Stolen Innocence (6 page)
Authors: Elissa Wall
I had no idea, and didn’t immediately answer. Now I was intimidated and worried, not knowing how to respond.
“This jewelry is quite nice,” he continued.
I began to exhale a sigh of relief.
He told me that it was wrong to adorn our bodies with worldly possessions. “Now, I want you to walk over to the garbage can and throw them away.”
I was devastated and embarrassed, but there was nothing I could do. Lowering my eyes, I obediently dropped the jewelry into the can, losing them forever.
I cried as I related my terrible experience with Uncle Warren to my mother that afternoon. She was sympathetic but firm. She told me that from that day forth I should not wear unacceptable items to school. I had to obey what Warren said. I was too afraid to tell my father, feeling ashamed to have lost something that he had given me, so I kept the incident to myself, oftentimes sulking in private when I thought about how my precious gift had become Uncle Warren’s trash.
T
he summer following second grade, I was officially baptized into the priesthood in the sacred “baptismal vault” in the basement of Alta Academy. I knew about the room, but I’d never actually been inside it until I had come of age. Descending the stairs to the basement in my pretty white full-length dress, I felt a rush of apprehension. I was excited to be participating in the sacred rite of passage, but also a bit scared. It was the way I felt about all of our rituals: it was good to know that my time had come, but there was always mystery surrounding the observance. Still, the thought that my father would be waiting for me in the waist-deep water calmed me down.
My mom and some of my siblings were standing just outside the door as I took off my white lace socks and white shoes and prepared to enter the room. I walked through the door of the sacred space slowly and descended the white tile steps that led into the enormous tub that took up much of the room, my clothing growing heavier with each step.
Three church elders had to be present for the ceremony; one was my dad, who was already in the water waiting for me to join him. The water was deep, just about up to my shoulders when I reached the section were Dad stood. For the ritual to be performed properly, every part of the body had to be completely submersed. My father had to submerge me three times because my foot kept popping out of the water.
Climbing back out of the tub, I was met by the other two elders standing just inside the doorway. They were there to perform a laying on of hands and anoint me with the special olive oil that had been blessed by three church elders for the occasion. I should have been freezing because the water in the font was so cold, but I was too overwhelmed to care.
I was officially a member of the church now and responsible for all my actions. It was an important moment in my life as an FLDS believer. The baptism signified that I was now accountable for my choices. All my childhood sins were instantly wiped away and I was given a “clean slate” to begin my life as an official member of the priesthood. From here on out, making the wrong choices could result in a permanent “black mark” on my slate that would remain until I was judged in heaven.
The moment I exited the cold tub of water I began to think carefully about how I behaved. I was in the church now, and I had to obey all the rules. If I didn’t, there would be consequences.
Your family must be united.
—
RULON JEFFS
I
n the weeks immediately following Mother Laura’s arrival in October 1995, the tension in the house had, for the most part, subsided. We’d cleared one of my sisters’ bedrooms on the lower level to make room for our new mother, and at the start we were all on our best behavior.
Mother Laura’s entry into our lives came at a time when many things in the Wall house were changing. In the span of a few months, my sisters Kassandra, Sabrina, and Michelle were all married according to the prophet’s revelation. Kassandra, at nineteen years old, joined Rachel as one of the many wives of Rulon Jeffs, who by that point was eighty-three, while Sabrina was married to a member of the FLDS community in Canada. Michelle stayed closer to home, marrying Uncle Rulon’s son Seth. All of my sisters had been over the age of eighteen at the time of their marriages, and Dad had been chastised for keeping them in the home so long. But my father just wanted to give his girls the opportunity to grow up.
Of these departures, Michelle’s hit me the hardest. She had the gentlest soul of anyone in my family and had always looked out for me—comforting me when I was sick, making sure that my hair was combed, and that I was dressed neatly and appropriately. There were so many children in the Wall household, and as the nineteenth, I sometimes fell through the cracks. But Michelle made every effort to ensure that didn’t happen; she was like a second mother to me. For the eldest sisters in the home to help with the care of the little ones was a common practice for families of the FLDS. Mom had thirteen children of her own still living in the home, and with Audrey up and out early to teach at Alta Academy, leaving most of the domestic duties falling on Mom’s shoulders, she’d needed to have Michelle, Kassandra, and Sabrina around to provide us extra attention. Of course, nothing compared to Mom’s healing touch, but in many ways Michelle had become another anchor for me. Losing her was unthinkable. I cried right up until the day of the wedding, begging her not to go away.
With all these changes in the family, it was beginning to feel like our house had a revolving door with people constantly coming in and going out. However, though we lost many of my older sisters that year, we had gained a mother and there was hope in that new relationship. I looked to Mom for advice on how to welcome Mother Laura. She had grown up knowing and wanting this lifestyle, but I now understand that our years of turmoil had made many of us skeptical about what her arrival would do to the already touchy atmosphere in our household.
Mom had endured years of compromising as she’d tried to pattern this home after the one she’d grown up in. I know that she had obeyed her priesthood head as she was directed, but over the years she’d grown increasingly disheartened at the way her relationship with her sister wife and husband had affected her children.
Mom’s firm religious convictions reminded her to hold her tongue and keep sweet. I admired how she welcomed Mother Laura with open arms. Seeing her embrace our new mother made me hopeful that this new element in the equation would balance our home out. Because Laura’s age was close to that of my older sisters, I felt optimistic about the prospect of forming a bond with her like the one that I shared with them. At first this seemed possible. Mother Laura and I had lots of fun, playing games with some of my other siblings. Her presence helped to alleviate some of the emptiness I’d felt since my sisters’ departures. But I watched helplessly as it soon became worse than before. Mom’s gentle personality and unwavering commitment to her faith were no match for the others in the home. It distressed me to see the lonely look in her eyes as she tried to keep the pieces together and shield her younger children from a repeat of the past.
But by the end of that first month, the newness of having Mother Laura in the house had begun to wear off. It was quickly becoming clear that Dad’s third wife had her own unique set of expectations and would present certain challenges. She was yet another person who wanted things done her way. We’d seen glimmers of that stubborn side during family get-togethers, but her desire to take charge held a different significance now that she was part of our household.
While Laura’s presence was problematic in itself, it served to aggravate another long-simmering tension in the family, involving my twenty-one-year-old brother, Craig. As he came of age, my oldest brother from my mother had finally been able to quiet some of the tension between the mothers and the children in our home. But adding Laura to the family had again made the equation unbalanced. It was not long after she arrived that old feuds were rekindled. She and Mother Audrey quickly became friends and their newly formed bond seemed to have the two women pitted against Mom and her children. Seeing his mother and younger siblings being improperly treated as he’d once been forced Craig to step in and do what he could. We were still recovering from losing three of our sisters and it had been hard for my mother’s children, especially Craig.
In conversations with Craig since, I have come to see that my brother, like most young men his age, had long been contemplating what he had been taught growing up. He found that many aspects of our religion had glaring discrepancies and didn’t make sense or feel right.
Craig possessed a fiery intelligence and a quick mind. When he was still a high school student at Alta Academy, he had begun to examine aspects of our religion in his quest to gain a deeper understanding of our faith. Uncle Warren didn’t seem to like Craig because he wasn’t just another sheep willing to follow the flock. He was an enthusiastic student, and in priesthood history, he often asked pointed questions that would back Warren into a corner in front of the whole class. While he was eagerly trying to understand how the teachings and our culture all fit together, Warren was threatened by my brother’s inquisitiveness and labeled him as trouble. The two often clashed.
Warren seemed to single out Craig and watch for any misstep he made. He was always ready to chastise him and often made an example of him in front of his classmates. One particularly shame-inducing consequence for acting out in school was to have your father called in, and Warren was not afraid to subject the students to that humiliation.
