Escape

by Carolyn Jessop

  Merril said nothing when he stood up. He washed his hands in Tammy’s bathroom and left her room.

  The next morning Tammy went into the kitchen and tried to apologize to Barbara and Merril before they left for Salt Lake City. Neither of them spoke to her. She had crossed every boundary, and now she would have to pay.

  Merril stopped speaking to her altogether. Tammy begged for his mercy and forgiveness. But she was an outcast. A few weeks later, Merril told her that he would never have sex with her again under any conditions. It was Tammy’s fault. Because of her rebellion Tammy would never bear another child of his.

  This devastated her. Tammy had been celibate during the ten years of her marriage to Uncle Roy because he was in his eighties when she married him while still in her late teens. It had taken her six years to get pregnant with Parley. Tammy wanted more children. Her mother had twenty children, and while Tammy knew she’d never come close to that number, she felt embarrassed and ashamed to have only one. Children reflected a woman’s sexual status with her husband and social status in the community.

  Tammy tried to get Merril to reconsider, but even though he would sleep in her room, he’d never touch her.

  Merril once took Tammy and me on a trip to Salt Lake City. He slept in Tammy’s room the first night of the trip. The next morning he called me on the phone and asked me to come to their room.

  I knocked on their door, and when Merril answered, he pulled me to him and gave me a kiss.

  Tammy started sobbing. Merril completely ignored her. I asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “He slept with me all night and didn’t kiss me once, not even this morning. You walk through the door and he’s grabbing you and kissing you the minute he gets his hands on you.”

  Tammy was so distraught and her pain so real, but I didn’t know what to say. Tammy had humiliated Merril to his family and children. Her future was the price Merril would make her pay.

  I told Tammy I was sorry and wished there was more I could do. But we both knew there wasn’t.

  Tammy stopped talking to Merril, but did not give up on trying to win him back. She waited on him hand and foot and, once again, began following Barbara around. I think she thought if she could win Barbara back as an ally, she might urge Merril to have sex with her again. But nothing changed.

  Merril and Barbara knew she was now an example of what could happen to someone who challenged their authority. Tammy was refuse—another body added to the scrap heap along with Faunita and Ruth.

  Several years later, Tammy went to Merril and told him she could no longer live without physical affection. How could he expect her to live that way forever?

  Merril was reading while she talked. He turned to her when she was finished, took off his reading glasses, looked across his desk, and said, “I always knew you had a weak character!”

  Tammy stood up and walked out of Merril’s office. As far as I know, this was the last time this matter was ever discussed.

  Resound of Music

  My sister Linda had moved back into the FLDS community with her husband because they were broke. She was pregnant with her second baby and didn’t have a lot of options. Linda also missed her family terribly.

  Linda was having a hard time in her marriage, which made her precarious life even harder. My father said he would help her financially, but there were strings attached. Linda had to agree to leave her husband, since he had refused to swing to our side of the religious split. She also had to agree to be reassigned in marriage by the prophet to another man.

  Linda had no other cards to play, so she agreed. She was assigned to marry a man with three children. Linda was told that if she kept herself in harmony with her new husband, then her life would be perfect in every way and God would bless her with everything she needed.

  This philosophy of “perfect obedience produces perfect faith” began sweeping through the community. Warren was assuming more control of the FLDS, claiming he was acting for his father. He began promoting the doctrine of perfect obedience. He preached it and talked about it on tapes, and laminated handmade signs proclaiming it were hung in nearly every home. We were told that every problem a woman faced was because she was not being perfectly obedient to her husband. Women were being instructed to listen to the whispers of God and pray to know their husband’s hearts. A wife’s goal was to be able to meet his every need without ever being asked. If she asked questions when her husband gave her an order, it was only because she still had contamination in her heart. If she was in harmony with him, God’s whisper would have made it precisely clear what was expected of her.

  But even if a woman did exactly what her husband demanded, he could still find fault with her and accuse her of still not being in perfect harmony with him, because otherwise she’d have understood what he really meant.

  Linda and I had grown close again after she returned to the community. We’d had almost no contact for nearly five years. Linda was now twenty-seven and was raising five children—her own two and her new husband’s three. She’d managed to get a nursing degree but had to quit working to take care of five preschoolers.

  Linda’s husband traveled a lot and she began inviting women over for coffee some mornings to break up her loneliness. These became rare forums to talk about what we felt was happening within the FLDS. Had it been known that we were meeting, we would have been reprimanded and seen as being out of harmony with our priesthood training. We kept our coffee parties secret.

  This was a radical departure for me. For the first time I had women friends outside my family. Compared to Merril’s other wives, I was running in a rowdy crowd and was being exposed to new viewpoints and controversial ideas.

  All of us, myself included, believed that Uncle Rulon was the true prophet of God, so we would never dream of criticizing anything he said or did. But that still left us room to talk about how people interpreted his teachings and how the new religious doctrines that were coming to us via Warren Jeffs were playing out in people’s lives. These women weren’t afraid to make fun of what they were seeing.

  “Perfect obedience” was very much on our minds. I remember the morning when one of the women said, “Remember Fascinating Womanhood? We don’t have to be fascinating anymore! The prophet has given us a new answer and we will never have to be abused again. The new answer is obedience!”

  I chimed in, “So, are you trying to tell us that all we have to do is be obedient and we’ll never be abused again?”

  “Yes, I am,” she said, “and do I have a story for you about obedience.” The story she told—which was true—held everyone in a trance about a large polygamous family that went on a picnic in a small car and a large van.

  The car began to have problems and wouldn’t start. The father told one of his wives—a first-grade teacher I knew—that she needed to help him get the small car going. He instructed her to get in the van and use it to push the car slowly up the hill. He said when it got to forty miles an hour it would start.

  The wife was somewhat confused but didn’t dare ask a question. If she wanted the blessing of perfect faith, she must be perfectly obedient. The wife got behind the wheel of the large van and her husband got into the car. He waited, but there was no push. When he turned around, the van was gone and he couldn’t figure out what had happened. After a few moments the van appeared in his rearview mirror, bearing down on him at forty miles an hour. He leaped out of the car just before she pulverized it.

  Everyone at the coffee roared with laughter.

  “Yes, the prophet’s answer is far more efficient,” I said. “Killing our husbands through perfect obedience is a lot more practical than trying to woo them by being fascinating.” The women laughed again. We were being dangerously honest with one another and we knew it. I realized how much freedom I had lost since I’d been married. I hadn’t had such fun with other women since high school when my friends and I joked about the nusses.

  I was wary about a lot of the new ideas that were circulati
ng in the community, but I didn’t have any sense of how fast they could take hold. Even if Warren Jeffs seemed to have some weird ideas, Uncle Rulon was still the prophet, and I had complete faith in him.

  Merril continued to marry his daughters off to Uncle Rulon to enhance his own prestige with the aging prophet. Merril’s need for power was insatiable. His daughter Merrilyn was also assigned to marry Uncle Rulon in 1992. She cried and pleaded with her father in protest. Merrilyn said it was impossible for her to marry Uncle Rulon because she was not as strong as Loretta and Paula. Merril didn’t care, nor did he realize that she was telling him the truth.

  Merrilyn was Ruth’s daughter and was also gorgeous. She was thin with long, dark hair, and like me, she was still in her early twenties. When forced to do something she didn’t want to, Merrilyn would pretend to comply but then somehow find a way to rebel. Merril insisted she must be obedient to the will of God.

  Merrilyn wanted a life with a man. She wanted love and children. Being married off to a man six decades her senior terrified her. Merrilyn knew it was unlikely that she would have children with him because he was so old and feeble.

  But there was no way out. The wedding was in Salt Lake City. Merrilyn had been making wedding dresses over the year, thinking that she’d be married any day. She had three dresses by the time she married Uncle Rulon. The one she wore was the least fancy of the three. Merrilyn looked stunning. Uncle Rulon’s younger wives were telling Merrilyn how happy they were she was coming into the family and how much she’d love it. As for the prophet, he was again too feeble to stand, and his hands shook with palsy as he held hers.

  Merril was now one of the most exalted men in the community since he had married three daughters—Loretta, Paula, and now Merrilyn—to Uncle Rulon.

  Merril was still abusive to his own wives, but I was more skilled in navigating around him. He was not as predictable as my mother, but I had studied him so closely for so long, I could usually tell when he was ready to explode and would find a reason to leave the room, one that wouldn’t make him suspicious. When he did blow, he’d accuse any wives who happened to be around him of being rebellious and having weak characters—a terrible insult. Merril decided the worth of each wife: Barbara was a goddess. Faunita, the lowest of low.

  I knew that when he had two wives crying it was safe to return. What made Merril different from my mother was that she would quit after beating one of us. Merril, unlike my mom, seemed to crave more. Humiliating just one wife was never enough.

  As strange as it might sound, I’d adapted to my bizarre environment and was, by 1993, feeling more grounded than I’d been in years. My world consisted of children: my second-graders at school and my own four at home. Arthur, Betty, LuAnne, and Patrick were bright and loving.

  I drew strength from activities and events in the community. We had a huge Harvest Festival that would consume the family for days in preparation. One year we made four hundred pies in the week leading up to the three-day event. The Harvest Festival was our version of a county fair. Large families were assigned booths; our booth was for pies. There were games and other activities for kids. The children loved it, and I was always happy for any focus beyond Merril’s family.

  But the reality was that despite my success in making a reasonably stable life for myself and my children, I knew I was walking a tightrope and was never more than one step away from danger.

  Barbara still felt that I was the only one of Merril’s wives who had never completely submitted to her, which was true. Faunita, defeated and broken, stayed in her room watching movies. Tammy spent her time flattering Barbara and Merril. Cathleen had given up and did what she was told without complaint. When Ruth was not in the throes of madness and watering the shoes in her closet, she obsessed about being in perfect harmony with Merril and following Barbara’s orders.

  My strategy was to ignore Barbara and live around her. But by late 1993 she and Merril had decided to try to make me surrender to her one-woman rule.

  Money was the weapon they decided to use against me.

