Escape

by Carolyn Jessop

  It was at this moment that the resurrected Indians came to save us.

  The resurrected Indians were a uniquely FLDS concept. From what I’ve been able to piece together, it was a belief that originated with Uncle Roy or possibly one of his predecessors. We’d been taught that a lot of good Indians were killed when America was settled. God had already resurrected them because they were worthy and deserving, but he was waiting until the last day to allow them to vindicate themselves. In exchange for being given a shot at revenge, the resurrected Indians were required to take on the job of protecting God’s chosen people. Once saved, we would become the seedlings for a millennium of peace.

  But the devil had designs on the end game, too. He wanted to wipe us out so no one would be left on earth to do God’s work. The devil would engineer our destruction by using the government and other bad people to destroy us. Then the entire world would be consumed in darkness and he’d triumph.

  “Here come the bombers!” we’d yell. But then my cousins, who were playing resurrected Indians, would come charging out and start knocking the bombers out of the sky by aiming their tomahawks at a pilot’s head. The pilot would fall dead, crashing his plane to the ground.

  When one of the wicked was killed by the tomahawk of a resurrected Indian, he’d fall to the ground, seemingly from a heart attack. But what had happened was that the tomahawk had split his heart in two. When an autopsy was performed, doctors would find the severed heart and be at a loss to explain it. But only a few would know the truth. Most would think that the person hit by the tomahawk had died from a heart attack. No one would know that the resurrected Indians had been our saviors.

  Once the planes were knocked out of the sky, my cousins who were playing the role of government agents marched into the orchard. Once again the resurrected Indians came to our rescue without firing a single shot or hurling a single tomahawk. It had been prophesied to us that in the last days, any army that went up against the Lord’s people would drop dead for no apparent reason and the armies of Zion would be seen as great and terrible.

  In the game of apocalypse, the resurrected Indians protected us from the government. But that wasn’t enough. We were being invaded by the Russians in the east and the Chinese in the west. Once again, it was the people of God who turned the invaders back by participating in prayer circles.

  We all came out from our hiding places and gathered together in circles, pretending to listen to radio reports about the Chinese invaders, who had made it as far as Nevada. The Russians were poised at the Mississippi River. Women and children had been evacuated from cites. We were informed that the men who’d stayed behind to fight were now dead.

  As the Lord’s people, we were required to stand in holy places and watch the army of the Lord be made manifest. So we stood in our prayer circles believing that when the last days actually came, the Lord would fight our battles for us.

  The war was over, but our game was not. We then faced famine because we had not yet conquered enough land to sustain all the people who needed to live on it. We went back to the orchard, splitting into groups to hide. We had to make sure the food we had set aside for the end times wouldn’t be taken from us. Messengers were sent back and forth to communicate between the groups. If we were caught while we were delivering a message, we were killed on the spot.

  This part of the game made my baby sister, Annette, burst into tears. The game was fine when the resurrected Indians were fighting our battles, but now that we had to sneak messages back and forth, she was too scared. I loved every minute of it, though. This was a huge and exciting adventure for me. I thrived on being in the thick of things. But my cousin came out and called us all in for dinner.

  Twenty of us ran into the kitchen for a dinner of canned peaches and a slice of bread and butter. Those who couldn’t fit around the table ate standing up. Afterward we tried to help with the dishes, but it got so chaotic that we were sent back outside.

  One of my older cousins, Lee junior, was a mesmerizing storyteller. He built a fire and we all sat close so we could listen. I was captivated by the stories he told us of our religion. He began by telling us about all the gold hidden in the mountains around us. God knew how much was there but he was keeping it hidden until the last days, when he would reveal it to his chosen people.

  Gold had a purpose, Lee said, but it was not for making jewelry. God hid all the gold away because he felt it was being misused. Once life was purified in the last days, God would bring the gold out from hiding and we, his chosen people, would pave roads and build houses with it.

