Escape

by Carolyn Jessop

  Elaine, one of Linda’s best friends, had come over, ostensibly to help Linda clean out her room. Linda was giving a lot of her things away, which didn’t strike me as odd until I realized that she was unpacking her hope chest. Most of us started hope chests in our early teens. Hope chests were status symbols in the community. We filled them with things we’d need in our marriages: pots, pans, linens, and blankets. Some girls made quilts for their hope chests. I did not. But often at birthdays we’d give one another things for our hope chests.

  I asked Linda why she was giving away the treasured items she was saving for her marriage and many of her clothes. “I’m sick of everything, so I’ve given it to Elaine. I don’t want to wear these clothes anymore. I’ll just make some more.”

  She wasn’t very convincing; her behavior was like jagged pieces of a puzzle that I couldn’t put together.

  Linda knocked on my door at nine o’clock that night. I was getting ready for bed and was surprised to see her fully dressed at bedtime. Her face was pale. She clutched a large garbage bag of things she hadn’t given away.

  In a whisper, she said to me, “Carolyn, I am leaving. Some of my friends are taking me to a neighboring community. From there I’m going to disappear. Some people are going to help me escape.”

  I was stunned. Never, ever would I have guessed that Linda was running away with total strangers. I started to tremble.

  “Why are you doing that? How can you trust people you don’t even know?”

  Linda shrugged again. “Even if they are bad people, I don’t have anything to lose. If I stay here, my life is over. I’m not going to do that. Carolyn, do you think I can borrow twenty dollars from you?”

  I was numb. I didn’t want to lose my sister. I walked over to the dresser drawer where I kept my summer money and handed her the envelope. “Take all of it, Linda—you’re going to need it.”

  Linda resisted. “I only need twenty dollars—that’s enough. I can’t take all your money.”

  I refused to take the envelope back. I couldn’t bear to look her in the eye. “Take it. You don’t know where you are going or even who you are going with. Take the money. Please. It will help me feel better about what you are doing.”

  Linda grabbed me and we hugged. “Thank you, Carolyn, thank you.” She could barely whisper.

  Our bedrooms were in the basement, next to the outside door. Linda went into her room to gather her things. Rosie heard her when she opened the outside door and came to see what was happening. When she saw Linda with the black garbage bag she asked her where she was headed.

  Linda’s voice was as strong as the unshakable will behind it. “Rosie, I am leaving, and there is nothing you can do to stop me because I’m eighteen now.”

  “Yes, I can,” said Rosie. “You are not going to leave.”

  Linda did not flinch.

  “I’m done with this religion! I’m not going to live this way anymore. I am going and nobody can do anything about it.” Linda bolted through the door. I watched her run until she was swallowed up by the night.

  Rosie was yelling, “Linda, you get back here. You’re not going to get away with this. I’m calling your father right now.” Rosie soon realized that the more she yelled, the more time she was giving Linda to escape. She quit and ran to the phone.

  Rosie raced upstairs and called my father at the hotel where he was staying. Minutes later men appeared at our house. They planned to restrain Linda until my father got home. But she was already gone.

  The mayor of the community came and questioned me. Linda had protected me by not telling me of her plans. I told the mayor the truth: I didn’t know she had been planning to escape, nor did I know where she was headed.

  My father and mother drove all night to get home. As soon as Father arrived, he teamed up with Claudel’s stepfather. Claudel and Linda had fled together. Her stepfather had brought about twenty men with him to hunt the girls down. They looked tall and ominous.

  My father was tired from driving all night, but I could feel the deeper sadness behind his fatigue and stress. Linda’s dash for freedom was a complete disgrace to my father, mother, and entire family. We had lost our status in the community as a completely faithful family. The image my father had nurtured for a lifetime was in smithereens.

  I could hear him crying in my mother’s bedroom. It was then that I felt the weight of his sadness and the brokenness of his heart. When my father came into the kitchen for breakfast he couldn’t eat. He stared at his plate and then asked me if I would ever do something like this and hurt him in the same way.

  “Never!”

  My fate was sealed.

  I loved my father; his love for me was the ballast of my life. It upset me to see how much he was suffering. Both of my parents were worried about Linda’s safety. They knew how vulnerable she was, how unsophisticated in the ways of the world.

  My mother was crushed that her image of a faithful mother of God was now in ruins. She knew she would never again be complimented within the community for her obedient children. Overnight she had become a mother who’d raised an apostate—someone who had turned against God and the prophet. There was nothing worse a person could become. As an apostate, Linda was now condemned to spend the afterlife in the lowest realm of hell, a place of such torment that it was beyond human comprehension.

  Even if Linda was found, we knew she would be out of our lives forever. We would never be allowed to associate with her because she had abandoned the work of God. My father could not risk contaminating his other children by letting them have contact with Linda. Linda’s escape was worse than death. She would never be part of our lives on earth again, nor would we see her in the afterlife. I hated the thought of letting her go, but as I watched her disappear into the night, secretly I envied her. What worried me was that I knew Linda didn’t have any kind of survival skills. But I certainly didn’t think she should be forced to wed someone she didn’t want to marry. I said this to Rosie at one point and she said there was no way Linda would be coerced into a marriage; she could always say no. But this was a joke. People said that all the time, but the pressure that was applied to a woman who tried to resist an assigned marriage was crushing.

  After several days, my father and several uncles of Linda’s friend tracked the two girls to a town not far from Salt Lake City. The posse of men surrounded the house, refusing to leave until the girls talked to them.

  Linda and Claudel refused.

  The woman who was sheltering them asked the men to leave, but they would not, so she called the police. When the officers arrived, the woman explained that she was protecting two runaways from Colorado City. When the police realized the girls were eighteen, they told the men to leave. The police told them they did not have the power to make the girls return. Nor had Linda and Claudel broken any laws.

  My father said he would leave, but he wanted to talk to Linda first. He needed to know that she was all right, and he asked an officer to tell her he was very upset. Linda still wouldn’t speak to him. Then my dad said that if Linda would talk to him, he would agree to leave her alone and let her do what she wanted.

  Linda relented.

  When he finally had the chance, my father asked her why she had done this. Linda said she was finished with the religion and nothing he could say would make her change her mind. Dad tried to talk her into coming back, but she refused. He finally left with the other men.

  Linda and her friend knew they had to flee that house before the men came back for them. Someone smuggled them into Salt Lake City. The hunt for them soon became an obsession within the community. It took several weeks, but Linda was finally spotted.

  Alma, a boy who had fallen in love with Linda at school, headed to Salt Lake to try to find her because it was the most logical place for her to hide. He was on the opposite side of the religious split and there was no way they ever would have been allowed to marry. By this point, the split had completely severed the community in two. All association between
one group and the other was unacceptable. Uncle Roy had kicked three apostles out of the FLDS, and they had established their own church. We no longer went to the same dances or celebrated community holidays together.

  After Linda escaped, Alma left the community, too. His father had a house in Salt Lake City, so he moved there to look for her. One day he saw her working in J.B.’s, a chain restaurant, and so he got a job there, too. Alma helped Linda get her sea legs in Salt Lake. She didn’t know how to use the city bus system, so Alma taught her how to find her way around town and bought her a bus pass. Though Linda was not in love with Alma or even attracted to him, they spent nearly every moment together because she was so lonely and so fearful of being on her own.

  Word somehow reached my father that Linda had been found in Salt Lake City. Dad got in touch with Alma and then showed up at J.B.’s to talk with Linda. She realized she would have to deal with him. There was no way she could spend the rest of her life running from her father.

  Dad had one demand: he wanted Linda to speak with the prophet. He promised her that after she talked to Uncle Roy, he would leave her alone. Linda agreed.

  When they met, Uncle Roy told Linda that although she had fallen away, she could redeem herself by marrying “a good man.” Linda said thanks but no thanks.

  The prophet exploded and berated her.

  Since Linda had no intention of being saved, Uncle Roy turned to my father and asked if he had any suggestions.

  Dad said that there was a young man in Salt Lake who had taken an interest in her. My father said he worried about Linda’s safety in the big city and thought it might be a good idea for Alma to marry Linda.

  In the prophet’s eyes, Linda was now useless to him. But Alma was on the other side of the religious split. If Linda married this boy and managed to convert him to Uncle Roy’s side, it could be worthwhile. There had been several marriages already where women were given to men on the other side of the split in hopes of converting the men. If one of the women converted instead, her family condemned her and considered her as dead. But the door was always open to her return. She could renounce her marriage and win back her salvation if she came home and let the prophet assign her to another man.

  The boy and his father were subsequently called into Uncle Roy’s office. The prophet told Alma he wanted him to marry Linda. The boy’s father refused because his son was seventeen and had yet to finish high school. But Alma did not want to lose the prophet’s blessing. (I think he realized that Linda could think for herself and that he risked losing her by waiting.)

  Linda had fled the community to avoid marriage, and now she was being forced to marry someone to remain free. Poor Linda was exhausted. There was monumental pressure on her to marry Alma. It wasn’t what she wanted to do, but it would put an end to the crisis. The hunt would be called off. She could maintain a relationship with our family, but she would not have to move back to Colorado City. It felt like the best of bad options.

  Even though she agreed to do what the prophet asked of her, Linda’s marriage was still viewed as a marriage of rebellion. She had thwarted the prophet’s will by not marrying “the good man” he wanted to choose for her. Linda and Alma would have to have a civil marriage, and then a year later they would be eligible for a priesthood marriage by Uncle Roy.

  Dad told me I could go to Salt Lake City and be part of Linda’s wedding. This was the first time I had seen her since her escape. We had no time alone and were never able to talk. Linda looked like she’d been run over and was too tired to keep fighting. I thought she looked scared. It was hard for me to see that there had been anything positive for her in the escape. I didn’t know how she would survive in the outside world.

  Linda was married at the courthouse. My mother and father were there, as was Alma’s mother. His father refused to come since he opposed the marriage. Linda wore a simple white wedding dress. The ceremony felt more like a disgrace than a celebration. Linda seemed so unhappy. My father could barely hide his disgust for her. He made it clear that for him, this felt like the lesser of two evils.

  Alma’s mother didn’t look too happy, but to his credit Alma had managed to do something rare within the community: marry someone he was genuinely in love with.

  The tension crackled just beneath the surface at the ceremony. But the judge was oblivious to what was really taking place. He talked about what an honor it was for a couple to be married in the eyes of God. In his remarks he told them how important it was to find a way to say “I love you” every day to each other. Marriage was a serious responsibility, he said, one that should not be entered into lightly. If only he knew!

  No one smiled when the couple said “I do.” They kissed robotically, like a couple on a bad blind date.

  When we left the courtroom, I had to say goodbye to Linda again. Neither one of us said anything. I didn’t know words that could reach into her unhappiness and make her feel better. She began her new life like a condemned woman, knowing she was a disgrace and disappointment to her mother and father.

  It would be several years before Linda and I would see or speak to each other again. It broke my heart. Because she had agreed to a marriage that was ordained by the prophet, she was no longer considered an apostate. But she was still in rebellion to her faith. That meant that she was left out in the cold and could not be included in our lives from that day forward.

  Several months later, we heard through the grapevine that Linda was pregnant. Even though she had acquiesced to my father’s wishes, he was no longer concerned for her well-being. There was much he could have done to ease the hardships she faced in the next five years, but he didn’t lift a finger to help the daughter he had once professed to love, nor did he reach out to his two grandchildren.

  I learned a terrible and powerful lesson from Linda’s ordeal: escape was not the answer. I knew that if I tried, I’d be hunted down like a fugitive and then forced into a situation that guaranteed misery and unhappiness.

