Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer (3 page)

My grandmother Jenny was one of the buffers between us and our mother’s volatility. I learned early on as a child to be a barometer for my mother’s mood swings. Her moods could change hour to hour; I always had to pay attention to which frame of mind she was in and adapt accordingly. But Grandma gave Mother some breathing room, especially when the smaller children were driving her crazy. Whatever my mother’s mental issues were, she was overall a much better mother than many of the women in the community. Grandma came over almost every day and helped care for us. If she got to our house early enough in the morning, there would be no spankings.

My grandmother was in her mid-sixties. I think she always seemed so much older to me because she was in very poor health. Women age rapidly in the FLDS. Most have hard lives and often a dozen or more children. Women look okay in their thirties and then age dramatically in their forties. My mother was the youngest of Grandma’s ten children and was born late in Grandma’s life, so my grandmother was very, very old when I knew her. She was heavyset, wrinkled, and worn. Her hair was gray and her eyes were bad, but her spirit was strong and she could tell a story like no one else.

I remember sitting in her lap for hours as she told me stories about the Old West and the southern states before the Civil War. Grandma’s husband had died when my mother was two years old. My grandmother—who came from polygamist bloodlines—then was married to an apostle in the FLDS and became part of a plural marriage for the first time. My grandmother believed plural marriage was the most sacred aspect of our faith and told me story after story about how the Mormon Church had been the church of God until it abandoned polygamy.

She told me with great pride that her great-grandfather, Benjamin F. Johnson, was one of the first men whom the prophet Joseph Smith introduced to the holy principle of celestial marriage in the nineteenth century. (Smith was rumored to have had between thirty-three and forty-eight wives himself. It’s been said that his youngest wife was fourteen when they married.)

The principle of celestial marriage is what defines the FLDS faith. A man must have multiple wives if he expects to do well in heaven, where he can eventually become a god and wind up with his own planet.

A man has spirit wives in heaven, where he fathers spirit children. (Becoming a spirit child is the first step on the journey in coming to earth.) We also held fast to the belief that our father was once a spirit and then came to earth to get a body and try to prove that he is worthy enough to become a god. Grandma said that the prophet had to be very careful about whom he shared this information with because several men had turned against him when he introduced them to this holy covenant of marriage.

So with deep feeling she told me how my great-great-great-grandfather became one of the first men to live the principle of celestial marriage, which is only given to God’s most chosen. It was not for everyone. The prophet Joseph Smith said that this one principle would condemn more men than it would save. But it worked for my great-great-great-great-grandfather, who had seven wives. His sons had many wives, too, and according to Grandma, the principle of celestial marriage had been a blessing to all in our family who practiced it.

I felt like the luckiest little girl to be one of God’s elite and a spirit who was the most chosen of all his spirits before I came to earth. Proof of that was that I had been born into a faithful bloodline. I was FLDS royalty. The culture really believes in the value of bloodlines. Only a spirit who was strong and worthy would be selected to be born into one of the royal lines.

Understand that we were taught to believe we were better than everyone else in the entire world because of our beliefs. Since I had been selected to come to such a royal bloodline, my grandmother told me that I had the chance to become a goddess if I lived polygamy and proved worthy. It was our own version of the Cinderella story. Just having the opportunity to live in a plural marriage was sold to me as a special blessing that few would ever have.

Grandma explained that our family always held fast to the principle of celestial marriage, especially after the Mormon Church issued a manifesto against it in the 1890s. Fearing prosecution, her family fled to Mexico with other Mormons who were devoted to polygamy and determined to keep practicing it. When she was ten years old her family came back to the United States. The official policy of the Mormon Church became, and still is, that those who practice polygamy are not in harmony with God.

But the adherents who believed polygamy was a requirement for their salvation began a fundamentalist movement in the early years of the twentieth century. The grassroots movement slowly gained strength, and it was several years before it became an actual organization, complete with a prophet.

The first fundamentalist prophet claimed his authority through John Taylor, who was considered the third leader of the Mormon Church after Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. It was believed that while John Taylor was in hiding, he was given the keys to the priesthood. As the story goes, he was visited one night by Jesus Christ, who told him that the principle of celestial marriage was to be preserved at all costs. Since there would be opposition to this, the priesthood would have to go into hiding. Christ made it clear to Taylor that the keys to the priesthood were being taken away from the mainstream Mormon Church. Christ told John Taylor that after he died the keys to the priesthood would go to someone other than the next in line in the Mormon Church. They would go to a man who would honor the sacred covenant of celestial marriage and from then on, God would be working only with his most elite children.

Even after the manifesto, the Mormon Church allowed members to live in plural marriage as long as a man did not have more than two wives. Anyone who tried to marry more than two ran the risk of excommunication. That changed in the early 1920s, when the Mormons tried to get rid of polygamy altogether and soon began excommunicating anyone who practiced plural marriage.

Listening to my grandmother talk, I felt like I was being rocked in a cradle of specialness. Grandma made me feel unique, but not in the traditional way. She taught me that I had been blessed by God with an opportunity to come into a family where generations of women had sacrificed their feelings and given up the things of this world to preserve the work of God and prove worthy of the celestial kingdom of God.

I was wide-eyed, thinking of all those women who were now in heaven, reaping the rewards of their earthly sacrifices. I was proud to be part of such an important tradition. As daughters of God, we were bound in a covenant before we came to earth. My grandmother explained that we had pledged to God that we would never do anything to undermine his work and would produce many children. There were thousands of chosen spirits waiting to come to earth. We were the women who would give birth to them. Grandma taught me that my sole purpose on earth was to have as many children as possible. God would reveal the name of the man he wanted me to marry by sending a revelation to the prophet.

