Authors: Elissa Wall
Had it not been for Mom’s intervention, the situation could have turned far more serious. She’d noticed that I wasn’t eating my meals and immediately took steps to correct the problem. Mom recognized how this was hurting my spirit and lovingly assured me that no matter what anyone else was saying, I was special and beautiful and didn’t need to be ashamed of myself. I was just a normal young teenager struggling to find my place in a house full of teenage girls.
The problems didn’t end with my weight. Every time I spoke about my father, the other girls in the house teased me, apparently deriving pleasure from informing me that he wasn’t my father anymore. I’d been involved in several heated arguments over the weeks and had simply refused to abandon Dad or agree that he was a wicked man.
“You just watch,” they’d say in rebuttal. “Your mom’s going to marry Fred.”
I should have realized that they were speaking from experience, as it had already happened to them and their mothers. Nevertheless, I refused to let go of my hope that somehow we’d all be reunited.
Finally came the day when the idle gossip became real. After helping some of the other Jessop girls pick corn from the community garden, we all had just arrived back at the house when one of Fred’s daughters approached me.
“Your mom’s going to marry Father,” she said in a know-it-all tone.
“No she’s not,” I quickly retorted, trying my best to sound sure of myself. “We’re going to go home someday.”
I was not going to give up on my dad. If Mom really did become Uncle Fred’s wife, it would mean that all of her children would then belong to Uncle Fred, and from the day of their wedding forward we would have to address him as Father. As far as the church was concerned, the man who had raised me, the man I had loved and called Dad for thirteen years, would no longer be my father. We could no longer even think of him in that way. In fact, we could no longer think of him at all. If Mom and Uncle Fred married, we’d literally belong to Fred Jessop and be expected to immediately transfer our love and loyalty to him.
It would also mean we would have to drop our proud family name of Wall and take on the last name Jessop. When a woman and her children were passed from one man to another—regardless of the reason—they were forced to forsake the legacy of the father, as though he had never existed. Warren preached that when a family remarried to another man, God changed their blood and DNA to match that of the priesthood man they now belonged to. If we did not have worthy blood running through our veins, we could not gain entrance into the kingdom of heaven.
But I didn’t want a new name or new DNA, and I most certainly didn’t want a new dad. I wanted my old dad, and the thought of these things taking place was incomprehensible. And I wasn’t going to allow it.
Upset after yet another confrontation with the girls of the house, I ran upstairs to see Mom. Pushing open the bedroom door, I found her standing before a mirror trying on what appeared to be an unfinished wedding dress as my sister Kassandra altered it. I was stunned and completely speechless. In one moment the realization that she was indeed going to marry Fred hit me. For weeks, my relationship with my mother had been a bit strained, and the fact that I was entering my teens only fractured our already weakened mother-daughter bond. It was too much for me to come to grips with the fact that Mom would give up on Dad, but there she was standing in front of me, preparing to marry someone else as though my father no longer existed. As I stared at her, all my hopes were shattered. There was a familiar sparkle in her soft brown eyes that had been missing for quite a while, a sparkle that contained hope and said that everything was going to be okay. Those were emotions that I hadn’t felt in myself for a long time.
Too devastated to say a word, I raced onto the house’s large balcony, where I found solace in a wicker porch swing. When I calmed down, Mom explained that Uncle Rulon had directed her to marry Uncle Fred, but I was livid. She hadn’t even taken the time to tell me. Hearing it from the house rumor mill had made it that much more difficult to swallow. The news was even worse for my two brothers Brad and Caleb. Life in Short Creek was very hard for them, and without the twins, they had banded together to survive. Brad and Caleb shared my feelings about Mom being married, and the idea of becoming another man’s children was something they could not accept.
Not long after my discovery, Rachel joined Kassandra at the Jessop house to help us make dresses for the ceremony. In the days that followed, everyone in the household was nice to us. While I hated to admit it, it felt good to be noticed and included in things for a change. Mom’s marriage to Uncle Fred would elevate our status in the home to actual children of the church bishop as opposed to “refugees.”
