Escape

by Carolyn Jessop

  Two nights after Shirley told me not to worry about the bleeding I awoke because I was soaked. I turned on the light and saw that I was covered in blood. There was a pool of blood in the bed. I was hemorrhaging. I panicked and got in the shower, and the bleeding stopped.

  I taught my second graders the next day, thinking that I had probably miscarried and that my pregnancy was over. But my morning sickness continued. I saw Shirley a week later and she ordered an ultrasound.

  The test showed a healthy baby but a placenta that had abrupted—torn away from the uterus. Only 50 percent of the placenta was functioning. I was only thirteen weeks pregnant. Shirley consulted with the other nurse practitioner now working in the community and the two agreed that I needed to spend the rest of my pregnancy in bed. The half of the placenta that was abrupted would continue to leak blood into the uterus and that would produce cramping that could potentially tear more of the placenta away. The nurses warned me that there was a high probability that my baby would not survive.

  Who would care for my four children if I was confined to bed? Patrick, the youngest, was still in diapers, and I knew that no one would bother to change him more than once a day. I knew the other wives wouldn’t bring meals to me in bed or see that my children got enough food. I also hated the thought of leaving my second-grade classroom. I’d become very attached to my students. But this was a matter of life and death.

  I asked Merril what I should do. He accused me of trying to make this into something it wasn’t and said to stop pitying myself. “What mother wouldn’t give her life for her baby?” He told me to quit my job and go to bed. In his view, this pregnancy was a test required by God.

  I continued to hemorrhage off and on for the next six months. I was so weak it was difficult even to stand. One morning after waking up in a pool of blood again I felt that I was dying and feared this might be the last day I would have to spend with my children.

  I called for my two youngest, LuAnne and Patrick. They hadn’t had a bath in weeks because I had been too weak and sick. I gave them a long bubble bath in the tub. They played joyfully together while I lay on the bathroom floor. I dressed each child in clean clothes. My head was pounding so hard it felt like a sledgehammer was battering my brain. I sent LuAnne and Patrick to find their older brother and sister. I saw no reason to stay in bed any longer because I was sure my baby and I were dying.

  When I had all four children together, we walked to the park near our house. I sat on a bench and wept as I watched my children swing and play. I wanted to be their mother. I wanted to watch them grow up. I was angry thinking how much of their lives I would miss by dying. Leaving them alone and motherless stabbed me with sorrow. But I ached in sorrow for myself. My unborn baby and I were dying and no one really cared. My husband wouldn’t miss me. My sister wives would be glad I was gone. My death would be seen as God’s will and there would be no questioning, no mourning. The only tears that would be shed for me were those I was shedding for myself. My children were exuberant and it felt as unbearable to watch them as it was to turn away.

  Shirley learned of my deteriorating condition from Tammy. Tammy and Shirley had been sister wives of Uncle Roy. Tammy was having coffee with her and condemning me to Shirley. Shirley knew how grave my condition was and went through the roof. For Shirley, this was a medical issue, not a religious one. She immediately called Merril and insisted he take me to the hospital. He made light of it and Shirley could tell he wasn’t going to act. The next day when she saw Merril at a community function she spoke to him in front of people she knew he was trying to impress. She told him I needed to go to the hospital immediately and if I didn’t he’d have a dead wife and a dead baby.

  I could not go to the hospital on my own. My husband had to authorize it. The volunteer ambulance drivers in Colorado City and Hildale were all members of the FLDS. Because of this they were under enormous pressure not to interfere with another man’s family. And so they would not take a woman (or her child) to the hospital unless her husband had given his approval.

  Shirley shamed Merril into sending me to the hospital, and I was en route an hour later. The doctor didn’t want to deliver me because the baby was still small and his lungs undeveloped. By now I was thirty-three weeks pregnant. I stabilized in the hospital quickly with adequate food and hydration. I stayed there for four weeks and then Andrew, my fifth child and third son, was born by Cesarean section. Andrew was small, but he nursed heartily and gained weight quickly. His survival was a miracle. Shirley said she’d never thought I’d carry Andrew as long as I did. Thankfully, only Merril was allowed to be present in the delivery room.

  On a follow-up visit, I talked to Shirley about my fears of getting pregnant again. She said I didn’t meet any of the risk factors for another abruption and assured me it would never happen again. She was wrong. I had three more life-threatening pregnancies.

  My pregnancy with Andrew changed my sense of security in the world. I had five healthy and beautiful children whom I cherished, but I was terrified of becoming pregnant again. I wanted birth control but had no access to it. The FLDS believed that if a woman used birth control to keep life from coming into the world, she would pay for it in her next life by being a childless servant to her husband’s other wives throughout eternity.

  The instability I felt in my personal life was mirrored by increasingly strange changes taking place in the community. By 1995, Warren Jeffs was becoming a subtle but more powerful presence in our daily lives. This struck me as odd because there were many other men who were more powerful in the FLDS than he. But he was Uncle Rulon’s favored son, and the prophet would often say that Warren spoke for him.