  My eyes widened at my cousin’s saga of the white Indians (not to be confused with the resurrected Indians). One of the earliest fundamentalist prophets, Lee said, had been taken to the Yucatán so God could show him the army of white Indians that was being trained for the end times.

  When God gave the order, the army of several hundred thousand would march out of the jungle. They would decide who would live and who would die by tearing off an individual’s clothes. If he or she was wearing blessed garments underneath their outer garb, they’d be spared. But those without the sacred underwear would be murdered.

  My cousins looked as scared on the outside as I felt on the inside. Only those who covered every inch of their bodies with blessed garments would be saved and get to live in the millennium of peace. It was sobering—especially to a six-year-old—to think that you could make it through all the different destructions but still end up dead if you didn’t wear the right clothes.

  My cousin spun out other stories that night around the fire. I was enthralled. It was like listening to fairy tales except that I believed every word I heard. The end times sounded frightening, except that I knew if I survived the destruction I would then live through the thousand years of peace, where there was no death. It sounded like a magic carpet ride that would whisk me away from the disappointments of this life to an enchanted world where life was perfect. I would have listened all night if I could, but Mother arrived to take me and my sisters home.

  We kept badgering Mother to let us go back to our cousins’ house. We had so much more freedom there to play and explore. In our own home, we were forbidden to play outside unless someone was watching. Mother finally agreed to let us go on a mountain hike with our cousins. When we got to their house they were still making lunches. My cousin Shannon was making sandwiches out of fried potatoes. It looked like food we called “yuck yuck.” Shannon said it was something her mother had taught her to make when there was nothing else to eat in the house.

  There was great discussion about where to go for a hike. No one wanted to go to the predictable places. We all wanted to go to the place that was off-limits—the ghost mountain, where some said the Gadianton robbers were buried. They were the wicked robbers who hurt the people of God in the Book of Mormon.

  We’d been taught that God had the power to change the entire earth at a moment’s notice. Uncle Roy used the Grand Canyon as an example of the intensity of God’s power. He said God created it on a day when he’d been extremely angry. The wicked city inhabited by the Gadianton robbers had been buried under the mountain in an instant of God’s wrath. God just picked up a mountain over in the Pine Valley area and dropped it on top of the evil city.

  There were several people in the community who claimed they knew that the mountain was haunted because several evil men had taken a very good man in the community up to the mountain. The mountain was opened up enough for him to see that the city inside was bursting with gold and precious jewels. He was told that if he killed Uncle Roy, the prophet of God, then he would be given all of the gold and treasure buried in the mountain. He refused and the mountain was sealed up again.

  My cousins said that their father was a man of God who had a lot of bills and debts. If we could find the gold buried in the mountain, it would be a huge help to him. We decided to take shovels and give it our best shot. We knew we weren’t supposed to hike on the haunted mountain, but now that it had been turn
ed into a noble cause, no one felt terribly disobedient.

  Ten of us hiked to the mountain—a ragamuffin band of kids ranging in age from four to eight. But our digging didn’t produce much. We got tired quickly and it was very hot. Nor did we eat the fried potato sandwiches because they tasted as bad as they looked—yuck yuck. But we did throw them back and forth at one another. As we were hiking, we told story after story of the things that the spirits of the Gadianton robbers had done when they haunted the community before being expelled by the priesthood.

  Even evil spirits have to obey the priesthood. The priesthood is the way God acts in us, but the power is given only to men. Boys are initiated into the priesthood at twelve by any man in the FLDS who holds the priesthood and has kept his covenants. We believed that the priesthood was the glue that held the earth together. Without its power, the earth would fly apart.

  Because of this, one good man in the priesthood could turn back thousands of evil spirits, who would do whatever he ordered them to do. I’m not sure how this squared with all the destruction that was supposed to rain down on our heads. Couldn’t the good men just tell the evil ones to scram? But a six-year-old doesn’t put such thoughts together. I took it all in as the grand myth and folklore that it was.