I was heartbroken as I stood in the living room of Uncle Rulon’s house that September 2, 1999, and watched my mother passed on to another man. On the outside, I was the picture of a beautiful priesthood child. My sisters had sewn my special pink gown with a three-inch lace sash at the waist, and my hair had been styled for the occasion by Felita, the well-known “Hair Queen of Hildale.” But inside I was falling apart. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t stop the tears from stinging my eyes. When the ceremony began, I beat myself up for having harbored angry feelings toward my father over things that had happened. Standing there, staring at my mother, I suddenly forgot any problems our family had ever had. All I could think was that we would never be reunited, and I deeply regretted not having cherished every moment we’d spent together. Had I known this was going to happen, I would have savored my times with Dad, and the whole family.
Uncle Fred looked old standing next to my mother, who was elegant in the delicate white lace gown my sisters had sewn for the occasion. It didn’t make any sense to me that Mom could become another man’s wife. How could she go from loving my dad for so long to suddenly loving Uncle Fred—all because of the prophet’s words? Even through the eyes of an FLDS child, those words were not enough to take away that love. The priesthood, God, the prophet—none of it could justify what was happening. Mom entered into this union out of hope for a better future for us all, because she truly believed that the prophet knew what was best for her and her children. It took a heavy toll on her as well, but it was hard for me to see that at the time.
I didn’t dare let on, but for a while I’d been wondering about aspects of our faith. I couldn’t understand how our family had ended up so fractured and why the Lord would take children away from their father. I struggled with the fact that Mom seemed happier and maybe even excited over her new placement as Fred Jessop’s wife. While the union had elevated her status in the family, it did little to ingratiate her to my brothers and me, but ultimately, we knew she had little choice. Since arriving in the Crick six weeks earlier, we hadn’t been allowed any contact with my dad. Every time I asked for an explanation, I was told that it was what Uncle Warren had directed. They said my father needed to repent and we did not need his influence in our lives. I know now that they were afraid if we talked with Dad he might ask us to go back and the priesthood could lose control of us. I was also upset that my mom hadn’t pushed harder to get Justin and Jacob to Hildale. It was like she’d abandoned both her husband and her children all in the name of God.
I listened as Uncle Warren sat at the right hand of the prophet reading a sermon. I held my breath, praying that Uncle Warren would not seal this union “for time and all eternity.” Sometimes, a couple is sealed merely for time, as is the case for a woman who has lost a husband to death and needs a caretaker on earth until she can join him in the Celestial Kingdom. I might have been able to accept the marriage had it been a union simply for “time.” That would mean that my brothers and I could still be with Dad in heaven. But that Uncle Warren had sealed her to Fred for “time and all eternity” took away any lingering hope of being reunited with my father in the next life.
Where we may have children who are leaning away, we must keep working them until they declare themselves against the Priesthood; and case by case, they are brought before the Prophet and handled.
—
WARREN JEFFS
W
e’d been living at the Jessop compound for a little more than three months when fear that the world was going to end became overwhelming. All our lives, it had been ingrained in us that we were to prepare for the “Great Destructions” and the redeeming of Zion. The new millennium was upon us, and we had been told that when it arrived, God was going to send destruction upon the world, and only the most worthy would be preserved.
Warren made it clear that the coming apocalypse, which had been the impetus to move the prophet to Short Creek, was going to occur soon. Speaking on behalf of his father, he commanded all FLDS members remaining in Salt Lake to move south so that all of God’s worthy chosen people could be one as we were lifted up to meet the Lord.
While the coming of Zion was supposed to be a good thing, I worried about how it was going to happen. As with many of our religious prophecies, I felt confused by it. We had all been told that if we were not 100 percent pure inside, we risked being destroyed alongside the wicked. I reflected over my thirteen years and contemplated all of the times I had doubted my faith, all the times I had not been perfectly obedient or not kept perfectly sweet. Because of the times that I had questioned the word of the prophet since coming to Uncle Fred’s house, I knew that I was not 100 percent pure, and I was terrified.
