Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer (27 page)

Charter School

T
here 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 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 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.

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 nobody.

Merril’s Heart Attack

A
fter the demise of my charter school, I knew I could never go back to teaching. The thought of going into a classroom 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 space 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 God 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 hell.

“What do you mean, ‘improvise’?” I asked.

“I was given an episiotomy with sewing scissors and then stitched 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 sex 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 sex away from the community by decreeing that it could only be used for procreation. We had to keep track of when we ovulated and sex could occur only at that time. Then we had to wait a month to see if we were pregnant before we could have sex again.

Merril just ignored this new decree and continued to have sex 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 sex, 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.” God could act directly in a family by inspiring the husband. So if a husband was inspired to have sex with his wife when she wasn’t ovulating, then Warren would argue that God 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 sex with them. Their husbands would say they were not worthy to bear their children and quit having sex with them altogether. This freed up men to just have sex 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 crass 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 sex with them. (Since women were pregnant almost all of the time, they expected to continue having sex throughout their pregnancies, otherwise they rarely would have it.)

Women would go into the clinic pregnant and distraught. The two nurse practitioners 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 practitioners, 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.)

Sex 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 sex won in the intense sexual competition 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 sexual wars. Husbands tended to become more abusive toward the wives they no longer had sex 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
to play favorites. There were schedules for sex 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 sex 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.

Sex was the only hope a woman had in this life. If she pleased her husband sexually, she and her children would be protected by him. Since he was her passport to eternal life, she could not risk displeasing him sexually. So it was emotionally destabilizing to women when their husbands only had sex 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 God. Warren was preaching that Christ would come to our community because we were pure and abstained from sex 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 assigned 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 massive attack. It was touch and go for several days. When he failed to improve, he was transferred to University Hospital in Salt Lake for bypass 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
. 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 assigned 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 assumed someone had taken her shopping. When Merril opened the present there was a wilted flower along with a few scraps 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.

I scanned the crowd looking for my children. I finally saw a small redhead popping through the crowd. Merril reached out for her. “Well, how is my Betty baby doing?”

Moments later I was hugging the rest of my children.