Authors: Elissa Wall
That he would sign his full name to such a note only confirmed how contradictory his words and actions were. We were still strangers to each other. As hard as I had tried, I couldn’t make myself love him, and more than ever I was convinced I never would. No matter how many times he professed his love for me, I knew that you don’t hurt people that you love. The way he was treating me I felt like he viewed me not as a partner and equal, but as a possession. Something deep in my heart knew that no man, woman, or child should be anyone’s chattel and be robbed of their God-given free will.
Over the next few weeks, I was able to gain some distance from Allen. I had been working two jobs, one as a health aide to the handicapped infant that my mother cared for. Another was as a dressmaker. I had befriended the owner of the local fabric shop, and she and her daughters had agreed to sell my creations on consignment in her Hildale boutique. I’d always had a talent for sewing and had begun putting it to good use making dresses for girls. My profits were about twenty dollars apiece. Soon I was getting special orders, and I was grateful to be less dependent on Allen for money.
W
hen Teressa arrived from Canada for a visit in late spring of 2002, she could see how upset I was. Without hope about my marriage, I felt dark, empty, and lifeless. Teressa knew that something needed to change, and she insisted to both my mother and me that I speak to Uncle Warren again.
In the coming weeks, I set up another appointment, but when Uncle Warren stepped out into the waiting room, he was unhappy to see that Allen wasn’t with me. I had brought my mother instead.
“I want to speak to you without Allen present,” I told him nervously, relieved when he agreed to hear me.
“How are you doing?” he asked as Mom and I took a seat, and we began to engage in small talk. But Uncle Warren was direct and quickly moved the conversation along. “What do you need?”
I outlined the reason for my visit. “Well, it’s been an entire year, and I have tried to be obedient and submit to Allen. But I am still nowhere, and I don’t trust Allen and I most definitely don’t love him. I don’t feel like I can continue to be his wife, let alone have his children.”
After a long pause, Uncle Warren asked me about my mother. “What is your relationship like with your mother?”
“Well,” I said, smiling and looking over at Mom, “she’s my best friend and confidante. I love her so much. And she has helped me through this.”
“Have you been saying your prayers and taking actions to stay obedient and keeping your faith up?”
“Oh, yes, yes I have,” I told Uncle Warren, eager to show him how hard I had been trying. “I have been doing everything I know how to do to make this work. I have given myself to Allen totally and completely. And I tried so hard to be submissive and obedient to him even though I didn’t agree with anything that he wanted.”
Believing that I had proven myself a worthy wife and done all I could to try to make my marriage work, I felt optimistic that Warren would see that I was not at fault for what was happening between Allen and me and would release me from the marriage.
He crossed his legs and took a breath before speaking. “You need to break off your relationship with your mother,” he began. “To break away from the tight close bond that you two have. You need to put your loyalties in your husband, not your mother.” He turned to address Mom. “You are being a meddling mother, and you need to let your daughter go and do what she is told to do by Allen even though neither of you agree with what is going on.”
I was stunned and confused by Uncle Warren’s directive. “Well, Uncle Warren, I don’t know what else to do. I have done everything I know how to do.”
“You go back and be obedient. And you give yourself mind, body, and soul to that man because he’s your priesthood head. The prophet and I have confidence that he will do what he is told to do. We don’t question what the priesthood does. We remember that the priesthood is again on earth. And the prophet is again on earth. And whatever he directs to be done is to be done without question. If you are not careful,” he cautioned, “you will lose your faith and fall away. You will lose the opportunity that you have to establish a salvation and a place in the kingdom of heaven. Allen will lead you to the Celestial Kingdom, and if you are not worthy, you will not have a place there. You need to spend more time at home with your husband.”
“But Uncle Warren,” I said, “I hate having husband-wife relations with him.”
“You are being very selfish. You need to set aside your feelings and do what you are told to do,” he said without sympathy.
His response flattened me. “I don’t know what to do because you’ve got to do something,” I said. “It is impossible for me to love this man.”
“You know, you have no right to feel that way,” Warren told me, his tone growing hostile. I was speechless as he continued to lecture my mother and me until he concluded the meeting.
I
n the weeks that followed, I did little to change my behavior toward Mom, but following Uncle Warren’s directive, she became less and less accessible. I’d long been avoiding moving into the trailer with Allen, but Mom and Rachel were instructed to move all of my stuff for me, and all at once I was out of Fred’s house. My mother was trying to follow Uncle Warren’s instructions and stay out of my marriage, but that also meant staying away from me. Kassandra, too, was being directed to stay at home and pray. Uncle Rulon was not well and Warren wanted his dozens of wives close by and focusing solely on the prophet.
Relegated to the house, Kassandra did her best to keep her spirits up. In a later conversation with Kassandra, she told me of a very disturbing incident that had happened in the prophet’s home. One day she was in the dining room with several other wives and Rulon’s sons Isaac and Nephi, waiting to pray over the noon meal. Uncle Rulon came in and sat down for lunch. He was very quiet and said nothing for a few moments. Then he leaned forward as if he was about to say something important, and pounding his fist on the table once, twice, three times, he announced, “I want my job back!”
Everyone at the table sat looking at one another, not knowing how to respond. Rulon’s mind was not always there, and no one could really tell if his thoughts were running away from him or if this was something else altogether. Kassandra sat watching as some of the prophet’s wives tried to calm him down. They assured him that he still had his job, but he was adamant.
“No, I don’t,” he shouted. “I want to take care of my people!”
As the sound of his fists on the wooden table hung in the air, people assumed Uncle Rulon was experiencing a moment of dementia. On the contrary, this was a display of lucidity. While it was never really clear what level of involvement he’d actually had in governing the people since his first stroke back in 1998, there was no question that the church had grown increasingly strict with Warren speaking for the prophet. Now, in this one dramatic moment, it seemed Rulon realized what had been taken away from him. But it was too late for him to get it back.
