Escape. Part 15

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 a.s.sured 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 cla.s.ses in Salt Lake City, where he still worked as the princ.i.p.al at a private FLDS school. The cla.s.ses 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 p.r.o.nouncement 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 discarded 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 cla.s.sroom.

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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l is this burning in your chest all about anyway? I always thought that burning is mast.i.tis." (Mast.i.tis 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 circ.u.mspect 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. G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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. Cla.s.srooms 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 cla.s.sroom, we could make them more efficient and actually help decrease cla.s.s 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 cla.s.sroom. Kids could do math and reading drills in the computer lab that would support their cla.s.sroom 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 cla.s.s.

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 big 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 a.s.sessment 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 a.s.sessment 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.

Warren heard that our charter school proposal had a big computer program. He had banned computers from his school. He knew I was developing my own reading books to complement my reading program, which was also threatening to him. Well-educated children might one day think for themselves. I think Jeffs knew this could ultimately undermine his leadership. So maybe I should have been better prepared for what happened next.

Merril went to talk to Uncle Rulon about the school. He told Merril it wouldn't happen. I have no idea if Merril even tried to change his mind.

All I was told was that the prophet was opposed. There would be no charter school. Alvin Barlow, the superintendent, was upset. Merril forbade me to do anything more with the charter school. I had been the backbone of the entire operation.

I was furious. My anger touched a core in me that burst into flame. Nearly everyone in the community wanted this school. For the first time, I began to see how religion could suppress something positive and life-giving. Failing to educate our children was unconscionable.

What was also maddening was that I was not allowed to present my case to Uncle Rulon before Warren turned him against the school.

Pieces were beginning to come together, but I had not yet added up the sum of the parts. I was too upset. I stopped eating for a week.

We told the state of Arizona that we couldn't pull the building together in time and that we were canceling the charter. This was a lie. (The state called us every year afterward asking what it could do to help get the school built. Jayne kept coming up with excuses but said sooner or later she'd blurt out the truth: the prophet opposed the school and would not allow it to happen.) I was too distraught over the crash of the charter school to continue teaching. I quit when the school year ended. There was no future for me in education, at least not while Warren Jeffs was the de facto prophet. I didn't think about what might happen after his father died. No one really expected Warren to become the next prophet. I certainly didn't. He was too much of a n.o.body.

Merril's Heart Attack

After the demise of my charter school, I knew I could never go back to teaching. The thought of going into a cla.s.sroom again was heartbreaking. I wanted to move before the public schools were closed in the community, which I was sure was going to happen. I told Merril that I could make more money as a Web site designer, and he agreed to let me try.

Merril gave me some office s.p.a.ce and I began developing simple Web sites for local businesses and selling health food over the Internet. Within a few months-the fall of 1996-I was pregnant with my sixth child and was sick again.

Life was changing, and not in good ways, as Uncle Rulon began exerting more control on the community. He had built a house in Colorado City, and he and Warren were spending more and more time among us. Our freedom was increasingly disappearing. We were now under strict regulations that prohibited us from going to the movies. Television and the Internet were also completely off-limits except for business purposes.

Even our clothing requirements changed. It was now forbidden to wear large prints. In the coming months and years, as our lives became more severe, plaids were banned and we were limited to wearing only pastel clothing in a few styles.

The other new and completely bizarre commandment from the prophet was that now we were all required to wear long underwear-including all children who were old enough to be potty trained. This created frenzy within the community as we all struggled to comply immediately. Until Warren's edict, wearing long underwear was optional. Only about 20 percent of the families chose to wear long underwear on their own-but they never tried to make toddlers wear them. I had to buy and sew underwear for us all. Then I had to buy more clothes that would cover up all the long underwear, which was not supposed to be visible. Like all the changes, the only reason that was given was that G.o.d believed his people were now ready to live by a higher law.

One afternoon I went with several of Merril's other wives to take a baby gift to one of Warren's wives who'd just given birth to a son. I'd heard that she delivered at Uncle Rulon's house and could not understand why she hadn't gone to the clinic.

I asked her what happened.

"Warren didn't want me to go to Hildale," she said. "He decided I'd have the baby at home. We had to improvise a bit, but everything worked out okay in the end."

She looked like she'd been through h.e.l.l.

"What do you mean, 'improvise'?" I asked.

"I was given an episiotomy with sewing scissors and then st.i.tched up with dental floss," she said in a weak and flat voice.

I was speechless. How could someone put his wife and child at risk and treat her in such a barbaric way?