  Warren spoke in other ways. He began teaching special priesthood history classes in Salt Lake City, where he still worked as the principal at a private FLDS school. The classes were taped, and Tammy’s sister came to our house one day enthusiastically talking about how much information they contained. I wondered why anyone would care about whatever Warren Jeffs had to say. Tammy’s sister said that these tapes were not available to just anybody. Only the privileged could purchase them.

  Some people who heard them found them disgusting and said they were little more than Warren’s racist rants. He claimed that the black race had been put on earth to preserve evil.

  I decided to listen to them myself. Warren based his talks on foundational FLDS doctrine. He spoke in a strange, trancelike voice that seemed deliberately aimed at hypnotizing the listener. One set of tapes described how God would destroy everyone on the North and South American continents. Then he recited a lengthy list of things a person would have to do before he or she could be lifted off earth.

  Anyone who hoped to ascend had to live with a burning in their chest at all times, and this burning was the spirit of God. The tapes were becoming so popular that there was a frenzy among those who were trying to get them. Their exclusivity gave them great status and everyone wanted to get hold of a set.

  Warren spoke at church and elaborated on how the burning in our chests would presage being lifted from the earth. Those who didn’t have it would be destroyed along with the wicked.

  It was around this time when Warren banned the color red. He announced that it was inappropriate to wear the color red or have red items in our home because it was reserved for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He preached that when Jesus Christ returns he’ll do so in a red robe, and that wearing that color prior to the second coming is unholy.

  He made the pronouncement one Sunday in church, and those wearing red went home immediately and changed clothes. Other families got rid of every red item they owned. This was a hardship for families without much money. Children lost a lot of clothes, coats, and boots. Women with red in their dresses had to get rid of them; for some this meant throwing out a sizable percentage of their wardrobes. Some families adapted to this with a more moderate approach: when the red clothes, toys, or household items wore out, they would abandon them. The more extreme families disc
arded all red items immediately.

  One teacher told her students red wasn’t a bad color, it was beautiful. The students reported her rebellion to their parents. The parents complained, asked that the teacher, who was not a member of the FLDS, respect their beliefs, and demanded that red be removed from her classroom.

  Merril had always liked red. In our family we went through the closets and eliminated most of our red clothes. That evening I watched the sunset—a blaze of orange and red. If God wanted red preserved for Jesus Christ alone, why did he spread it across the sky in such abundance?

  When some of us gathered for coffee later that week at Linda’s, the topic of having a burning in our chests as a proof of righteousness came up again. Jayne, my high-spirited cousin with whom I’d played apocalypse as a child, kicked off the discussion. “Ladies, I have one question. What the hell is this burning in your chest all about anyway? I always thought that burning is mastitis.” (Mastitis is an infection common to nursing mothers.) Everyone laughed. Someone asked Jayne how she dared question the requirements about being lifted up. “Well,” she said, “if I have to have a breast infection to be lifted up, then no thank you! I would rather die with the wicked!”

  The discussion then became more serious, about what felt like a new extremism taking root in the community that felt more radical than anything that we’d known in the past. One of the women recounted a harrowing story about one of the police officers in the FLDS. (All of the police officers in our community were FLDS members, which complicated matters if a woman tried to escape, because she’d get no help or protection from police. It also made reporting domestic violence almost meaningless because the police would always side with the husband.)

  I had rarely heard a story as disturbing as I did that morning. The FLDS police officer wanted to take his wife up to the Steeds ranch to teach her a lesson in obedience. He put her in a pen with a bull and then tied a rope to the neck of the bull. He told his wife, who was pregnant, that she had to control the bull with the rope on orders of her priesthood head. She tried to hang on to the bull, but he ran off and she ended up being dragged until she let go of the rope.

  Her husband got into the pen and handed her the rope again and told her she had to hold on. But the bull pulled away from her and her husband became enraged. This time he took the end of the rope and tied it around the neck of the bull and told her she better hang on this time. But it was impossible. The third time he tied the rope to her so she could not let go. She was dragged around the ring again and so badly injured she lost the baby—which then became her fault because she was so disobedient.

  When I heard it I told the group I had a burning sensation in my chest—I wanted to kill the guy. The others agreed, and we talked about what we’d do if he ever pulled us over. The story was well circulated in the community because the man’s stepmother became aware of what he’d done to his wife and was so incensed that she started talking about it. No one went to the authorities because we knew the woman would deny the whole thing. We all knew we were powerless when it came to protecting ourselves. I feared that it was an example of hysteria that was manifesting itself in extreme ways. This police officer had carried the notion of “perfect obedience” to a criminal level.

  The obedience Warren preached was a woman’s complete submission to her husband. He said women should not work outside the home and should not even leave home unless allowed to do so by their husband.

  We’d always kept our coffee meetings quiet, but now we knew we had to be even more careful. We began to be much more circumspect about what we were doing as changes swept over our community. As women were required to leave the workforce because of Jeffs’ new doctrines, it became harder for some families to make ends meet.