Uncle Warren was immediately summoned. He arrived to find his father edgy and inconsolable.
“I want my job back!” the prophet told his son.
“But Father, I’m just helping you,” Warren insisted, assuring Rulon that he was still in charge and that he had never lost his position. On this day it seemed that he did not believe his son—and neither did Kassandra.
“He Shall Be Renewed”
—
TITLE OF SONG BY WARREN JEFFS
W
hen the Winter Olympics passed without the end of the world coming, Warren made us all feel that we had again been “exceedingly blessed” with more time to repent and purify ourselves. The Lord wanted a perfect people, and he didn’t feel that he had that in us yet.
As a part of his mission to make us more perfect, it appeared that Warren started to use any excuse he could find to tighten his grip on the church, ostracizing various male members—even high-level officials—and often directing them to leave FLDS property. Such was the case with Winston Blackmore, the bishop in Bountiful, whom Warren began to aggressively “handle” in the summer of 2002.
For weeks Uncle Warren had been hinting that something would happen and saying that he had “a very important message from Father.” He told us to “prepare” ourselves because the news would “rock” us to our very core, but he never elaborated on the details. Once he felt confident that he had laid the proper foundation, he made the proclamation. We were all assembled in the meetinghouse when Uncle Warren assumed his position at the podium. On the stage behind him, Uncle Rulon sat in his designated chair beside Uncle Fred and several other church elders. Warren had taken steps to make sure that the message was going out to all of the faithful. The meeting was also being piped through phone lines to the worshippers in Canada eleven hundred miles away. While Warren always started his orations with a reminder that his words were coming from the prophet, Uncle Rulon himself rarely spoke aside from the usual “Brother Warren speaks for me.”
Now Uncle Warren primed us again for the impending news. In his slow monotone, he delivered the bombshell. “Winston Blackmore has been aspiring to position,” he said. “He is pushing his own words beyond that of the prophet. He is seeking power and aspiring to power and is in need of serious reprimand.” Warren then instructed the people to destroy or turn in any tapes or writings produced by Uncle Winston, in particular any stories of priesthood history.
Everyone was stunned into silence. Known affectionately to the extended FLDS congregation as Uncle Wink, Winston Blackmore was a well-respected member of the church who held an enormous amount of influence. He had been ordained as a bishop by the previous prophet, Leroy Johnson, and during his tenure he proved to be a kind and reasonable man. Many of the people held more love and respect for Winston than Warren, who was feared more than loved.
“Brother Winston is offered the hand of repentance, but he has been handled by the prophet,” Warren declared.
Uncle Rulon was next given a microphone. The prophet could no longer stand easily and remained seated for the announcement. In the past, Uncle Rulon had spoken to the people, but recently he would ramble and repeat himself until Uncle Warren stepped in to take the microphone. On this day, his voice was weak and at times inaudible. The entire congregation, and particularly those assembled in Canada, strained to hear what he was about to tell us.
“If you people in Canada just stand behind Elder Winston Blackmore, it will be okay,” Uncle Rulon uttered thinly over the speaker system.
Uncle Warren quickly bent down to correct his father. Congregants in the front rows overheard him whispering, “No, Father, that is not right.”
The prophet looked at his son as if confused and then implored, “Oh yes, do what Brother Warren has told you.”
Warren interrupted, booming into the microphone, “Give your loyalties to the prophet.”
With that, the meeting abruptly ended and questions immediately swirled over what had happened to make Uncle Winston a target of reprimand. It appeared Winston’s beliefs had been more in line with those of former prophet Leroy Johnson than those of the Jeffses. Like Uncle Roy, Winston seemed to believe that there was room in the church for people to make mistakes and be human. His stance on purity was not nearly as vigorous as either Warren’s or his father’s, and he had produced teaching materials, but his beliefs were nothing new and didn’t seem to be cause for such a dramatic dismissal.
When the fallout from the announcement began to subside, it was quietly whispered that Winston’s punishment came about because he had been questioning the extreme direction in which Warren had been taking the church. It was rumored that Warren and Winston had had many confrontations in the days and weeks before Warren went public. People said Winston saw that Warren was being dishonest in his communications with his father concerning the people and the church and manipulating him and decisions being made. They disagreed on how Warren was treating members that he deemed unredeemable; he sent them away, while Winston often refused to give up on them. I also heard that Warren went so far as to send Winston a list of people that he wanted cut off from the church completely, but reportedly Winston resisted.
The select few who were in the front seats the day of the announcement had taken note that the prophet’s original words were at odds with what Uncle Warren had said.
Looking back, I see that Warren timed the announcement perfectly. Rulon’s health had been in rapid decline, and Winston Blackmore was one of the few men whose influence could turn people against Warren. If Warren waited until after Rulon’s death to make such an accusation against Winston, people would have questioned his motives and doubted the directive, but having Uncle Rulon onstage and “supporting” Warren’s claims made it unquestionable.
Warren used the community’s sincere belief that the prophet would continue to live for hundreds of years to justify his commands and teachings. For much of my life, Uncle Rulon and Warren had been preaching that Rulon would be the last prophet on earth. They taught that he would never die; rather he would be “renewed”; once again he would be a man in his twenties who would continue on as the prophet living with his sixty-plus wives. In his renewed state, Rulon would lead us to Zion after the destructions and live for three hundred years. This idea was regularly discussed and universally accepted in the FLDS. We embraced this prophecy with all our hearts and the song that Uncle Warren wrote late that summer, narrating the glories of Rulon’s renewal. I’ll never forget the intense emotion in the meetinghouse as the people raised their voices in unison to the chorus of this song: