Authors: Elissa Wall
The front door opened onto the huge dining room, where the Jessop family was seated at two long tables holding about eighteen on each side as well as four shorter tables. Although I had been raised in what many would consider a very large family, there had never been anywhere near this many people seated in our dining room. I immediately spotted Uncle Fred at the head of one of the two long tables. The air was full of chatter and the inevitable clanging of a dish or squeal of a baby.
When we stepped inside, it was like something out of a movie: a hush fell over the noisy room and everyone stopped eating to look at us. The arrival of a family in trouble was nothing new to them. Indeed, many such women and children like us had found themselves here. Still, I felt terribly awkward and ashamed as I followed my mother to an enormous living room packed with couches and chairs arranged in rows. Like all FLDS families, the Jessops held prayer services in their home, and the sheer number of people in the house required the space to be large and specialized. Upon entering the huge oblong room, I was overcome by the strangeness of the place.
Weary from the emotional turmoil of the last several days, I took a seat close to my mother. A commotion drew my attention to the doorway, where some of Fred’s children were peeking in at us as if we were on display. Everyone was curious, and in the days ahead I would discover that many of Fred’s children had stories much like mine, but people hardly ever talked about them. In many ways, it felt like we were all a bunch of outcasts forced to put our pasts behind us and find our niche in this large mixed family.
During the ten minutes that it took for Uncle Fred to finish up his dinner, I soaked up my surroundings. Like many members of the FLDS, Uncle Fred had added to his home a number of times over the years as his family grew. The room that we were in was part of his original home, but I could tell that it had been recently updated with new carpet and a fresh coat of paint. Vaulted ceilings and large windows lent the room an open feel, much like the Claybourne house that Dad had remodeled for us. In the center was a big, comfy-looking La-Z-Boy chair that I was certain belonged to Uncle Fred.
Sure enough, when he shuffled in, he made himself at home in that very seat. Out of respect, we all rose and one by one shook his hand. I was initially intimidated by the way he stared at us, and I didn’t speak a word. Finally, a grin formed on his face and in a jovial tone, shaking his head, he mused to all of us, “What am I going to do with you?”
Even though his manner was kind, I was intimidated by him. This was the typical dynamic between women and children and church elders, especially men in a position of leadership. Fred Jessop had been assigned to be our caretaker until the prophet could decide where we belonged, and it was clear that he took the role seriously from his effort to set us at ease. Motioning one of his wives to join us, he instructed her to check on our accommodations and make sure things were ready. Then he invited a handful of his young daughters to gather around us and introduce themselves. We sat among them as Uncle Fred regaled us with a few stories of his youth before sending us to the second floor to settle in for the night. He’d graciously offered us a meal, but we were all too numb to eat and went to bed that night with empty stomachs and heavy hearts.
We were given two rooms in the south wing. Brad and Caleb shared one room, while Mom, my younger sisters Sherrie and Ally, and I moved into the larger room, which had a queen bed for them and a small pullout chair for me. Both rooms were at the end of a long hallway with a door leading to a small terrace where we could sit outside and enjoy dramatic views of the Vermilion Cliffs encircling the community like fortress walls. At first I found the scorched red landscape too grating to enjoy, but with time, I came to appreciate the raw beauty of the rugged crimson mountains that surrounded us.
I was miserable those first few nights and cried myself to sleep. I begged my mother to take us home, and I was so confused about what was happening to us. Nobody would explain to me why Uncle Warren and the prophet had ripped us away again, and I would not know what had actually happened until many years later.
Though I was incredibly homesick, I held out hope that Short Creek would prove a welcome home. I had so many positive associations with it from all of the years of summer festivals and FLDS gatherings. Hildale was the place where we didn’t have to hide our lifestyle within the confines of our house and backyard. I found myself drifting into daydreams and remembering Pioneer Day celebrations from years past, envisioning how much fun it would be to encounter that kind of communal spirit on a daily basis. One of the centerpieces of Pioneer Day was a parade. It was an important and eagerly anticipated community event and every member worked hard to contribute. Beautiful floats, lines of marching boys, and groups of girls dancing to music would stretch for a good mile through the center of town, where everyone would line the streets to watch. The sheer number of people attending was astonishing.