To a little girl, this sounded important and thrilling. It was the one way in my life that I could feel special. Nothing explained why my mother beat me or why my parents argued all the time when my father came home. But Grandma made me feel as though I had been singled out for an important life. I didn’t question my parents’ behavior; it was a fact of life for me. Violence toward children was incorporated into our belief system, and it was very common in the community to see a mother slap one of her children, sometimes very hard. I knew my parents didn’t get along, but I didn’t really see many other parents who did. This was just the way our world worked; I had no way of making comparisons. But whatever happened at home, I knew in my heart that God thought I was special. I knew that the prophet would tell me whom to marry and then I’d produce as many babies as I could. Because I loved my grandmother so much and because this was presented to me as absolute truth, it would be years before I’d even begin to look at any of the premises my life was based upon.

The most dramatic story my grandmother ever told me was about the raid at Short Creek, Arizona, on July 26, 1953. The way she told it, the women of the FLDS rallied to protect the work of God. The raid is a key focal point of FLDS history. Grandma told us this story over and over, and it always began the same way—with her dream.

Several months before the raid, Grandma dreamed about being with her children in the back of a very old wagon. The prophet, Uncle Roy, was driving the wagon across an old, rickety bridge that was beginning to break apart from the weight of the wagon. Grandma could see that there was a deep ravine below them with a rushing river. She knew that if the bridge collapsed, they’d all be lost forever.

But the wagon made it safely to the other side. She knew, in her dream, that Uncle Roy had saved them and that he was the only man who could have done so.

Grandma said rumors were rampant that a raid was coming. She put my mother and aunt to bed that night in July and went to the schoolhouse to join in a prayer circle, asking God to keep the armies of the devil at bay.

A lookout was posted on the only road coming into town. The young man was supposed to warn the community if he saw the authorities coming by exploding several sticks of dynamite. The blast came. The state of Arizona had launched an invasion. Grandma said the lookout ran into town and fell at the feet of Uncle Roy, shouting, “They are coming, they’re coming, and there are hundreds of them!”

Out of the darkness came troops from the Arizona National Guard along with police and other local officials. They moved into Short Creek (which is now Colorado City) and began arresting men and women who practiced polygamy.

Uncle Roy was urged to flee but decided to stand firm. “My feet are tired of running and I intend to turn to God for protection.”

Grandpa Jessop, Grandma Jenny’s father-in-law, went out to meet the authorities and said, “What is it that you want? What have you come for? If it is blood you want, take mine, I’m ready.” He was an elderly man with a long white beard. Photographers snapped his picture as he stood up to the authorities.

Grandma described the harrowing scene as the troops tried to take babies out of their mothers’ arms. The children were wailing, the mothers were screaming, and newspaper photos the next morning captured the terrible images that turned public opinion in
favor
of the polygamists.

By the time the raid was over, 122 men and women had been arrested and 263 children had been identified to be seized from their polygamist families the next day. Everyone except the children was to be transported to Kingman, Arizona, which was four hundred miles away. The men went the first day, and buses came to take the children to Phoenix the next. The women were escorted from their homes, leaving behind bread baking in the oven and laundry hanging on the line. They were ordered to the schoolhouse and not allowed to bring even diapers for their babies. When the buses arrived, they were told they’d be separated from their children. The women revolted. The plan was to not only take the children but make them wards of the state and adopt them out to nonpolygamist families.

Ultimately, the state of Arizona relented. It feared the negative publicity, and it had also underestimated the number of children in the community. They did not have enough adults to care for that many children on the long bus ride to Phoenix, so in the end mothers were allowed to accompany their children.

Grandma had a brother in Phoenix who pressured the authorities into releasing her and her three children into his care. She told me that she stayed strong by remembering her dream. She had faith that Uncle Roy would find a way to save them, and he did.

Uncle Roy traveled to Phoenix and began doggedly tracking down all the children and their mothers. He forbade the women to testify about their marriages and started court proceedings of his own to counter Arizona’s action. In a move that perplexed everyone except those who believed Uncle Roy was getting messages from God, Uncle Roy told his lawyers to find the law that said children couldn’t be taken from their families without a parent’s consent. His attorneys scoffed at the notion that such a law existed. Uncle Roy said it did. Sure enough, a law on the books said just that, and the court case ended.

The Short Creek raid actually turned out to be a boon to the FLDS. It generated monumental sympathy for the cult. Once the court case was thrown out, everyone returned home and the practice of polygamy thrived.

But the sect became more secretive. People were afraid of the government and became much more guarded about their activities. The dress style became more conservative. No one could show any part of their bodies below the neck. Women were forbidden to wear pants.

Marriage also changed. Before the Short Creek raid, women were allowed to choose the men they wanted to marry. The problem was that when women had a say in choosing their own husbands, they chose men close to their own ages. Young women wanted to marry young men. That was bad news for an older man seeking younger wives to enhance his favor with God. The powerful men in the FLDS were older. They knew something had to change because when forced to compete with younger men, they routinely lost out.

They also feared that young men from outside the community would entice young women to live outside once they fell in love with them. The future of polygamy was in jeopardy before the Short Creek raid. Several women were thinking of leaving. Back then many women had family on the outside, so leaving was not frightening. Women had some choice. The men in power didn’t like it.

The Short Creek raid sabotaged the trust women had in the outside world. They now felt everyone was against them. They’d seen their terrified babies ripped from their arms. Uncle Roy stood up to the state of Arizona and won. He credited the victory in part to the faithfulness of women who would not turn against the system. The women then believed that they must be even more obedient to the prophet in the future. They were thinking of the terror of losing their children, not of surrendering their human rights, which is precisely what happened.