Warren’s attitude toward Craig and many of my siblings seemed to come not just from displeasure with their behavior but from a larger, more fundamental problem with the Wall family. It was almost as though he felt threatened by us. The fact that many in my family were smart, strong-willed, and unafraid to ask questions when things did not feel right made it hard to keep a tight hold on us. Warren didn’t like having to deal with disobedience and questions concerning the priesthood. Our religion left no room for logical reasoning and honest questioning. Warren made no attempt to understand or tolerate any of this, deeming it as absolute rebellion.
By the time Craig was twenty-one, doors had been opened and he began to objectively examine our culture. He was still a believer, but was growing skeptical. He had lost trust and faith in the church and its leaders because he was having trouble reconciling the way they were teaching to the way in which they were conducting their actual lives. Seeing our sisters get placed for marriage to men who were so much older than they were only confirmed for Craig that there were many unjust and illogical elements to the FLDS belief system. In particular, the marriage of our half-sister Andrea disturbed him.
Andrea had wed Larry Steed, who was also married to Mother Audrey’s daughter, Jean. Because Jean was one of the oldest girls in our family, the younger children were not close to her, and Andrea feared that life in the new home would be difficult. Before her marriage, we all worried about the prophet’s revelation that she should marry Larry. We were skeptical that the union would make her happy, and doubt began to swirl that the placement had truly been God’s will.
Though Craig had been raised to see Andrea’s placement as a revelation from God, he questioned more than ever the arrangement. At the time, he worried that Larry and others had contrived the marriage and suspected it had little to do with any divine inspiration. He was coming to question the most fundamental aspect of our way of life: divine revelation from God regarding placement marriage. A thought like this went against everything we knew, but with no outlet for his questions, Craig continued to struggle inwardly.
When Mother Laura moved in, his internal debate began to bubble over in noticeable ways, and he was sometimes confrontational. It wasn’t just about how Mother Laura behaved; her presence was a constant reminder that the church’s values were flawed and that plural marriage was not working in our home. Laura had a forceful personality, a trait that combined with Audrey’s similar personality seemed to drown out our mother. I was too young to really know what was going on or see the dynamic, but I could tell that Craig’s concern only grew as he came to feel that Mom was not being treated properly.
Looking back, I wonder if a lot of the fights may have arisen because neither Dad nor Audrey knew how to live in plural marriage. Even if you’re raised in plural marriage and have a model for it, it’s difficult to make it work—to know when to compromise, when to complain, and when to involve the father. If you’re not careful, minor scuffles can snowball into ugly conflicts. Since Audrey grew up in a monogamous family, it seemed hard for her to take a conciliatory tone, and with the addition of Laura’s assertiveness, my mother’s needs frequently got lost in the fray.
My mother’s background only made things more complicated, because she knew all too well that plural marriage, with all its intricacies, could work under the right circumstances. Mom had been raised in a household that was held up as the ideal plural family, where the mothers got along and
all
the kids truly saw one another as siblings. Mom embraced her faith and the FLDS teaching in regard to women, and desired a peaceful household. As it wasn’t Mom’s way to engage in fights with the other women in the house, she would often retreat instead of getting in the middle and making things worse. Everyone on Mom’s side felt that Dad should stand up for her more, and we were upset when he allowed the more forceful wives to take charge.
The situation failed to improve with time. Craig, being my mother’s oldest son, took on the responsibility of advocating for her and her children when no one else would. When his conflicts with Mothers Audrey and Laura escalated, my father was often pulled in, leading to contention between him and Craig. Some fights got so heated that they turned physical. I had always seen my dad as an even-tempered and reasonable man, but now it was slowly beginning to show that he was consumed by the situation and having trouble controlling his feelings. It appeared that in Dad’s mind, Craig was affecting the other boys in the home and tainting their beliefs, and in trying to solve this problem, he was losing his grip on our family and on himself.