But I knew I had to keep my mouth shut. Many of Warren's wives were in the room, and if I reacted, it might get this one in trouble-and me. It was hard to contain my shock. She had already said too much.

Later I heard that Merril's daughters who had married Warren defended his actions. They thought she was out of order for even talking about what had happened to her. No one questioned Warren's beliefs.

Months after the baby was born, word got around that Warren had stopped having s.e.x with this wife. I'm sure it was because he was angry that she told the truth about her episiotomy and it reflected badly on him. But Warren had always been mean to this girl and he might have rejected her for other reasons.

What frightened me now was that as word got around about how Warren Jeffs treated his wives, other men would start emulating his extreme behavior. At Linda's coffees we talked about how domestic violence had increased after the release of Warren's tapes calling for even more obedience among women toward their husbands.

Warren's expanding influence over our lives spread into the bedroom. He took s.e.x away from the community by decreeing that it could only be used for procreation. We had to keep track of when we ovulated and s.e.x could occur only at that time. Then we had to wait a month to see if we were pregnant before we could have s.e.x again.

Merril just ignored this new decree and continued to have s.e.x with me whether I was pregnant or not. He was in such a high position in the FLDS that none of his wives would ever report his lack of compliance. Some men didn't abide by this new ruling about s.e.x, but they knew that was risky. This new ruling gave Warren Jeffs more power over them. If their wives complained to Jeffs that they were being disobedient, their husbands could be kicked out of the FLDS.

But there was a catch: even if a woman told on her husband, it could still backfire. If Warren liked her husband, he could take his side through a loophole Jeffs called "the power of inspiration." G.o.d could act directly in a family by inspiring the husband. So if a husband was inspired to have s.e.x with his wife when she wasn't ovulating, then Warren would argue that G.o.d knew this was best for that man's family and the woman could be seen as being in rebellion and face consequences. The bottom line was that Warren was gaining complete control over our lives; he could make the rules but also manipulate them to his advantage.

The women who suffered most were those whose husbands didn't like to have s.e.x with them. Their husbands would say they were not worthy to bear their children and quit having s.e.x with them altogether. This freed up men to just have s.e.x with their most favorite wives. He'd tell the other wife that when she was worthy enough he would give her a baby. It was as cra.s.s as that.

It wasn't long after this decree went into effect that there was an upsurge of women in the community seeking antidepressants. Pregnant women started losing it because their husbands stopped having s.e.x with them. (Since women were pregnant almost all of the time, they expected to continue having s.e.x throughout their pregnancies, otherwise they rarely would have it.) Women would go into the clinic pregnant and distraught. The two nurse pract.i.tioners had the power to prescribe antidepressants. Pregnant women were put on Zoloft; everyone else got Prozac. This was not a secret. I heard about it both directly and indirectly from Shirley, one of the nurse pract.i.tioners, who worried that some of these pregnant women would have nervous breakdowns without the drugs. She said that at least a third of the wives in the community were on medication. (After several years of this, the Health Department was alerted to the number of prescriptions that were being written for antidepressants, looked at their charts, and said that women could not be on these medications for an extended period of time without seeing a therapist or a doctor. But if any serious action was taken as a result, I never heard about it.) s.e.x was power in the FLDS. If a man stopped sleeping with his wife, she was cut off at her knees. She lost power and status within her family. We always knew which wife in a family was like Barbara, the favorite. The woman having the most s.e.x won in the intense s.e.xual compet.i.tion played out in polygamous families. Her husband treated her like a queen and she used that power to lord it over her sister wives.

But children got caught in the crossfire of these s.e.xual wars. Husbands tended to become more abusive toward the wives they no longer had s.e.x with. They also mistreated the children of those wives.

Barbara was typical of a woman exalted in her status as the favorite wife. She genuinely believed she was superior to us all. As a favorite wife, both she and her children were untouchable. Her children looked down on their half siblings as inferior, which was also common in these large polygamous families.

The caste system in Merril's family was entrenched before I even arrived. But in that our family was an exception. Warren's new decree meant other families would now become more like ours. Many men in the FLDS tried to be fair to all their wives. They felt it was their religious duty not not to play favorites. There were schedules for s.e.x in the home so no one felt hurt or left out. If a man had three wives, each woman knew that according to the schedule, she would sleep with her husband every third night. to play favorites. There were schedules for s.e.x in the home so no one felt hurt or left out. If a man had three wives, each woman knew that according to the schedule, she would sleep with her husband every third night.