  The Nusses

  The moment I saw them, I knew they were trouble. A long line of girls walking two by two turned a corner and streamed into the corridor at the new public high school on the first day of registration. There seemed to be no end to them—and they were all sisters. Their dresses had several layers of flounces that bounced when they walked. Their sleeves, bodices, and necklines were trimmed with yards of lace and frills. They looked like those crocheted pastel dolls that cover up Kleenex boxes, except that they all wore big blue boys’ sports shoes and made it clear that they would vaporize anyone who tried to cross them.

  I looked at my cousins as if to say, Who are they? Shannon started laughing. “Those are Merril Jessop’s daughters and they own the school.”

  “It’s obvious that they own the hallway,” I said.

  My cousin Jayne chimed in, “Oh, they’re not as bad as they look. They do a lot of funny things, trying to be so superior and pious.”

  “Funnier than the way they dress?” I asked, thinking of those blue sports shoes. “Does everyone at school dress that way?”

  Jayne and Shannon were giggling again. “No,” Shannon said. “Not everyone dresses like that, just the nusses and the wanna-be nusses.”

  I looked blank. I had no idea what Shannon was talking about. “We call everyone who dresses that way nusses,” she said.

  Jayne jumped in. “It all started out when we called them righteousnesses. People who didn’t dress like them or want to be like them were called hoods. Righteousnesses was too long, so we shortened it to nusses.”

  I could see that the nusses were going to be one of the strangest components to the strange school year of 1984–85.

  Registration day was huge for me because I had been out of school for a year. The split in our community was now in its seventh year. One of the consequences was that many families pulled their children out of the private high school so they would not be contaminated by the children of the families on the other side of the divide who supported Uncle Roy. As a
result, many boys wound up working on construction jobs instead of going to high school. The girls who were forbidden to go to the private high school were confined to their homes. Most of the girls who were kept out of school were disappointed because they had wanted an education and a diploma before they were assigned to a marriage. They knew their futures were being shortchanged.

  I had been working at my father’s office during my year away from school, which was at least better than being stuck at home doing babysitting and chores. I was diligent about my correspondence courses but eager to get back into the classroom. I was thrilled when the Colorado City High School opened.

  I realized as I stood in the registration line that I didn’t have any friends on the Uncle Roy side of the split even though my parents supported him. I had gone against their wishes and maintained friendships with children whose parents supported the brethren, the side that believed that disciples should assist the prophet in interpreting God’s word.

  No one else looked and dressed like the nusses. Those of us on the Uncle Roy side of the split usually wore only skirts and blouses, as did the girls on the brethren side. Sometimes we’d wear jumpers, and on rare occasions, a dress. I was still wearing my hair piled on top of my head in a granny knot. We’d been forbidden to wear it down at our former school. Even braids were unacceptable.

  When I finally sat down with a counselor, I held my breath. I didn’t know if all my correspondence courses would be accepted for credit. My fear was that if they weren’t, I would be forced to start as a sophomore again, instead of a junior. That would mean I’d turn eighteen before I graduated. If I was assigned in marriage shortly after turning eighteen, as so many girls were, I might not even get my diploma. (By twenty, a girl who was unmarried was considered an old maid.)

  But all my credits were accepted, and to my surprise I was told that I was going to begin as a senior. I felt elated. Starting as a senior meant I’d be seventeen when I graduated, and so I’d have a year of college under my belt before I was assigned in marriage. I was beginning to dream about becoming a pediatrician. There were so many children in the community who had no access to comprehensive medical care. Aunt Lydia, the self-taught nurse and midwife, had many practical skills, but she was getting older and soon would have to quit working altogether. I thought that I might be allowed to become a doctor if I worked only with children. But that was a dream in the still distant future. I was thrilled and proud at the thought of being in the first graduating class at the high school. Ever so slowly, my life was starting to feel like my own.