Authors: Elissa Wall
All this tension between the mothers frequently spilled over to the kids, who also harbored feelings of resentment, believing that the sons and daughters of the other mother were receiving special treatment. Church rules forbade us from outwardly showing displeasure, so the bitterness remained just below the surface. We were taught to always put on a good face, even when things are going poorly. We were told to “keep sweet,” an admonition to be compliant and pleasant no matter the circumstance. Since we couldn’t reveal our angry words and feelings, they got bottled up inside, and often there was no communication at all. Despite our teachings, many times our true feelings came out, erupting in arguments, with each group of children naturally siding with their biological mothers.
Over time the bickering between Mother Audrey and my mother took its toll on my father and endangered his standing with the church. Dad’s role as patriarch of the family was to control his wives and children in strict accordance with the teachings of the church and the directives from the priesthood.
Priesthood
in the FLDS, is a hard concept for outsiders to understand. First, to “hold the priesthood” is to hold the power and authority of God, delegated to men. To hold priesthood, a man must prove his worthiness by showing his absolute devotion to the work of God through strict obedience to the key holder of the priesthood, the prophet. The prophet is the president of the priesthood. In the FLDS, it is believed that God (or the priesthood) is funneled through the prophet to the elders of the church.
Lines of priesthood authority are patriarchal and strictly observed. In this system all women and children basically belong to the priesthood—not just to their husband or father. In reality, they are possessions of the priesthood and the prophet, and revelations from God determine their ultimate fate. When the prophet decides to award a wife to a priesthood man, it is viewed as a transfer of a possession to the man. The prophet decides when two people should marry, when families can form, and when families that are not working are to be reorganized. From my earliest memories, I was taught that I should never do anything to go against the prophet and priesthood. Doing so would ultimately be going against God himself.
It was common practice to expel men, and in extreme cases women, whom the priesthood considered a threat and could weaken the faith of other members. It doesn’t take a religious ordinance or excommunication for a man to lose his priesthood. All that’s required is for the prophet or someone acting at his direction to say: “You have lost your priesthood.” The significance of this is enormous for believers, as it creates a culture of fear. If a husband loses his priesthood, his family is literally no longer his. In addition, he has to leave his land and home because his home is owned by the FLDS Church and controlled by the priesthood. Faithful wives and children will accept these decisions and wait to be reassigned to another man. In the meantime, the father is told that his only chance to win back his family is to leave and repent at a distance.
If men want to remain faithful members of the church and not lose their home and family, they must obey the priesthood’s rules and teachings in every facet of life. An important part of this responsibility is running a happy and obedient household. Because of the friction between Mother Audrey and my mom, it was no surprise that my father was apprehensive about the prophet getting involved in our family’s domestic issues. Men had been kicked out for far less serious problems, and it seemed only a matter of time before the difficulties at home would become apparent to the priesthood.
But even this risk was not too great to stop my mother from enlightening the prophet to our problems once she’d reached her limit. Mom had long ago learned that trying to fix problems herself wouldn’t change anything and she could no longer allow her children to be blamed for troubles in the home. Not long before the night we learned that my father would have a third wife, my mother had contacted the prophet, alerting him to the trouble in our household. This bold move was a huge violation for a woman, as it disrespected her husband and went against the church code of female behavior. Women are not supposed to complain; they are taught and expected to willingly and “sweetly” obey their husbands, who are their “priesthood heads.”
The fear of displeasing God and failing our religious responsibilities is so great that it pushes most members to do anything for the priesthood. For many women, this means they must sacrifice their own desires, needs, and feelings to conform to those of their husband and their religious beliefs. The FLDS believes that women cannot gain entrance to the highest of the three levels of heaven on their own; they must be married to a man who holds the priesthood and has at least three wives, or they will go to a lower level of heaven or to hell.
From birth, girls are prepared for this role. Their way of life is chosen for them by the priesthood. They are told whom to marry, what to believe, and how to live their lives. Women are taught that they have already chosen their destiny before their birth, at which point they chose to willingly place their lives in the hands of the prophet and priesthood, having everything dictated for them.
For my mother to alert the prophet without my father’s knowledge meant risking our chance of going to heaven together as a family, but things had gotten so bad in our home that my mother felt something needed to change.
When my father learned of my mother’s actions, he feared that he would never receive a third wife—or attain celestial marriage. But he held faith that the prophet would see him as the good man he was. He was well aware that men who prove unable to control their wives are looked upon as “weak sisters” and that he faced the possibility of losing his wives and his children to another man the prophet deemed more worthy.
So Dad was quite relieved several weeks later when he received a call from Rulon Jeffs, the prophet at the time. It seemed that Uncle Rulon had “another lady” for my father, and that my mother’s concerns had not jeopardized his standing after all. All my father’s worries were put to rest. Clearly, the prophet must have been confident that my father could handle his family issues.
My mother’s complaints may have been brushed aside, but there were reasons to be optimistic that another mother would bring stability into our home. The whole house seemed to light up at the mere prospect, and the two days after the announcement were consumed by a flurry of activity. All of the kids had fun rehearsing the musical presentation to welcome our new addition. Even my mother and Audrey seemed to put their differences aside as they began preparing for the wedding.
Dad had been assigned to marry Mom’s twenty-four-year-old niece, Laura Jessop. Laura’s father was married to two of my mother’s sisters and one of them was Laura’s mother. In the FLDS, it’s not uncommon for members of the same family—even sisters—to share a husband. Our family and the Jessops had been close for many years, but the choice of Laura was still a big surprise because we had been so closely tied to her growing up. It would be an adjustment to now call her “mother” instead of cousin.