There were a couple of years when I had the excitement of being one of the dancing girls. My sisters Kassandra and Rachel were in charge of the choreography for this and many other community performances. Their artistic and musical talents earned them a degree of respect in the community. For weeks before the parade, hundreds of girls would gather to rehearse the steps my sisters had helped to arrange until they had them down perfectly. It was impressive to see row after row of girls dressed alike performing their routines in precise harmony as they twirled their way along the town’s roads.
Like the dancing girls, the marching boys or Sons of Helaman would meet weeks before to prepare for their biggest performance of the year. Uncle Rulon’s Sons of Helaman was a program to teach young boys unity and discipline. During the summer break, the boys of the community would meet to learn and practice military-inspired marching. Each platoon was directed by a church elder, who was to act as leader and mentor. Every Monday at dawn you could hear the steps of hundreds of boys marching to commands. It was an honor to every young man to earn a place in this assembly. The boys performed their carefully timed formations at many community functions.
After the morning parade, everyone would go to Cottonwood Park, where there was a large breakfast spread set up in a carefully manicured spot planted with greenery and lined with picnic tables. Donations to fund the breakfast were accepted but not required, and no one was meant to feel excluded. FLDS families cooked up every kind of breakfast fare imaginable. For me, this had always been a welcome change from the typical morning offerings of lumpy oatmeal that lined the counter of our long kitchen island.
Throughout the day the people would socialize and enjoy one another’s company. The children were free to let their imaginations run, while adults could take a day off from the daily grind. Laughing children weaved their way through the crowd and played for hours on the playground. The park had an actual working mini-train, and standing in line for a ride, I could barely contain my excitement.
The day would come to a close with a community dance held in the Leroy S. Johnson Meeting House, an enormous Colonial-inspired structure—it spanned the entire block—that my father had helped to design. The dances were far from modern—we did the waltz, the two-step, and square dances. You could feel the energy in the air at the sight of twirling girls in flowing dresses and boys in their best Sunday suits. These special events were the only time that physical contact between members of the opposite sex could take place. We were allowed to chose our own partners and touch just enough to be able to perform the dance steps. When the night came to a close, we had to view each other as poisonous reptiles once again.
After summer’s warmth had vanished and the children had all been in school for over two months, Octoberfest provided a reprieve from the daily routine. Much of the potatoes, dairy products, and meat consumed by community members were raised on the farm of Parley Harker, which was homesteaded in Bural, many miles outside of town. This was a time when many could come together to help harvest the crops we would consume throughout the year. The event, also dubbed Harvest Fest, was one of the most anticipated celebrations of the FLDS, with festivities lasting for three or four days, ending with Saturday work projects.
Much like the summer events, Harvest Fest days were spent at the park, where all could enjoy food and musical entertainment. Some of the stores in town closed early to celebrate, and many families participated in the organized program set for each day. The park was lined with booths offering every food item a child could dream up—candied apples, pie, cotton candy, popcorn, canned items and homemade knickknacks. Harvest Fest even allowed an annual football game for men and older boys, held in Maxwell Park, a huge sod field where there was also a baseball diamond. It was one of the few chances for men from all of the FLDS communities to come together to enjoy the raw aggression of a contact sport. Women were prohibited, of course, even from attending as spectators. Still, some of the older girls would drive by slowly enough to take an unnoticed peak from the road while “pretending” to be en route to another activity.
While I knew that these were special occasions, I still held out hope that the communal atmosphere that permeated those days would carry over to the rest of the year. There weren’t many things about the move to Hildale that I had to look forward to, but the hope of finally fitting in was one of them.
It didn’t take long for this optimism to fade. Trying to mesh with the home’s many occupants at Uncle Fred’s proved quite difficult for my family. Dad had raised us differently from the way many of the children in Fred’s home were raised. We’d grown up exposed to non-FLDS people, and Dad shared my mother’s desire to educate us in music. It had always been Mom’s dream to play the violin, and even though it wasn’t encouraged, Mom had the tenacity to seek out musical instruction for her children, developing in us all a deep love and appreciation of classical music. I remember from my youngest years her efforts to expose us to the world of music, taking us to concerts, the symphony, and instrumental performances in Salt Lake. As busy as my father was, he had always tried to find time for family, whether it was picnics, camping trips, or family music lessons. And since Dad traveled so much, we’d learned about other places in the world from his stories.
The breadth of our experiences was quite different from what most people in Hildale had grown up with. For my siblings and me, life in the closed community of Short Creek gave us something of a culture shock. Until we moved, I’d never realized just how isolated the people who lived there really were. Complicating matters was the fact that there was a trace of skepticism about us because we were from Salt Lake. Growing up, I’d always sensed an undercurrent of competition between the communities of Salt Lake City and Hildale/Colorado City, and as the days turned to weeks, that silent rivalry I’d felt as a visitor seemed to take root in Fred Jessop’s home.
It seemed that almost from the very first day, the other mothers living in the house kept close tabs on all of us, including Mom. My brothers and I were often singled out and humiliated for the kind of small incidents that would be ignored when they involved other members of the household. Uncle Fred had no qualms about shining a spotlight on us during prayer services when he felt we’d done something wrong. It felt to us like the people in Fred’s home were trying to break our spirits in order to make us conform more strictly to the FLDS religion as they knew it. Even so, I held on to my belief that the spunk which had gotten us into trouble so many times in the past was also what would help us to stay strong and true to ourselves.
S
everal days after we’d settled in, I began the eighth grade at the public junior high school in Colorado City. It was so exciting to join the public school, and from the moment I first arrived, I loved my time there because it kept my mind off my family situation. Every day, I rode to and from school in one of Fred Jessop’s family vans with other kids from his family because Uncle Fred’s house was so far up the hill that there was no bus stop nearby. At the end of the day, Mom would pick us up from school. Those trips home were just about the only moments when we were all together with no one from the Jessop family around, and we cherished that time. On the days when she couldn’t come, sometimes I would walk the couple of miles back home after school, taking the opportunity to enjoy time by myself before returning to the bustle of Uncle Fred’s house.
Almost all of our school’s administration and teachers and most of my classmates were FLDS members, but unlike the curriculum at Alta Academy, which was rooted in our religious teachings, the coursework at Colorado City School District #14 conformed more to state mandates. Those who were not FLDS were from the surrounding area, including members of the Centennial Group. Being able to mix with kids outside of the FLDS religion was a wonderful change. I quickly found friendship with a girl from the Centennial Group named Lea, but the long-standing feud between the two sects prevented me from socializing with her outside of school. By church declaration the members of the Centennial Group were apostates, and I was not to associate with them.
As I became more accustomed to life in Short Creek, I was lucky to find a very dear friend who was also an FLDS member. Her name was Natalie, and she was one of the most enjoyable people I’d ever met. She was the first young person in Hildale who seemed to accept me as I was—something that I’d been unable to find in Uncle Fred’s home. For the first time since I’d arrived, I felt I could trust someone, and I finally started to come out of my protective shell and blossom.
Friends weren’t the only thing that I liked about school. Public school opened my eyes to a varied curriculum that gave me a thirst for learning. Given the focus on religious learning at Alta Academy, I had missed out on several important subjects. And had to struggle to catch up to my grade level. With so many distractions at home, at first I had a hard time with the rigors of public school, but with the help of my science teacher, David Bateman, I felt my eyes open up to a whole new academic world. I had never really studied science at school, and Mr. Bateman challenged me to come up to par, and even spent extra time helping me to discover science at work in the world around me. We had our fair share of difficulties and teacher-student arguments, but I loved his class and he became my favorite teacher. I also developed a love of writing and history and found that I was good at both. I finally started to adjust to my new school life, although I found it impossible to adapt to my new home. Since arriving at Fred’s house, I’d endured weeks of backstabbing and name-calling from the other girls in the home. My near-fatal reaction to the anesthetic during my “attempted” tonsillectomy had resulted in a number of lingering effects. One was the retention of water, and that, coupled with the baby fat I’d always had, had contributed to the little bit of pudge I’d put on over the months. Being a bit heavier had placed me at the center of cruel taunts, as some of Uncle Fred’s daughters looked to cut me down. With fifteen girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen living in the home, it had become like a dormitory with various cliques forming and relentless teasing everywhere. I was already very self-conscious about my appearance, and their comments only made it worse. I was so hurt and humiliated that I began starving myself to lose weight.