Even with the apocalypse looming, there was a New Year’s Eve party at Uncle Fred’s house and several FLDS members who had passed through his home over the years as his “children” returned for the festivities. Despite the energy that filled the space, I could tell I was not alone in my worries. We popped a ton of popcorn for munching as we all waited for the moment when the Lord would descend.
As 2000 came and went and the world didn’t end, everyone was pretty confused. In the days ahead, Uncle Warren would tell us how lucky we were that God had blessed us with more time to prepare. Satisfied with the explanation, many of us went about our lives feeling gratitude for the reprieve, and the extra time to cleanse our souls.
Being a full member of Fred Jessop’s family soon lost its luster. While Uncle Fred preached in church that a father should reprimand his sons and daughters in private, he’d often hold my brothers and me up as examples during his prayer services at home. “Sharon, I don’t like the shirt your son is wearing,” he’d say to Mom in front of the entire family. On more than one occasion, he singled me out, correcting me in front of everyone for a variety of reasons: I wasn’t helping enough around the house, my clothes weren’t up to the dress code, or he didn’t like the music I was listening to in the privacy of my room. It seemed like nothing I did was acceptable to him. But sooner or later, he would make all of my family fall in line.
The music in particular became a point of contention. At Fred’s home, as in other FLDS homes, it was preferred that we listen to Uncle Warren’s tapes, including his home-economics classes or church-distributed music. While I listened to those tapes over and over, I also had classical music that I had been listening to all my life, which was comforting to me and helped me to relax. Even that small outside influence was too much for the Jessop household, and Fred made no attempt to hide his disdain for my choices. This would have been hard in any environment, but what made life in the Jessop home so unbearable was that it was impossible to trust any other family members. One time, another mother went so far as to hide in Mom’s closet to spy on us and catch us listening to “worldly” music. When I noticed her behind some dresses, she became very upset with me for questioning her authority. She didn’t feel that she’d done anything wrong and in fact got me in trouble for the incident. In response, Fred demanded to see our entire music collection and threw out any titles he deemed “worldly.”
Incidents like this made it that much harder to accept Uncle Fred as my new father, and the sting of his corrections did not seem to go away. Ultimately he struck at the one thing I loved about my new life—school. It all started when one of my new stepsisters tattled on me to Uncle Fred for having a friendship with a boy at school. Austin Barlow had been nice to me in class when I was still “the new kid” struggling to fit in, and throughout the year, we shared many classes, developing a friendship in the process. He was the first boy I’d ever met who didn’t make fun of me. It was a new experience for me not to have so many restrictions and to be able to forge an actual friendship with a boy. Being treated kindly by someone of the opposite sex felt good, and for a time I even had a secret crush on him, though it was never anything more than an innocent schoolgirl feeling.
Still, my associations with Austin became a source of great pain when my stepsisters saw us talking after school one day. One of them felt it was her duty to report it to Fred. That night Uncle Fred stood me up in front of the entire family during prayer time and reprimanded me for these boy-girl relations that would “taint” my future. I hung my head in shame as he made me feel so guilty for something I hadn’t even done. I tried to get a word in, but he refused to stop the tirade, forcing me to defend myself against his accusations.
“Did you kiss him?” he demanded.
“No way,” I insisted with a trembling voice, as every pair of eyes in the room bore a hole through me. “I would never even touch him.”
But for all my denials, Uncle Fred wouldn’t let it go. I wanted to run and hide as my cheeks grew fiery from the embarrassment. I already felt like an outcast, but now I was on a life raft all by myself.
Until then, school had been my lone refuge from the chaos of the Jessop house. It was the one place I felt safe. Back at Alta Academy, I had always been afraid of Uncle Warren. His critical eye was always upon us, and any minor infraction would be taken very seriously. In this new school, I felt free in a way I never had before. Because it was a public school, the principal was not required to adhere to the strict mandates of the FLDS Church. With some room to breathe, I grew comfortable in my own skin and enjoyed socializing with children from polygamous sects outside of my faith.