  While our fundamentalist faith cast a long shadow on how we played, a lot of the things we did and the trouble we stirred up were fairly typical. It was the consequences that were more severe.

  One afternoon we got to go back to my cousins’ because Mother needed to do some shopping. It felt like a return to wonderland. My cousin Ray Dee was pushing the family cat around in a small doll carriage with a pacifier taped to its mouth. The cat was wearing a ruffled dress. Beverly, another cousin, was congratulating her on her new baby. When we were distracted, the cat leaped out of the carriage and ran for its life. We went looking for it and instead found our cousin Shannon.

  Shannon was sitting in the grass stirring a big bowl of punch. She had cups and passed out drinks to all of us. We were having a fine time, savoring our freedom and catching up with our cousins. But it was short-lived. One of the younger boys came running out with the news that Shannon had stolen the punch and that his mother, our aunt Charlotte, planned to spank everyone involved.

  Shannon was guilty. She’d gone to Aunt Charlotte and said she needed a package of Kool-Aid for Aunt Elaine, which was untrue. Someone squealed on her when we were spotted out in the orchard drinking punch. Now anyone with punch-stained lips might be spanked.

  Shannon said she didn’t care if Aunt Charlotte spanked her. “Why?” I said. I hated spankings.

  Shannon was very matter-of-fact. “Aunt Naomi’s spankings are way too hard. They’re so bad, they’re ridiculous. Mom’s spankings are so soft you have to pretend that you’re crying. But Aunt Charlotte’s spankings are just right.”

  I didn’t think a spanking could ever be just right. So I asked Shannon what she meant. “It’s like this,” she said. “You never know how many swats you are going to get from the other moms, but Aunt Charlotte gives you two swats for every year old you are. If you scream really loud, she thinks she’s hurting you and doesn’t swat as hard.”

  Shannon’s optimism brought a new mood to the orchard. She got about a dozen brothers and sisters together and told them they needed to play the game they always did when they were getting a spanking from Aunt Charlotte.

  She ran through the drill. First they had to act extremely sorry for what they had done. Then they had to promise that if Aunt Charlotte would forgive them, they’d never again do whatever they’d done. If Aunt Charlotte still insisted on spanking them, everyone would act scared, start crying, and beg her not to. This sometimes made Aunt Charlotte feel guilty enough to reduce the number of swats.

  When it was time to spank those involved in the punch theft, we all trooped inside. I lucked out. Even though I’d had some punch, I got to stay downstairs with some of the others who weren’t being spanked. I was surprised by the volume of screaming coming from upstairs. I said to my cousin Jayne, “I thought that Aunt Charlotte’s spankings were just right. It sounds like she’s killing everyone.”

  Jayne told me, “They are just trying to make her think she’s killing them. If everyone in the room screams loudly enough, then the person getting the swats has less screaming to do and gets a spanking that doesn’t hurt very bad. We always do this to Aunt Charlotte.”

  “What about with Aunt Elaine?” I asked. Jayne looked at me like I was a little bit crazy. “No, we don’t need to bother her because you can’t usually feel her spankings. And we don’t do it to my mother because she doesn’t buy the act.”

  I nodded. Aunt Charlotte probably thought that day that she was giving everyone a correction. But for those involved, this was just another game. Nevertheless, it was a game I had no interest in playing.

  Minutes after the spankings ended, everyone marched downstairs, and shortly all of us were laughing and smiling again. It was as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and for us it hadn’t.

  School Days

  I didn’t start school until I was six and a half. Finally! I had watched Linda go to school every day, wishing I could go with her. Kindergarten didn’t exist in the FLDS because the belief was that children were better off spending another year at home. It didn’t do me any good. I was eager to get going. I wanted to learn.

  There wasn’t much stimulation at home beyond listening to my grandmother’s stories. Fairy tales were frowned upon, and we had no other children’s books at home. There was no public library in town, and I don’t remember my mother ever buying us books of our own.

  In 1974, a few weeks before school started, when I was counting down the days, I met Laura, who would become one of my closest friends. It was a scorching July day, one of those when the air feels too hot and dry to even want to breathe it in. I was playing paper dolls inside with Linda while Mother was sewing new dresses for our first day of school.

  The weather shifted suddenly; the sky darkened and then split apart in a downpour. Linda, Annette, and I stood at the kitchen window, listening to the rain pound the roof of the house and smelling its sweetness through the air conditioner.

  After the deluge, we begged Mama to let us go outside, and she said we could as long as we didn’t get muddy.

  The dirt road in front of our house had turned into a large stream of muddy water. I could think of nothing better than to run and splash in it. Linda read my mind. “Carolyn, don’t even think of it. We will all get a spanking if you do!”

  When my mother got mad at one of us for doing something disobedient or wrong, usually we all paid a price for her anger. What kept me on the porch wasn’t my fear of getting a spanking; it was the fear of how Linda would feel if I got her and Annette in trouble.

  A moment later, we heard children’s voices and suddenly saw the kids from a new polygamous family that had moved into the community. They’d come from Idaho with three wives and what seemed like two dozen children.

  A redheaded girl who looked about the same age as me caught my eye. She came running down the street and with a big jump and splash landed in the middle of the muddy water. All her other siblings followed her. They were laughing and splashing in the mud and having the best time. I was dying to join them but knew I couldn’t.

  Linda didn’t envy the mud ducks at all. She looked stricken that they had dared do this. Daring had nothing to do with it for me. I was frustrated that they could do something I couldn’t. Linda went over to talk to them, and it was the by now very muddy redheaded girl who spoke to her first. She said her name was Laura, and then she rattled off the names of her little brothers and sisters.

  Laura looked over to us and said, “Why don’t you guys get in the mud, too?” Linda told her that our mom would get mad at us if we got muddy. Laura seemed perplexed. What we were saying made no sense to her at all.

  When the novelty of splashing around in the muddy stream wore off, we asked her if she wanted to play dol
ls. She said she didn’t have any dolls. I couldn’t believe it. “You don’t have any dolls? What do you play with?”

  Laura shrugged. She didn’t need dolls to play dolls. She picked up a crooked little stick from the ground and walked over to Mama’s flower garden and plucked a flower. “See, this is her skirt and this little blossom can be her hat.” Next she snapped a blossom off a flower and put it on the stick. Then she found another flower to make a skirt. Now the stick girl had a flounced hat and skirt. I was impressed. Laura had taken a stick and made it into one of the best dolls I had ever seen. “All I have to do to change her clothes is pick another flower.” I certainly couldn’t change clothes as much with my real dolls as she could with her stick ones.

  Linda, Annette, and I quickly found sticks to make our own dolls. We spent the rest of the afternoon playing with Laura. At dinner that night we talked nonstop about our new friend. In the years ahead, even Mama came to love Laura. She would say that her daughters didn’t fight as much when she was around.

  The first day of school finally came. My mother took me to my classroom and watched while I picked out my desk. She said she was proud that I was starting first grade. The door to our classroom opened a bit and I saw one of my classmates stick out her tongue at the girl in the doorway, whom I couldn’t see. Then I heard her exclaim, “Ooh, she has red hair.” Laura came in and found a seat, but I could tell she was shy being around so many new people.

  Not only were we in the same class, but we rode the bus to school every day for the entire year. I was so happy! Having her on the bus helped me feel safe.

  The bus scared me because strange things often happened there. One day I was sitting next to Linda when Randi, an older girl in the front seat, began whispering to her friend. She rolled up the long sleeve of her dress, and I could see that her arm looked melted and red. Her friend gasped. It was shocking to see. I was standing up, and Linda yanked me down in my seat and said to be still or the bus driver would hit me. It was not unusual for the bus driver to stop the bus when a child misbehaved. He’d walk back and hit a child so hard his or her face would slam into the window of the bus.