Escape

by Carolyn Jessop

  Harrison began to sleep for longer periods of times. Even with a maximum dose of sedatives, he had never slept for more than six hours. I knew I would need medicine when we fled, so I gradually began to reduce the doses of his drugs—in tiny and incremental ways—and built up a small stockpile. Even when I cut back on his sedation at night Harrison began sleeping for eight hours.

  Harrison became so healthy that I took him to the doctor only once a month. He still needed Versed, but much less than before. His anxiety attacks diminished dramatically three months after his breathing improved. Maybe, just maybe, he could come out of those awful and debilitating spasms. Oh, how I wanted my little boy back. His doctor didn’t seem that impressed by his small improvements; she was looking for a big change, like the cessation of his spasms. But each small change filled my wellspring of hope. Escape was on the horizon.

  One afternoon in early spring I asked Cathleen to help me take Harrison for a walk when she came home from work. It had been another day of constant screaming because of his spasms.

  Cathleen told me what people had been talking about all day at work—Warren Jeffs had kicked more than a hundred teenage boys out of the community within the past month.

  “It’s such a shame that so many mothers are producing so many unworthy sons,” she said. “These children are choosing rebellion over doing the work of God and supporting our prophet.”

  I was speechless. I had been so consumed with Harrison’s care that I didn’t realize teenage boys were being kicked out of the FLDS in significant numbers. Audrey had told me once about a fourteen-year-old boy and his brother who were told to leave because they were accused of being gay. Homosexuality was seen as an abomination and never tolerated. I’d asked Audrey how the mother of these boys felt when her sons were dumped on a highway and told never to return. Audrey had said the woman was ashamed and heartbroken that she had raised a couple of creeps. She was embarrassed and tried not to think about what her sons had become. But I’d thought that was an isolated incident. I had no idea that boys were being kicked out in significant numbers.

  Whatever innocence I had left was wiped out that afternoon during my walk with Cathleen.

  It was bad enough that women couldn’t mourn the loss of a child for more than a week or two after the funeral. But how could any mother bear knowing that her son was being abandoned into a world he feared and had no skills to face? Since birth these boys had been taught that the outside world was evil. Now, because Warren Jeffs said so, they were hurled out of the FLDS and told never to come back.

  Women could show no emotion for these lost boys, who could be kicked out for listening to CDs, watching movies, or kissing girls. Mothers were told to pray to God to show them where they’d gone wrong in raising such children so they would not repeat the mistake with their other children.

  When young boys were kicked out of the community, the family didn’t talk about it or even admit that it had happened because it was too disgraceful. Women tried to keep it secret. No mother would ever protest the prophet’s decision because she believed it was revelation from God—just like her marriage.

  Because women were so secretive about this practice, few of us knew the true numbers. The other siblings were told never to speak their brother’s name again after he’d been sent away. The outcast sibling had been consigned to the devil, who’d punish him for all his remaining days on earth and seize his soul the moment he died.

  No one protested as hundreds of teenage boys were arbitrarily excommunicated from the FLDS by Warren Jeffs.

  One night I was doing my laundry when I heard myself paged over the intercom. “Mother Carolyn, you are wanted on the phone.” I picked up and heard my sister Linda’s voice. “I just drove by your house. Your children are dancing on the tables! I could see them doing somersaults from table to table and dancing around the room.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “There is no way they’d dare do that!”

  “Dare or not, they’re doing it. Go upstairs and see!”

  I left the endless pile of work behind and went upstairs. I saw the show of my life.

  Twenty children were dancing. All the lights in the dining room were ablaze. The three long tables were pushed together in a horseshoe and the kids were jumping and flipping from one table to the next. The player piano was belting out something with a jazzy beat. The older children were carrying the babies, and the smaller children danced at their feet. They were carefree and gleeful. I was mesmerized by delight. I had never seen such spontaneous happiness in our family. It amazed me that these little souls still knew how to be carefree and playful.

  The fun had begun when Merril and Barbara left for the night. A couple of the boys had a football and started tossing it around. The chandeliers began swinging and the kids squealing.

  Unmitigated joy of any kind was diminishing from our lives. Warren Jeffs had our community in a chokehold. I noticed that people’s faces now seemed devoid of expression. It was as if they were afraid even to look like they might be thinking. The life seemed drained from their faces. They acted as if emotions had been outlawed. People were determined to “keep sweet” even if it killed them. There was no arguing or questioning. But by “keeping sweet” we lost all our power.

  I never knew what was coming next. One day all the dogs were rounded up and killed. This had a harrowing effect on children who were attached to their pets. Oreo was our family dog, a cute black and white mutt that LuAnne adored. When Merril heard that the order had gone out to seize the dogs and destroy them he told one of his sons to take Oreo to Page and put him in the pound. This was devastating for my children even though Oreo didn’t die. LuAnne was heartbroken. Merril told the children that tears were not allowed. They should only be concerned with doing the will of the prophet.

  The dogs were destroyed after an ugly incident in which a four-year-old boy was killed by his stepfather’s pit bull. Warren’s decision to kill the dogs seemed completely irrational, like so much else in our world.

  One of the most searing incidents of my childhood was seeing Randi, the girl on my school bus with what I’d later realized were burns on her arm and who’d had her long braid hacked off. Her utter agony had broken my heart, and the fear in her face when she got on the bus that day never left me.

  Randi was forced into marriage at an early age, and by the time I had my eight children, she already had ten. One day Warren told her she was being assigned in marriage to another man.

  Stories like this were becoming more commonplace in the community. Warren would tell a woman one day that she would belong to someone else the next. Her children would follow her and belong to another man. They would take their stepfather’s last name. The only way they would be able to continue to see their biological father was if he went to court. But only a handful of men ever did that. Most believed Warren’s lie that if they did what they were told there was a chance of redemption. By the time I fled, I knew of fifteen or so women who had been reassigned to different husbands; in the years since, that number has grown to nearly a hundred.

  Warren would tell women that their husbands would not be able to offer them salvation in the afterlife and that he was assigning them to a man who could. Our belief was that as women, we could become celestial goddesses only if we were married to a man in this life who was worthy of becoming a god after death. For those who were still true believers, Warren’s violent disruption of families was seen as an act of divine inspiration.

  Women were not only the ones being torn from their families. Men were, too. It seemed as though I heard about it happening every week. Warren would call a man to his office and tell him he was no longer going to be a part of his family and that he must leave his wife and children, his job, and his community to repent from afar.

  Sometimes a reason was given, but often not. A man I knew, Paul Musser, was told by Warren that he was not fit “to exalt his wife into heaven.” Paul, who was not in a plural marriage but was devoted to his wife and th
eir thirteen children, believed that Warren’s orders were revelations from God.

  He went home and told his family that the prophet had told him he was unfit to be their father. The next morning, weeping and sobbing, the family said goodbye to their father and he to them. Paul had no idea of what he had done to fall from favor with God. But he believed Warren knew. Paul’s wife and children were given to another man soon after he left. (Paul was eventually able to see that he’d been brainwashed and that what Warren Jeffs did to him was an outrage.)

  Two years or so after he was kicked out, Paul’s wife was assigned in marriage to yet another man and his children had their third father in less than three years.

  One of the ways I could measure the change in our community was at Linda’s coffee parties. I’d been too engrossed in Harrison’s care for the last year to get to any. I was excited about going back and eager to see what women were talking about.

  One woman said she thought all the cell phones in town were bugged. This prompted someone else to say, “Whatever you do, don’t drink the punch,” a reference to the mass suicide in 1978 in Guyana when nine hundred followers of Jim Jones drank a cyanide-laced grape punch.

  Another woman became upset when she heard this. She started accusing us of not following the prophet’s will. It had become illegal to say the word fun. Warren Jeffs had banished that word from all use. So if we were being silly or lighthearted in any way, we could be reported as being in rebellion to the prophet. This kind of tension was new to me. I’d never been to a coffee at Linda’s where women censored themselves or criticized something another woman said. These clandestine get-togethers were the one place we could really be ourselves and talk openly.

  I was very confused. When I said something negative about Warren, my cousin Jayne kicked me under the table. I looked at her as if to say, What’s your problem? Jayne just put her finger up to her mouth. I was at a complete loss. The woman who was upset about the reference to Jim Jones left. We all concluded that those who were upset about the “drinking the punch” comment had already taken a few swigs.

  After she did, the conversation became more freewheeling. I learned about secret tapings that had been going on. Men would be called into Warren’s office and asked their views on a religious topic or issue. He’d then play a taped conversation in which they’d talked about the same issue, usually in a cell phone conversation. If there was a disparity between what the man said and what Jeffs had preached to believers, he’d be put on notice that he had to get in harmony with the prophet. (Men had also begun reporting on one another to Warren to try to get in his good graces so they wouldn’t be kicked out of the community.)

  I also learned about how Warren had bugged the meetinghouse of a rival FLDS bishop in Canada. None of us felt comfortable with any of this, but we were not going to bring it up with our husbands because it could get us in trouble if word got around that we were questioning Warren.

  Someone else talked about a woman we all knew who was caught having an affair with a young boy after her husband was given a new wife. Because of the affair, she was told that she had committed a sin unto death. Despite the fact her husband had been taken from her, she was still considered his property and he would rule her destiny in the afterlife. Because of her adultery, she was condemned to be a servant to him and his wives in heaven for all eternity.

  Warren banished her to her uncle’s home, where she lived, in effect, under house arrest. She was not allowed to be a mother to her children and could only see them on short, supervised visits if her husband gave his approval. There could never be forgiveness for her in this life. She was condemned to die the second death and her soul would be destroyed forever.

  But women didn’t have to commit adultery to be severed from their families. Another woman we heard about was taken in to see Warren by her husband, who felt she was unhappy in his family and he didn’t know how to help her. He complained that she was pulling away from him.

  Warren condemned her for being rebellious and removed her from her husband. The husband wept uncontrollably; this was not what he wanted to have happen. She was forced to move out of her husband’s home and into a small apartment in the community as an example of what could happen to a woman who wasn’t “keeping sweet.”

  When we talked about this at the coffee party we all felt that she should have taken her children and left the community. But women risked so much in standing up for themselves. If Diane had stood up to Warren, her husband never would have allowed her back into his home. He loved her and hated losing her, but he loved the prophet even more. It is hard for someone on the outside to fathom, but men would have died for Warren Jeffs. Jeffs was also cagey; he’d often hint at the possibility of eventual forgiveness if they did what he wanted them to do.

  What was most unsettling was that families could be torn apart for no reason—or reasons Warren would never reveal. We knew that he could turn on any of us the way he did with the others. A man who wanted to get rid of a wife could now march into Warren’s office and know that even with the flimsiest complaint or accusation he would be likely to get a fresh start with someone else.

  Cathleen and I were still having our morning coffee together when an episode with a Canadian bishop came up. Cathleen was critical of those in Canada who were defying Warren Jeffs and refusing to follow the newly ordained bishop. I could not believe her unquestioning support for Jeffs.

  “Cathleen, Warren can’t upset the leadership in Canada just because he is in a bad mood one day and think there will be no consequences.” She looked at me in disbelief. Cathleen still thought that Warren Jeffs was a god despite what he had done to her. She got up and left. We never had coffee again and she rarely spoke to me.

  Ordaining a new Canadian bishop was one of the rare instances when an action backfired on Warren Jeffs. Uncle Rulon was so incapacitated that he had no real power anymore. It had all been ceded to Warren—except that the old man had a few tricks up his sleeve. We saw this play out in Warren’s feud with the Canadian bishop of the FLDS, who had always been close to him.

  Warren saw him as becoming a threat to his own power and tried excommunicating him from the FLDS church. The bishop had thirty wives and more than a hundred children. He told his family what had happened and said they could leave if they liked, but everyone chose to stay.

  Warren felt the bishop was in total defiance and appointed the bishop’s half brother as his successor. The half brother refused to take the position. Warren bullied him until he finally relented and came to be ordained.

  The story that circulated around the community was that when it came time to ordain him, Uncle Rulon, who was so demented he didn’t even recognize the man, put his hands on the man’s head and did far more than make him a bishop. He made him a high priest, apostle, patriarch, first counselor, and finally bishop. Then he topped it off by giving him the keys to the priesthood and, in his final blessing, making him the prophet of God.

  This made him more powerful than Warren, which of course Warren could not stand. He told the new bishop to forget about everything he’d been ordained to beyond bishop. The new bishop told Warren he was a complete fraud.

  One day I was on the phone talking to someone about Harrison’s physical therapy when Merrilyn came into the kitchen crying. I asked Cathleen if she knew what the problem was.

  “Warren has sent her back to Merril because Uncle Rulon never wants to see her again. She’s Merril’s problem now.”

  Merrilyn and I were both thirty-four. For nine years, she’d been married to a man sixty years her senior. I hadn’t wanted to marry Merril, but I cherished my eight children. Merrilyn had no children. My sweet, innocent classmate, who had once tried to charm our teacher at the pencil sharpener, had been forced to spend the best years of her life in an old man’s harem. Now she was cast out.

  Merril banished her to his motel in Caliente. After several weeks of cleaning rooms, she decided to leave her father and her religion and fight for the l
ife she’d never had.

  Merrilyn found a ride into St. George and hooked up with the party circuit. The following week she went to Cedar and tried to get her own apartment. A boy who was still in the FLDS was helping her try to get settled. After three days, Merrilyn had a job.

  But then Merril came and required that she come home. The next day he took her to see Warren Jeffs.

  I was looking out the window when they came home. Merril looked disgusted. Merrilyn was crying and walked straight to the garden. I went out on the back deck of our house and watched her. She was sitting on a stump in the garden and sobbing. After a few minutes, her sister Paula arrived. Paula had been married off to Uncle Rulon, too. She must have snuck out of his house to come to see Merrilyn. She threw her arms around Merrilyn, who was in tears, and held her close.

  The next day I heard Tammy talking to someone on the phone about Merrilyn’s punishment. The boy who had tried to help Merrilyn in Cedar had been excommunicated. Tammy said that Warren had told Merrilyn she would spend the rest of her life as a slave. She would never be allowed to have children or anything of value in life. The devil would be waiting for her as soon as she died and would instantly destroy her.

  Warren told her the only way she could be spared from this fate was by the blessing of blood atonement. If the priesthood granted her this blessing, she might be able to remain as a servant to Uncle Rulon through all eternity.

  Blood atonement meant Merrilyn’s throat would be cut from ear to ear.

  Warren had begun preaching about blood atonement. In his sermons he said that Jesus Christ died on the cross in atonement for the sins we commit unknowingly. The sins a person commits knowingly can only be redeemed through blood atonement, but it is not a sacrament an individual can choose for herself. It can only be mandated by the priesthood.