This is one of the worst chapters in Escape. Considering how much abuse we’ve seen already, and how bad it gets later on, that’s saying something. Needless to say:
Content Notice for severe child physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse.
Carolyn starts the chapter with her excitement at finally being old enough to start school. She’s now six and a half. We learn that FLDS kids don’t attend kindergarten; supposedly home is better. But Carolyn’s home is one without books, without even fairy tales. I can’t even stand this. My mom filled my childhood with books. I started to read a bit on my own by age 3, and some of my best memories are of afternoon reading time with my mom. I became a writer because she’d told me every fairy tale she knew and run out of ideas for new ones by the time I was six, so she encouraged me to make up my own. My thirst to learn and imagine was never quenched – that would be impossible – but Mom gave me bottomless springs to drink from. Carolyn was just as thirsty, and was only given a few pitiful drops to drink.
There wasn’t even a public library, in a town of several thousand people, overflowing with children. That’s practically criminal. And no, I’m not being sarcastic.
In our last installment of Escape by Carolyn Jessop, we got a taste of the depression, despair, and abuse Carolyn lived with in her FLDS community. Today, we’ll see how her childhood conditioned her to fear the outside world, and accept her lot as an abused wife pumping out endless babies in a loveless plural marriage.
In the preface of Escape, Carolyn Jessop gave a brief, body-clenching account of the night she and her eight children fled her polygamous arranged marriage and the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints cult. Now she takes us back in time to her childhood. For the next several chapters, she’ll immerse us in her early life and the FLDS, showing us how a harsh fundamentalist doctrine enmeshes the mind, and leads to the awful abuses many people, especially women and children, suffer in such sects.
Content Note: Child abuse, emotional abuse, medical neglect, threats of suicide
Carolyn very nearly wasn’t born into it at all:
Aunt Lydia couldn’t believe I’d survived. She was the midwife who had delivered babies for two generations, including my mother. When she saw the placenta, she realized that my mother had chronic placental abruption. Mom had hemorrhaged throughout her pregnancy and thought she was miscarrying. But when the bleeding stopped, she shrugged it off, assuming she was still pregnant. Aunt Lydia, the midwife, said that by the time I was born, the placenta was almost completely detached from the uterus. My mother could have bled to death and I could have been born prematurely or, worse, stillborn.
It appalls me that a woman could hemorrhage during pregnancy and just disregard it. But this is what can come of fundamentalist philosophy. Many of these very controlling sects prefer using midwives to OBs. The gynecological care for women is poor or non-existent. You frequently end up with pregnant women choosing – or being forced – to take enormous risks with their health. You get women “shrugging off” dire emergencies like maternal hemorrhage. You too often end up with injured or dead mothers and babies. Carolyn and her mom Nurylon were extremely fortunate. (Oh, and if you’re tempted to paint this gamble as the beautiful result of trusting “natural birth,” please go read the Skeptical OB. There’s a reason poor women in other countries go so far as to swim raging rivers so they can give birth in a hospital. It’s because “natural” childbirth is wildly dangerous.
Carolyn’s father Arthur gave her mom a choice of two names. That’s the extent of egalitarian parenting in their world. Carolyn’s mom was sixth generation FLDS. She knew her place was to submit, the man’s to decide.
When Carolyn was born, her father had only one wife. The family moved from Colorado City, Arizona to Salt Lake City, Utah when Carolyn was five. Her mother thrived there, where her husband could come home from work nightly and they had enough money to feed their growing family. They could even afford toys for the kids. Nurylon loved taking her kids to the zoo and the park. And she was “thrilled,” after three daughters, “to finally have a son, because in our culture, boys have more value than girls.”
The fact that her father favored Carolyn over the other kids caused tension, but despite that, the year they spent in Salt Lake City was good. But then her father decided to move the family back to Colorado City, because his eldest child, Lydia, was about to start school, and he wanted her taught in the FLDS-soaked (nominally) public schools. Couldn’t have her learning real stuff, of course!