But this new s.e.x policy gave men a freedom they never had. There was no longer any obligation to sleep with a woman unless he wanted to have a child with her. So expectations about decency were off. Once free from sleeping with a wife, most men singled out their favorites and locked in a caste system in their families. Caste systems in families are breeding grounds for family members to harm one another. As the months and years wore on, Warren would underscore this by preaching that a man had the right to treat one wife better than another if she was more worthy of love.

s.e.x was the only hope a woman had in this life. If she pleased her husband s.e.xually, she and her children would be protected by him. Since he was her pa.s.sport to eternal life, she could not risk displeasing him s.e.xually. So it was emotionally destabilizing to women when their husbands only had s.e.x with them once a month or stopped altogether when they were pregnant. Their chances to seduce, impress, and satisfy their husbands were so drastically limited it threatened their very being.

But, like everything else, this new decree was done in the name of G.o.d. Warren was preaching that Christ would come to our community because we were pure and abstained from s.e.x except to create children. He preached that we were now living at a higher spiritual plane, but to me, it felt that we had crossed a new and dangerous threshold.

One morning when I was in the bathroom vomiting, Tammy came and pounded on the door. "Carolyn, Merril had a heart attack this morning. The ambulance is here to take him to the hospital. Barbara's going with him and the rest of us will meet them at the ER."

Tammy drove the small family car and I sat in the backseat, upset and so sick it was hard to stop vomiting. What if Merril died?

I was terrified. Women I knew in the community who were a.s.signed to marry other men after their husbands' deaths always ended up in more drastic situations. I honestly did not know how I could survive in a family if I was treated any worse.

Not all-but many-big polygamous families were similar to lions' prides. When a new lion takes over, it kills off all the cubs from the previous lion. I had seen situations where the new husband chased off all his new wife's sons and then married her daughters or married them to his sons. Girls can stay in the new family as a commodity, but the boys are often outcasts.

If Merril died, I'd be forced to remarry. There was no way around it. I prayed hard for Merril to live. My children were so young, and I was pregnant with another; we would be completely vulnerable if we were moved into another family.

Barbara became the spokesperson for the family. She stayed with Merril around the clock, but she was very secretive-at least with the other wives. She confided more in Merril's daughters. His condition was not good. His heart had been permanently damaged from a ma.s.sive attack. It was touch and go for several days. When he failed to improve, he was transferred to University Hospital in Salt Lake for bypa.s.s surgery. He went on a life flight. We made the five-hour trip the next day in a caravan of cars.

Merril did not do well in surgery. There was concern that he would not make it through the night.

What a strange scene we were. All six wives, Merril's married children, and several of his friends sat outside the surgical ICU. Many were in tears. The head surgeon returned to the hospital at about 3 A.M A.M. After spending several hours at his bedside, he told us Merril had stabilized and we could all go and get some sleep.

The next week was a nightmare. Merril got a staph infection and became septic. His kidneys started shutting down and he was put on life support. I was sure he was going to die. I couldn't stand being away from my children, but we had no choice. All of Merril's wives were required to keep a vigil while he was hospitalized. When I went in to see him I was convinced he was dying. Machines were keeping him alive.

People stared at us in the hospital; I felt like an alien when I went into the cafeteria. Rumors were circulating that a polygamist was in the ICU. I heard two janitors talking in the hallway saying, "Six wives-what does he do with them?"

Ruth was unhappy. She wanted to go home. Cathleen just left one day and went back to work. Barbara insisted we all had to stay. Tammy was marching in step, but I was desperate to get home. The conflict between Ruth and Barbara escalated. Several of Merril's daughters reported this to Uncle Rulon, and he a.s.signed another man to be responsible for Merril's family until he recovered.

This man had more power than even Barbara, and she hated being usurped. He took us all out to dinner, but Barbara's open hostility toward him made the meal tense. I didn't engage at all with either of them. I just needed to get back to my children. We'd been apart now for nearly three weeks.

One of Merril's daughters brought Arthur and Betty to stay with me for a week. That helped, but there were still the three others I yearned for. I talked to them every day, but it wasn't the same.

LuAnne had sent a present to her father. It was nicely wrapped-I a.s.sumed someone had taken her shopping. When Merril opened the present there was a wilted flower along with a few sc.r.a.ps of fabric. Everyone in his room roared with laughter. I ached for LuAnne so much; I knew what she had sent her father were treasures in her five-year-old eyes. Merril was so sick I'm not sure he understood what was going on, but I hated that everyone else was mocking my sweet little girl.

Merril had improved enough after a month to return home. We flew back to Colorado City on Uncle Rulon's private plane. As we touched down, I could see that a crowd of people had gathered on the tarmac to greet us.