The wedding was to take place at the prophet’s home in Salt Lake. Laura was driving up with her family from Hildale, Utah, home of an FLDS-only community. For years, Hildale and its sister town of Colorado City, Arizona, were called Short Creek, named after a stream that came out of the mountains and disappeared into the sand. Many of the locals just refer to the twin towns as “the crik,” and to the residents as “crikers.” Although these are not the proper spellings, residents of Short Creek long ago adopted these unusual pronunciations and spellings: “crik” and “criker.” Nestled close to the awe-inspiring red rock mountains of El Capitan and surrounded by hundreds of miles of parched, rough country, Short Creek was a refuge for members who wanted to practice their religion and plural marriage without the risk of persecution. Though barren and desertlike, the area’s rugged landscape and great expanses of open space offered scenic beauty and served as a buffer between the FLDS community and the outside world. The remote sites appealed to followers because they’d long been taught to be suspicious of all outsiders and to regard them as evil.
My family always stayed with the Jessops on the Utah side of Short Creek when we made the long drive south for church meetings and events. Likewise, the Jessops stayed with us in Salt Lake during visits to the prophet’s compound or as a pit stop on their way to visit their relatives in the FLDS-only community of Bountiful, British Columbia, just across the Canadian border. The community in Canada was much like the one in southern Utah in that its thousand or so members lived isolated from outsiders. Members of all three FLDS communities operated under the same umbrella of priesthood leadership and convened in Short Creek several times a year for important religious events and community activities.
Our mother, Laura Jessop, was fourteen years older than I was, and she and I had rarely spoken during our family visits. I was much friendlier with her three younger sisters, who were closer to my age. Still, I shared everyone’s optimism about Laura and hoped that her addition would mark a positive turning point for our family. Mom hoped for a friend in Laura. So did Mother Audrey. I just wanted the fighting in our house to stop and for us to all be a happy family.
Unfortunately, things would only get worse.
We follow the prophet.
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FLDS PARABLE
I
t hadn’t always been so tense in the Wall household. Growing up, I remember many good times with my family. There were camping trips, picnics in the mountains, and countless visits to the FLDS communities in Canada and southern Utah for festivals, celebrations, and group events. There were struggles, but I remember so much happiness, and how much I loved my dad.
Sixteen of Dad’s children were still living at home when I was born on July 7, 1986. I was the eleventh of my mother’s fourteen children, and number nineteen of Dad’s eventual twenty-four. My father was in the delivery room for my birth, and he always said that I came out smiling and continued to smile throughout my childhood. He nicknamed me Goldilocks because of my long silky blond hair and the way I skipped around the house reciting the Grimms’ fairy tale and performing it in skits for my family.
I was still quite young—only a few months old—when a dramatic fire changed the course of life for our family. At the time, we were living in our new nine-bedroom house on Claybourne Avenue. One crisp morning in November my mother was in the kitchen preparing breakfast for three of her young boys and cleaning up from a hectic morning of getting eleven children off to school. After putting some raw honey on the stove to melt, she went down the hall to the nursery to check on me. I had awakened and had decided I was hungry, so my mother lovingly took a few minutes to address my needs. While she was feeding me, my older sister Rachel called from Alta Academy, and my mother talked to her as she nursed me.
The blaze started when she was out of the room. The boys were happily eating oatmeal when a heating element on the old stove exploded and turned the pan of honey into a fireball. The flames quickly spread to the cabinets, which were made of a highly flammable material; upon seeing the flames, my brother Jacob ran into the nursery to alert my mother. My mother was still on the phone with Rachel, and it took her a few minutes to ask Rachel to call back and to calm Jacob enough to comprehend what he was saying. Her heart was pounding as she raced after Jacob to the kitchen only to be greeted by the grim sight of flames licking at the kitchen walls. Justin, Jacob’s twin brother, stood at the sink throwing small cups of water onto the flames to try to put them out.
Just then the phone rang, jolting my mother into action. She rushed to answer it, hoping that whoever it was could send help. It was Rachel calling back, and Mom screamed into the phone that the house was on fire, instructing her to get word to my father. Mom immediately herded the twins and my two-year-old brother, Brad, to safety, but the fire spread rapidly. Windows of the house exploded from the heat as she came back in to pull me from the nursery. In the end, I escaped uninjured, but my mother needed medical treatment for burns she received during the rescue.
After a frantic search for my father, who was volunteering as a teacher at Alta Academy, Rachel found him and shared the catastrophic news. As Dad raced home, he could see the thick black smoke rising from halfway across the valley. His heart dropped and a sick feeling entered his stomach as he realized the seriousness of the blaze and the danger we were all in. He arrived home to find the street packed with fire trucks, but to his relief we were all collected safely outside.
Once the flames subsided and the trucks had dispersed, the damage was assessed, and it was crushing: the top floor of our house had been completely destroyed, and the basement had suffered damage as well. Our neighbors on the block immediately came to our aid. Even the local Mormon bishop arrived with donations of clothing and offered a place where we could stay temporarily. Our family was shocked by the outpouring of kindness from people outside our church. Their actions contradicted what we had long been taught about the “evil” character of outsiders. Here were so many non-FLDS people offering help in our time of need, despite knowing about the secret and misunderstood life our family led.
While the loss of our home was traumatic, it was nothing compared with the loss we suffered later on that day. That night, November 25, 1986, as we were recovering from seeing our home and possessions go up in flames, we received word that our prophet, Leroy S. Johnson, had passed away at age ninety-eight. The entire FLDS community was devastated, and suddenly the fire in our home took a back burner.