Authors: Elissa Wall
What helped families like ours stay under the radar in Salt Lake was the fact that our numbers were few and we were all scattered throughout the Salt Lake Valley. At the time, there were about ninety FLDS families residing in the area, and if we had all lived together in the same location, our way of life may have drawn more attention and brought repercussions from the state government.
My father was beaming that Saturday night as he sat at the head of the dinner table. On either side of him sat his two wives, the mothers of the family, who would have to make room for one more at their table. Sharon, my biological mother, was my father’s second wife. Audrey, my father’s first wife, was known to me as Mother Audrey. The atmosphere was filled with excitement as we looked at one another with the expectation of a good future. My father’s face seemed to swell with pride as we talked about how we would prepare for the ceremony and make room for our new mother. My older sister Rachel and some of my other family members began preparing a song that we children would sing in honor of our new mother’s arrival.
But when the revelry of the night gave way to the realities of daylight, the anxiety of the situation became palpable. Receiving another mother into the family is supposed to be a wonderful, joyous occasion; we had always been taught that this was a gift from God to be celebrated and revered. But beneath our outward joy, a larger, ominous tension lurked, as no one—not my father, my mother, Mother Audrey, or my siblings—was sure how this would impact the volatile chemistry that was already at work in our house.
F
or as long as I could remember, there had been an undercurrent of contention and unrest in our family. The relationship between Mother Audrey and my mother was complex and often fraught with misunderstanding as their natural feelings of insecurity and jealousy created problems for us all. Trying to coexist in a single-family home with multiple children and two women sharing the same husband had presented challenges that began soon after my mother arrived more than twenty-five years earlier.
Dad met Audrey when he was fifteen. They attended the same high school and traveled there on the same bus. Dad was class president and a football star in his junior year at Carbon High School when a friend set him up with Audrey, a beautiful and vibrant senior. Audrey was smart, educated, and outgoing. The chemistry was right, and they became sweethearts, marrying in August of 1954.
Since neither was raised in the FLDS Church, they came to the faith by chance. After Dad and Audrey had been married for several years, Audrey’s parents converted to the fundamentalist religion. Eager to bring them back to mainstream Mormonism, Dad and Audrey began to study the FLDS religion to learn all that they could about the faith. At the time the church was still known as the Work, and Dad and Audrey’s plan was to scrutinize The Work’s teachings and find its flaws, but instead found themselves swayed to its views.
A few years after joining the FLDS, my father saw my mother, the woman who would become his second wife, through a chance encounter during a trip down to southern Utah. Dad’s training as a geologist made him a valuable resource to the FLDS community, and at that time he’d been working a lot with the main community in the twin border cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, helping them to find sources of potable water.
My mom grew up in an FLDS family in southern Utah and was a member of the church choir. My father first noticed her during a service he attended one Sunday, as she sat with the choir waiting to perform. She bent down and whispered something to her father, Newel Steed, the conductor of the choir, and the slight movement caught my Dad’s attention.
Dad later told me that at that moment, he heard a voice telling him, “Sharon Steed belongs to you as your next wife and you will speak next.” Dad was extremely surprised when he was called up to the podium just minutes later to address the people. Men of the FLDS are taught they hold power to receive some direct revelation from God and Dad believed this was God’s message to him. Following church teachings at the time, my father returned to Salt Lake City and began to pray about his revelation. To his amazement, a few months after he arrived back in Salt Lake, Audrey told him about her own revelation. She had dreamt that a woman named Sharon Steed belonged to their family, and she asked Dad if he knew who she was. Up until this point, my father hadn’t told anyone about his revelation, so hearing this from Audrey was a surprise. That day, he told her about Sharon and they began to pray together.
More than a year passed and nothing happened. Soon afterward, Dad heard that Sharon was going to be placed with another man. Disappointed and worried that he had misunderstood the revelation, he confided in Audrey’s brother, who suggested that Dad speak to the man who was then the head of the church—the prophet Leroy S. Johnson, commonly referred to as “Uncle Roy.” (In the FLDS religion, the term “uncle” is commonly used to refer to the patriarchs and presiding leaders and conveys endearment and respect.) During his conversation with Uncle Roy, Dad learned that there was no marriage planned for Sharon, and the prophet directed him to go home and pray so that Uncle Roy could “take it up with the Lord.”
When it comes to marriage, members practice something called the Law of Placement, in which all marriages are decided by the prophet and based on a revelation that he receives from God. Everything the prophet proclaims is said to be the word of God, and thus if he directs a union, it is akin to God commanding the union.
Several weeks after his conversation with Uncle Roy, during one of Dad and Audrey’s visits to southern Utah, the revelatory word came from the prophet. At the direction of Uncle Roy, Dad and Audrey drove to the home where my mom lived with her family to make an introduction. Mom was in the living room when they arrived, and not knowing what was about to take place, she rose to leave when her father instructed her to stay and meet her husband-to-be. My mother had already been told of the prophet’s placement for her, but when nothing immediately happened she worried she would not be married because traditionally, marriages are “sealed” by the prophet within days, and sometimes hours, of a revelation.
My parents were married that very same day. With no time to sew a wedding dress, Mom made do by wearing her favorite pale pink dress for the ceremony. That night, she was on her way to Salt Lake City to start a new life with my father and Mother Audrey in their six-bedroom house on the “benches” of the Wasatch Mountains.
This would be one of the first nights my mother had ever spent away from her large family. Though it was a difficult and sudden change, her steadfast faith allowed her to see it as positive. The union represented an important milestone: the prophet had found a place where she could start to build a new family. More than anything, Mom was thankful to have been placed.
My mother came of age during a time when the local authorities in southern Utah and northern Arizona were very committed to ending plural marriages. For a time, her father, my Grandpa Newel, had become a target of routine raids, with police turning up unannounced at his ranch in hopes of finding plural wives. As a result, much of her childhood was spent hiding her family’s polygamous living arrangement from authorities and moving between Utah and Arizona to evade detection and capture. In an effort to avoid arrest and possible imprisonment, Grandpa Newel had begun stashing the women and children in various locations around the region. My mother was sent to live in a home near the Arizona border, where some of her siblings could attend school. However, authorities somehow learned of their location, and an anonymous call was placed to my biological grandmother, Alice, alerting her to their knowledge and offering friendship and a way out. Much to the astonishment of law enforcement, none of Grandpa’s wives were unhappy or seeking help. In fact, all five of his wives wanted little more than to be left in peace to live out their lives according to their religious teachings and beliefs. It has often been said that Grandpa Newel and his family were a model to be followed by all.
As traumatic as the moving around and evading authorities might seem, it only made my mother’s faith more entrenched. She firmly believed in the traditions of plural marriage and the teachings of the church, and her positive experience growing up shaped every part of her outlook. Whenever she spoke of her childhood, her voice resonated with affection—even when she spoke of the family’s persecution. Nostalgic stories of living on her father’s ranch would mix with dramatic scenes of evading capture, leaving me scared and imparting the clear lesson that all strangers—especially the police—were not to be trusted. One story in particular about my mother and her young siblings crawling through a hole in the backyard fence of their “safe house” near the Arizona border to escape the authorities always sent my stomach lurching. I would sit there listening and imagining how terrified she must have been, a little girl out there in the dead of night squeezing through a fence to escape the officers who’d come to round up her family. Mom used stories like this one to deepen the faith of her own children, and to help us to understand why it was so important to keep our lifestyle hidden from outsiders—particularly outside law-enforcement officials.
At the time of her wedding, Mom was only eighteen years old, while Audrey was thirty-three. Despite their age difference, Audrey eagerly anticipated the addition of another wife to the family, thinking that she would have a confidante and a friend. However, it was soon apparent that the different ways in which the two women had been raised made it difficult for them to understand and appreciate each other. Although Audrey’s parents were converts to the FLDS religion, Audrey herself had grown up in a monogamous household. When my mother became the second wife, it was the first time that Audrey had ever experienced a plural marriage firsthand.
Understandably, having a much younger woman come into her home and share her husband’s love brought up strong feelings of resentment and deep jealousy for Audrey. She was Dad’s first wife and first love. She had established a home and family with my father and had been his mate for nearly fifteen years before my mother arrived. My mother was talented and beautiful and had youth on her side. She could cook and sew and was very artistic with a gift for painting that she inherited from my grandmother. Sharon was known for her lovely singing voice and vibrant personality. With soft brown eyes that revealed the kindness in her soul, she appeared to captivate my father. That my mother was brought into the family by a revelation from God only seemed to make her union with Dad more significant and intimidating to Audrey.
There were also practical issues. Audrey had always played an integral role in the family’s financial planning and had a clear idea of how money should be spent. It seemed that in Audrey’s opinion, Mom had left her home a child and had no experience with budgeting for a family.
My mother, in turn, had her own feelings of inadequacy. Audrey had a long-established, strong relationship with my dad; she’d borne his children and knew his wants and desires. As first wife, Audrey had primacy, which elevated her in the eyes of my father and gave her authority. Later I realized Mom saw Audrey’s concerns over the household budget as demeaning and felt she was trying to monitor her spending. Mom had never had money be such a contentious element in her life. Growing up on a self-sustaining farm, money didn’t have the same kind of relevance. Her family had little but made do, living frugally. Still, everyone was content and provided for. In Salt Lake, Mom tended a garden in our backyard, and harvested fruit and vegetables for the family. She was unaccustomed to having to provide reasons for items she felt she needed to care for herself and her children. It was even harder when the questions were coming from a sister wife.
As the years went on and their families grew, these problems and insecurities did not fade away, but only amplified. Even after my mother began to have kids of her own, the two women were often at odds over everything from raising children to the affections of their husband. Each woman suffered doubts about the household as she tried to practice her individual parenting style and run a house full to the brim with children. To make matters worse, each mother felt that the other’s children were being treated better than her own. Frequently, communication between Mom and Mother Audrey was strained with my mother taking the onslaught to prevent further conflict. Neither had total authority over the household, and both seemed to feel somehow robbed of the chance to be in charge of their own home.
Growing up, I always heard differing sides to the story, and blame for the problems in the family was always being passed around. By the time I came along, my brothers and sisters were older and the dynamic in the household had changed significantly. For my elder siblings, memories, as well as their understanding of the source of the troubles, varied tremendously depending on their age and involvement in the family strife. From my perspective, there seemed to be frequent fights among various family members that often resulted in raised voices and angry tones. It seemed like both mothers constantly pointed out each other’s faults, with one accusing the other of a lack of cooperation and disrespect toward the children. Each complained of being overworked, and each felt that she was carrying the heavier load. As Sharon’s daughter, I naturally tended to support my mother’s point of view. I looked up to and adored my mother and strove to be just like her.
Mother Audrey liked a tidy house, and she tried to create an organized system for family members to accomplish their individual responsibilities. In theory, it was a good idea, but with so many people in the home it was hard to keep track of everyone’s role. Although the chores did somehow get done, the strained communications in the family prevented repeated attempts to implement a workable system. Despite the flaws, there were moments the family took pleasure in working together. We all knew the faster we finished, the sooner we could play and escape the inevitable complaints that our jobs had not been completed to satisfaction.