacted in that joint. The crazy sheriff bulldozed it not long after.
posted by Bob Regular at 12:08 PM on October 27, 2016 [7 favorites]


oooh this reminds me - their new music issue will be out soon
posted by thelonius at 12:09 PM on October 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


The crazy sheriff bulldozed it not long after.

All things considered, he comes off as pretty darn sane in the piece.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:14 PM on October 27, 2016 [7 favorites]


It seems like Dwight York's son Jacob deserved more credit than he gets in this piece - it sounds as though without him going to the cops and supporting women who wanted to talk, they might never have busted the guy. That was a good thing he did and was probably pretty hard to do.
posted by Frowner at 12:27 PM on October 27, 2016 [6 favorites]


Wow, that's just a god-damned nightmare. Those poor kids.
posted by suelac at 12:34 PM on October 27, 2016


These guys seemed to still be around, at least recently. For a long time the "Bakery Outlet" building just down from the Dekalb Farmers Market in Decatur was filed with man-sized Anubis & Osiris statues and other 'ancient Egypt' kitsch and a friend told it was where "some cult" hung out.

Couple of month ago it all disappeared and the place has a For Lease sign up.
posted by kjs3 at 12:42 PM on October 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


Yikes. I went to college at GSU in Bulloch County, a few counties over. I'd never heard of these guys.
posted by JHarris at 1:43 PM on October 27, 2016


My parents lived next to a house that was for sale for a long time, on a large lot. While it stood empty, a bunch of folks who claimed to belong to a Native American nation and to have a particularly distinguished African descent and to be sovereign citizens appropriated the empty house and land, claiming freehold title by a document they had just recorded at the county clerk's. They also claimed said freehold over some hardware from my parents' shed in the backyard.

It made me very nervous, since I was living so far away, but the police didn't let the squatting go on for too long. My parents even got their stuff back. I was relieved, but being a wretched bleeding heart, I was uneasy about how much these people must have suffered under American racism to retreat into a fantasy world like that.

The thing is, I don't remember the name of the nation they claimed -- it seemed spurious -- but now I believe it was Yammassee, in which case they were Nuwaubians, in which case the hell with them.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:24 PM on October 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


My mom is from Monticello. When they first showed up, the Nuwaubian compound was a tourist attraction, a funny thing to drive past on a long Georgia afternoon when I was visiting my relatives. I was living in Athens when he moved there and opened some "bookstores" there, and it still just seemed like another Georgia eccentricity, like the idiot carvings on Stone Mountain or Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens or Little Five Points. Then the raid happened. And it was hard to believe just how much evil had lurked behind the fake palm trees. I haven't been to Monticello in a couple years, and I had no idea that lady and her "bookstore" were still there. On the plus side, there's also a nice coffee shop run by Mennonites. It's also where My Cousin Vinny was filmed and is really a very pretty little town in the middle thousands of acres of national forest pine trees.
posted by hydropsyche at 2:39 PM on October 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


The crazy sheriff bulldozed it not long after.

Lemme see if I got you straight: Deep South Georgia town is invaded by militant, anti-government, African-American, child molesting cult. End game is no shots fired and cult leader convicted in a court of law and serves time in prison.

But it's the sheriff that's crazy.

Que?
posted by kjs3 at 8:41 PM on October 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


Wow. I'd never heard a thing about this story. Probably because it didn't end in the government coming in with guns a blazing and the murder of innocents. Every time there's a Waco or Ruby Ridge, it's evidence that the jackbooted FBI thugs are coming for your law abiding ass, when most of the time they're quietly doing their job.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 7:32 AM on October 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


But it's the sheriff that's crazy.

Going through the whole article now. Sills, the sheriff in question, went to any disturbance involving the cult to make sure his deputies didn't shoot anyone, and refused to send them out in riot gear when they threatened a major disturbance at a court case involving their leader in order to help keep things peaceful.

Also:

After York was released, he told his followers that peace had been made. But Nuwaubians continued to monitor Sills, even accosting him on the street during a family trip to Atlanta, the sheriff said. He became convinced that the Nuwaubians were trying to bait the police department into violence. “I think [York] wanted a Waco-type incident, but he didn’t want to be around when the bullets started flying,” Sills told me, his voice taut with old frustration. “They did every fucking thing they could to start an altercation.”

Sills seems pretty darn enlightened by the standards of the office. We could use a lot more like him. I hope he goes far.
posted by JHarris at 8:02 PM on October 30, 2016 [2 favorites]


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