Colorado City, Arizona. Photo courtesy Ken Lund via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
The move back to their cramped little home and the dusty, claustophobic little FLDS town caused Nurylon to sink into a deep depression, one so severe she couldn’t even try to hide it from the kids. She would talk constantly about wanting to die, “having nothing to live for,” and sometimes would inform her children over their late-morning breakfast that she planned to kill herself that day. She assured her terrified kids that the Church would assign their dad a new wife, so they’d have a new mom to take care of them. She beat her children almost daily, sometimes bruising them so severely the marks would linger for over a week. The kids had to become experts in her behavior to survive, going so far as to provoke her into spanking them every morning once Carolyn had figured out she only spanked once per day, and the morning spankings weren’t as severe. She then wondered why her children were so bad in the mornings…
Many fundamentalists advocate spanking, relying on the Bible for justification. They have entire rituals dedicated to it, including spanking from love and hugging the child afterward. Carolyn’s experience shows why this doesn’t work:
When my mother beat me, she would always say she was doing it because she loved me. So I used to wish she didn’t love me. I was afraid of her, but I would also get angry at her when she hit me. After she beat me she insisted on giving me a hug. I hated that. The hug didn’t make the spanking stop hurting. It didn’t fix anything.
This was considered good discipline in the FLDS community. But it’s not discipline. Spanking is abuse.
Abuse was rife in the FLDS community. Carolyn remembers seeing women in dark glasses, hiding black eyes and other bruises, quite often as a child. Her mother wouldn’t explain that those bruises came from battering husbands.
On the outside, Carolyn’s family looked perfect. Her mother kept them dressed in beautiful handmade clothes, and they were exquisitely well-behaved. Everyone thought their family was perfect. Keep that in mind when you see the Duggars playing happy huge family on teevee.
In Salt Lake City, Carolyn’s mother had been happy, engaged with the world around her. “In Colorado City, she was locked into a world of constant pregnancies, a loveless marriage, and a rural community strung together with dirt roads.” She and her husband fought constantly when he was home. She had to put on a facade of perfection with him, but it was never perfect enough. He complained about dust atop the refrigerator when the rest of the house gleamed. He complained about the children’s behavior, no matter how well they behaved. He wanted his already-thin wife to be thinner, despite keeping her almost continually pregnant.
There were flashes of the person she could have been, had she not been crushed by the FLDS lifestyle and her husband’s abuse. She loved playing games with her kids, and read them fairytales. She delighted in Christmas, even going so far as to smuggle in an FLDS-forbidden Christmas tree one year. She and her kids had a wonderful night decorating it, and a joyous Christmas morning opening their presents and eating candy.
My father let us have candy once a year – no more. My mother was clearly disobeying our father in giving us sugary treats…. Linda and I were old enough to realize that Mama was going to have to pay for her disobedience, but we loved feeling so spoiled.
Carolyn’s father came home the following night, and blew up. He and his wife fought at top volume long into the night. When Carolyn woke the next morning, the tree was gone, and her mother wept as she cooked breakfast. Their first Christmas was their last. Her mother’s depression grew so severe she couldn’t get out of bed or take care of the house. Her spirit was crushed.
After a few days, the friend who had been her Christmas co-conspirator came over and told her to stop feeling bad about herself. If her husband didn’t want her to have fun with her kids, that was his problem. Mother rallied, but she never again did something with us in defiance of our religion. I did notice that she became more demanding of us and insisted on more perfection after the Christmas episode. I’m sure she would have preferred to play games with us instead of spanking us, but her own mental slavery prevented her from being who she was.
It’s unbearably tragic when religion and/or ideology confines people in strait jackets so tight they’re strangled. I wish Carolyn’s mother could have broken those bonds, but it’s nearly impossible for women with no power and resources to do. And next week, we’ll see how the FLDS church kept its members in chains. We’ll also see what happened when they were almost set free.