  Merril cut off every account in town and then informed us that if we needed something we had to come to him directly and ask for it. I was still teaching and turning over my entire salary to him, which, after taxes, was about $500 every two weeks. I had no money of my own, but in the past this had not been a problem because we had charge accounts everywhere in town. Merril seemed to think that if he denied me the basic necessities for me and my children I’d submit to Barbara’s rule.

  Merril told me he was having financial problems again. I believed him initially and tried not to ask him for money. But then I discovered everyone else in the family was still spending at the same levels. When they went to Merril, he instantly gave them the money they needed.

  The first time I went to his office I told him I needed a few items. He ignored me and didn’t even speak. I left, suspicious.

  The next week I went into Merril’s office to turn over my salary check. When I did, I asked Merril for five dollars to buy Arthur a pair of shoes. He ignored me again, refusing to respond. I sat down in his office. I wanted an answer.

  Barbara came in and asked Merril for money to pick up pictures in town. He wrote her a check that was almost equivalent to the paycheck I’d just handed him. When Barbara left I said, “It looks like you have plenty of money if you can spend nearly as much as I make in two weeks on pictures. Surely there must be money for shoes for your son.”

  Merril’s face turned crimson. “There is money for those who do the things I want.”

  I knew that was the opening for an argument. But I also knew he held all the cards. If I challenged him, he’d berate and humiliate me. I walked out of his office determined to never again ask him for a dime.

  I vowed never to surrender to either Merril or Barbara. I quietly began to figure out a survival strategy. I filed my tax return without telling Merril. I’d never done that before. I started to do a few extra things on the side to make money. I began selling NuSkin cosmetics. Merril knew about my venture but had no idea of my success.

  There were months when I sold $5,000 worth of cosmetics in a community where makeup was strictly forbidden. A banner month could net me $1,000. There was so much competition in the community among wives that when a man took one wife on a trip, the others would come and blow a few hundred bucks on cosmetics to stay competitive. I could even accept credit card payments by calling the number in to NuSkin. No one in the family suspected how much money I was making. It was one of the most empowering experiences I’d ever had. I was able to do it because I was married to Merril. Merril paraded me around town as his young trophy wife. Men would give their wives permission to buy cosmetics from me.

  Doing my own taxes and hiding money was the first time I’d ever gone against the teachings of the prophet. I didn’t care. I felt no guilt, no shame. This was the beginning, the fragile, tentative beginning, of mentally breaking free from the control of my “religion.” I still basically believed in the FLDS but thought Merril was corrupting and distorting its values for his own selfish and narcissistic ends.

  While I began putting energy into staying ahead of Merril and Barbara’s dirty little games, the rest of the family was intent on pampering Merril’s ego.

  Every year around Merril’s birthday on December 27 the family would perform a play or put on a program in his honor. His daughters usually took charge and orchestrated everything. For Merril’s birthday in 1994 one of his daughters did a new version of The Sound of Music.

  In those pre–Warren Jeffs years, we still watched movies and listened to the radio. Some families had TVs and their children watched videos. We were all familiar with The Sound of Music. Our extravaganza was going to be staged, in honor of Merril, at the community center, which could hold a thousand people. Margaret’s version of the musical was based on several polygamous families. She wrote parts for every child in Merril’s family, and by then there were more than forty. Margaret called it The Resound of
Music.

  I was pregnant with my fifth child and was too weak from morning sickness to take part. In our version, Maria was a nanny sent from one large polygamous family to another. Captain Von Trapp was not a widower but a married man with a large family. He had recently been introduced to the principle of plural marriage and was thinking about joining the FLDS. He hired Maria because he respected her father and knew he needed her to take care of his very large family.

  These two large families created parts for many of the children. But then Margaret needed parts for sons and daughters-in-law. So there were characters in the script that seemed to wander in and out from nowhere.

  Margaret dreamed of having an orchestra provide the music, but the reality was she was stuck with our little FLDS band. She dressed them up in formal wear so they looked like a professional orchestra, but when the band started playing the score from the real Sound of Music the audience laughed because they sounded so amateurish.

  The gist of the plot was that everyone was trying to escape the Nazis and flee to America to join the work of God. The play ended with a musical talent show while German soldiers stood guard. Merril’s sons-in-law played the Germans. After each talent number the actors pretended to flee to the mountains to escape. When the show ended everyone was hiking through the mountains to safety.

  But then the German soldiers came frantically searching after them. Uncle Rulon’s sons, Leroy and Warren Jeffs, who had married into Merril’s family, appeared in full Nazi regalia and were the last to march across the stage.

  The audience was laughing, unaware of the shadow falling across our community. It was the shadow of a totalitarian society that would one day consume every aspect of our lives and be under the control of Warren Jeffs.

  Warren’s Rise to Power

  All my pregnancies had been awful, but my fifth pregnancy was the first that was life-threatening. The pregnancy began with the same severe illness and vomiting. But this time I continued to menstruate. Shirley, the nurse practitioner I saw, said it was not unusual for a woman to have one period after becoming pregnant. She listened to the baby’s heartbeat, said it was normal, and sent me home.