  The changes Warren Jeffs mandated were obeyed because it was believed he was the voice of the prophet, Uncle Rulon. People did not resist the more oppressive policies he advocated. Instead, it was widely believed that we were being called to a higher way of living the gospel. This wasn’t oppression, this was grace. God was giving us a new and better way of being more faithful to him via the prophet and his mouthpiece, Warren Jeffs.

  People who feared these changes and sensed danger, like me, kept quiet. It wasn’t safe anymore to talk about what you were feeling. Women now were not even supposed to go into town without the company of a man. Our husband was our lord and supreme master, holding exclusive power over our lives. It was seen as no longer acceptable for a woman to enter the same room as her husband without first saying a personal prayer asking God to put the same spirit on her as on her husband.

  I saw this as a real dilemma because most of the time when I entered the same room as Merril he was in a very bad mood. If I had the same spirit that he had, one of us might get hurt. This doctrine was one I decided to ignore.

  Charter School

  There was no aspect of our lives that Warren Jeffs left untouched. Education was one of the first areas where his imprint was punitive and spiteful.

  Warren’s father had put a stop to higher education after he became the prophet. The only exceptions were those of us who had been given permission to attend college by his predecessor, Uncle Roy, before he died. So a few of us were allowed to go on to college, but most could not. This created a population that was even more isolated by its lack of exposure to reading, critical thinking, and the arts. It also meant there was a real shortage of trained teachers.

  We couldn’t hire teachers from out of town because no one was willing to work for such low salaries. Teachers made, at most, twenty thousand dollars a year. Some families were home-schooling their children because they felt public schools were too contaminated with worldly influence. The education the home-schooled got was abysmal. But the number of kids being taught at home did not have any impact on the teacher shortage. Classrooms were overcrowded, teachers overwhelmed.

  Several of the second-grade teachers talked about this problem at our monthly meeting. We knew families were getting bigger, not smaller. Our brainstorming produced no answers. But the next week I heard about charter schools that were starting in Arizona.

  The state was accepting proposals for additional schools that would open in the following years. I started doing research to see what a charter school might mean for us, and it was breathtaking.

  If the state funded a charter school, it would do so based on the school’s total number of students. The rate per student was the same as it was in Phoenix. This meant that we could generate enough income from a charter school to hire competent teachers from outside the community. Win-win, it seemed to me.

  I told the school superintendent, Alvin Barlow, that if we used computers in the classroom, we could make them more efficient and actually help decrease class size. Some teaching could go on in the computer lab, but it could be done by a lab tech instead of a teacher. This would free up teachers to spend more time in the classroom. Kids could do math and reading drills in the computer lab that would support their classroom studies.

  I had taken several courses in computer programming and writing HTML—hand-coding Web sites. I knew I could develop software specific for our curriculums. Barlow was impressed. He wholeheartedly supported my idea for a charter school.

  I was a well-respected teacher because I had a talent for teaching any child to read. Parents whose children had reading problems would go to Barlow and ask for their child to be put in my second-grade class.

  Merril also thought the charter school plan was a good idea and gave me the go-ahead. I asked Merril before I started writing the proposal if we needed to run it by Uncle Rulon first. He said he’d talk to the prophet about it but didn’t see any problem. I don’t know if Merril ever did have that conversation, but several of the prophet’s wives knew I was writing the charter, so I think he knew what was going on.

  I worked on the proposal night and day. My cousins, Jayne and Lee Ann, both teachers, also pitched in. We got our proposal in the night before the deadline and then took a bi
g breath. We were proud of what we’d accomplished and now had to wait and see what happened.

  A month later, we were invited to Phoenix to present our charter. There had been a hundred entries. Most of the presenters were school administrators or superintendents with much more experience than we had. Jayne and I felt like kids.

  Of the twenty proposals presented before ours, only one was given the green light. The stakes were high. Our turn finally came. We were questioned repeatedly.

  One of the women on the board finally put a halt to the questioning. “I want this school. It contains the best assessment plan I have ever seen.” One of her male colleagues concurred. He liked the innovative ideas we had in our proposal and wanted to see how they’d work in practice.

  The board had concerns about whether we could build a school the size we’d proposed over the summer. I said that would be no problem. The community was used to building things fast.

  We were approved! Jayne and I were elated. I’d never done something so empowering. I was proud and determined to make this school work. When the Arizona State Board of Education reviewed our charter, we were told it was one of the best assessment plans they’d ever seen.

  Merril was impressed with our accomplishment and said he’d tell Uncle Rulon. Word got back to Warren Jeffs in Salt Lake City about our triumph. Warren was still running the private FLDS school there and handling a lot of the day-to-day running of the sect for his ailing father. Warren’s teaching style consisted in beating students with yardsticks. Only two teachers in the school had teaching degrees. The rest had, at most, high school degrees. Their only qualification was their loyalty to the FLDS and to Warren.