For now, all I can say is, fuck religion. Yes, I’m aware that families can have abusive and controlling dynamics without it. But at least those abusers don’t have a mandate from God for their abuse. At least they can’t so easily claim that what they do is holy. And good people aren’t turned bad against their will, believing they must do what God wants, even if it means harming themselves and their kids. At least they don’t believe their salvation depends upon it.
I went to high school in Page, Arizona, a complete nowhere town with virtually nothing for kids to do. One of the ways we’d amuse ourselves on boring nights was by driving up to the Utah/Arizona border and gawking at the polygamists’ houses in Big Water. We’d make fun of their extreme size and shoddiness. There weren’t many there. They were weird and isolated, and we rarely caught a glimpse of any people around them. We had no idea what went on behind those blank walls, aside from knowing it involved one man, lots of women, herds of children, and extreme Mormon religion. If we ever encountered actual polygamists visiting or working in Page, we didn’t realize it. We’d probably have done something stupid if we had. We were almost completely ignorant about polygamy and the lives people in the more fundamentalist sects lived.
Escape by Carolyn Jessop and Laura Palmer is showing me what we rude teenagers couldn’t see. And in the FLDS case, it’s a horrifying enough picture that a single review isn’t enough to capture the sheer scale of the awful – I’ve got to review it chapter-by-chapter. Pick yourself up a copy if you decide to follow along.
Carolyn Jessop was born and raised in the FLDS cult1*. These are the extremist Mormons who believe polygamy is required by God. If they sound familiar, it may be because their prophet, Warren Jeffs, is in prison for sexually assaulting children and arranging child marriages.
The Preface of Escape opens with Carolyn’s escape from the cult with her eight children. She’d waited and planned for months. We get some insight into communication (or lack thereof) in her polygamous family: she hadn’t known until 10 that night that her husband was away on a business trip. With all of her kids at home and her husband gone, this was their one chance to get out.
(Some people may wonder why she didn’t just ask for a divorce and let the courts settle it. Those people have no idea how cults and religion-sanctioned abuse work, so they just need to read on.)
Carolyn has a nearly impossible task ahead of her. She’s got an 18 month-old toddler, a 3 year-old boy who’s severely disabled from spinal neuroblastoma, and several older but deeply indoctrinated kids to rescue. She’s got six highly suspicious “sister wives” to evade. Fortunately, she’s got a sympathetic biological sister nearby whose phone she can use – her only means to contact the outside world.
This is the era of Warren Jeffs, Carolyn tells us. Warren had stepped into the Prophet’s role after his father Rulon’s death. He’s now claiming that he’s Jesus Christ and preparing to move his faithful to an isolated compound he calls the “Center Place.” Carolyn knows her husband and his family will be among the first to go there – and once trapped there, all chance of escape will be gone. Her young daughters will end up as child brides. None of her children will get an education, or have much of a future.
The FLDS Temple near Eldorado, Texas. This is Warren Jeffs’s “Center Place.”
By the time Carolyn is at her sister’s house and able to make phone calls, the Arizona police aren’t answering, and the Utah police can’t help because she’s a mile outside their jurisdiction. No one at the charity that helps women like Carolyn flee their polygamous marriages can assist on such short notice. Desperate, Carolyn calls a brother who’d fled the FLDS with his lady love several years before. He can’t get there until 5am, but he promises to come.
Now we begin to learn why Carolyn can’t just drive herself and the kids to safety:
[My van] was registered in my name but had expired license plates. (Women in the community could drive – but our cars had either no license plates or outdated ones, so if we tried to leave without our husband’s permission, we’d be stopped by the police.
Yep. They use classic abusive spouses’ tactics to keep their women under control.
Carolyn also has the challenge of her children’s conditioning to overcome. They’ve been “taught that everyone outside our own community was evil.”
And the outside world didn’t disabuse anyone of that notion:
When I was younger I remember being looked at with scorn and disgust when we went into town in the long pastel dresses that we wore over dark leggings. People called us “polygs” and sometimes threw rocks at us. Their hostility confirmed that all the evil people in the outside world were poised to hurt or even destroy us.
So, this. I want to pause here and discuss this, because it’s some critical insight. We’ll see in another book by a former FLDS woman that it was the kindness of people she’d been assured were evil and hell-bound that put the first crack in her FLDS programming. Here, we see a woman trapped in the FLDS cult because no one challenged the narrative of the evil outsider. This is one of the countless reasons why, although we give religion itself no quarter (nor should we), it’s imperative we don’t abuse the people trapped in those religions. They deserve the kindness and respect we should be extending to all human beings, just by virtue of their humanity. But they also need those things from us in order to challenge their indoctrination. Do you want to defeat religion? Never stop deconstructing and revealing the terrible things it teaches and causes people to do. By all means, call out the leaders and harmful behavior. But offer the followers compassion, not abuse.
These folks, especially the women and children, have often been so sheltered that they have no other choices. They’re often not even aware there are any. Remember that. Be ready to show them by your actions that everything they thought they knew about you, the Big Scary Worldly Person, was wrong. Okay, most of it. I mean, obviously, we’re still freaky non-believers.
We’ll talk about this some more soon. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to debate, but let’s at least agree to not hurl slurs and rocks at people. (And what I love about this side of the rift is that you’ll say, “Well, duh, Dana, of course no rocks and slurs! Hopefully, other folks will, too.)
Back at home, Carolyn stealthily collects a few changes of clothes for each child, and packs the van. All she can take is those few outfits, some family photos, and the medication she’s been hoarding for her disabled son. We learn how she’s spent six months trying to prepare a child who’s so ill he can’t walk, talk, breathe well without oxygen equipment, or eat without a feeding tube. She’s so determined to strengthen him that she adds her breast milk to his feedings. She gradually trains him how to eat solid food, because she can’t take his feeding equipment when they flee. And, because little Harrison is so sick, she has a smokescreen. No one expects her to be able to manage to abscond with a critically-ill child. And her kids are used to being hauled along to emergency doctor’s visits, so they don’t suspect a thing at first when Carolyn wakes them and tells them they have to take Harrison in. She gets her older kids to come by telling them they’re all going for a family photo at Sears afterward, since everyone’s here.
It almost goes smoothly. But then a wife wakes up and gets suspicious, starts questioning Carolyn’s oldest daughter Betty, and then calls their husband. Merril Jessop immediately phones Carolyn’s father to ask what she’s doing, because of course women aren’t responsible for themselves. Good thing she didn’t clue Daddy in, or the jig would’ve been up.
Carolyn has no time left, but Betty resists. “Mother, there is something wrong that you’re doing!” she sobs, angry and afraid. Carolyn won’t leave this poor 12 year-old behind, and with a little pulling, gets her into the van. They have to leave fast:
One phone call from Merril to the local police and we’d be trapped. The local police are members of the FLDS and the men whom Merril would rely on to stop my escape. The community also had a watch patrol that drove around during the night. If anyone saw me, I’d be stopped and asked if my husband knew what I was doing.
So, between that, the Colorado City/Hildale police being FLDS, and the non-FLDS police in both states being either MIA or out of their jurisdiction, and I do not want any ignorant blathering about how these women should just call the police. I’m talking to you, lurking atheist assholes.
Carolyn’s van runs out of gas just before they reach her waiting brothers in Hildale, Utah, a few miles down the road. Fortunately, they’re close enough for her to fetch them on foot. Her oldest son recognizes his uncle and the jig is up, but Arthur’s a sensible enough boy not to tip off the younger kids and spark a rebellion. They get everyone into the brothers’ vehicle, and they’re off to seek safety. Unfortunately, they can’t stay with family – Carolyn’s husband will track them down and drag them back if he can find them, and family members’ homes will be the first places he’ll check.
Betty catches on that they’re definitely not going to the doctor when they take the exit to Salt Lake City rather than St. George. Imagine being in a car, fleeing with no safe destination, while many of your children demand to know why you’re taking them to hell. Your husband will be hunting you down. You have virtually no money and very limited options.
