Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer (5 page)

Jayne told me, “They are just trying to make her think she’s killing them. If everyone in the room screams loudly enough, then the person getting the swats has less screaming to do and gets a spanking that doesn’t hurt very bad. We always do this to Aunt Charlotte.”

“What about with Aunt Elaine?” I asked. Jayne looked at me like I was a little bit crazy. “No, we don’t need to bother her because you can’t usually feel her spankings. And we don’t do it to my mother because she doesn’t buy the act.”

I nodded. Aunt Charlotte probably thought that day that she was giving everyone a correction. But for those involved, this was just another game. Nevertheless, it was a game I had no interest in playing.

Minutes after the spankings ended, everyone marched downstairs, and shortly all of us were laughing and smiling again. It was as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and for us it hadn’t.

School Days

I
didn’t start school until I was six and a half. Finally! I had watched Linda go to school every day, wishing I could go with her. Kindergarten didn’t exist in the FLDS because the belief was that children were better off spending another year at home. It didn’t do me any good. I was eager to get going. I wanted to learn.

There wasn’t much stimulation at home beyond listening to my grandmother’s stories. Fairy tales were frowned upon, and we had no other children’s books at home. There was no public library in town, and I don’t remember my mother ever buying us books of our own.

In 1974, a few weeks before school started, when I was counting down the days, I met Laura, who would become one of my closest friends. It was a scorching July day, one of those when the air feels too hot and dry to even want to breathe it in. I was playing paper dolls inside with Linda while Mother was sewing new dresses for our first day of school.

The weather shifted suddenly; the sky darkened and then split apart in a downpour. Linda, Annette, and I stood at the kitchen window, listening to the rain pound the roof of the house and smelling its sweetness through the air conditioner.

After the deluge, we begged Mama to let us go outside, and she said we could as long as we didn’t get muddy.

The dirt road in front of our house had turned into a large stream of muddy water. I could think of nothing better than to run and splash in it. Linda read my mind. “Carolyn, don’t even think of it. We will all get a spanking if you do!”

When my mother got mad at one of us for doing something disobedient or wrong, usually we all paid a price for her anger. What kept me on the porch wasn’t my fear of getting a spanking; it was the fear of how Linda would feel if I got her and Annette in trouble.

A moment later, we heard children’s voices and suddenly saw the kids from a new polygamous family that had moved into the community. They’d come from Idaho with three wives and what seemed like two dozen children.

A redheaded girl who looked about the same age as me caught my eye. She came running down the street and with a big jump and splash landed in the middle of the muddy water. All her other siblings followed her. They were laughing and splashing in the mud and having the best time. I was dying to join them but knew I couldn’t.

Linda didn’t envy the mud ducks at all. She looked stricken that they had dared do this. Daring had nothing to do with it for me. I was frustrated that they could do something I couldn’t. Linda went over to talk to them, and it was the by now very muddy redheaded girl who spoke to her first. She said her name was Laura, and then she rattled off the names of her little brothers and sisters.

Laura looked over to us and said, “Why don’t you guys get in the mud, too?” Linda told her that our mom would get mad at us if we got muddy. Laura seemed perplexed. What we were saying made no sense to her at all.

When the novelty of splashing around in the muddy stream wore off, we asked her if she wanted to play dolls. She said she didn’t have any dolls. I couldn’t believe it. “You don’t have any dolls? What do you play with?”

Laura shrugged. She didn’t need
dolls
to play dolls. She picked up a crooked little stick from the ground and walked over to Mama’s flower garden and plucked a flower. “See, this is her skirt and this little blossom can be her hat.” Next she snapped a blossom off a flower and put it on the stick. Then she found another flower to make a skirt. Now the stick girl had a flounced hat and skirt. I was impressed. Laura had taken a stick and made it into one of the best dolls I had ever seen. “All I have to do to change her clothes is pick another flower.” I certainly couldn’t change clothes as much with my real dolls as she could with her stick ones.

Linda, Annette, and I quickly found sticks to make our own dolls. We spent the rest of the afternoon playing with Laura. At dinner that night we talked nonstop about our new friend. In the years ahead, even Mama came to love Laura. She would say that her daughters didn’t fight as much when she was around.

The first day of school finally came. My mother took me to my classroom and watched while I picked out my desk. She said she was proud that I was starting first grade. The door to our classroom opened a bit and I saw one of my classmates stick out her tongue at the girl in the doorway, whom I couldn’t see. Then I heard her exclaim, “Ooh, she has red hair.” Laura came in and found a seat, but I could tell she was shy being around so many new people.

Not only were we in the same class, but we rode the bus to school every day for the entire year. I was so happy! Having her on the bus helped me feel safe.

The bus scared me because strange things often happened there. One day I was sitting next to Linda when Randi, an older girl in the front seat, began whispering to her friend. She rolled up the long sleeve of her dress, and I could see that her arm looked melted and red. Her friend gasped. It was shocking to see. I was standing up, and Linda yanked me down in my seat and said to be still or the bus driver would hit me. It was not unusual for the bus driver to stop the bus when a child misbehaved. He’d walk back and hit a child so hard his or her face would slam into the window of the bus.

When we got off the bus I asked Linda what could have made Randi’s arm look so melted and raw. She seemed uncomfortable and said she didn’t know. Later we heard Mom telling the story to our dad, and he said that we were never to be allowed anywhere near that girl’s father because he’d heard some stories about the man.

The girl with the melted arm had the longest braid I had ever seen. Her braid hung well below her knees. I had never seen anyone with thicker or more beautiful hair. Everyone who rode the bus admired her braid. But what I noticed about her was that she never looked happy. She didn’t have many friends and seemed to prefer to be by herself.

One morning Randi got on the bus and was sobbing hysterically. Her face was red and flooded with tears. She was shaking and gasping for breath. Her sobs came like one big wave after another. When she turned around I realized her braid was gone. Her hair was neatly combed, but her braid had been chopped off into stubble. The chatter and noise on the bus stopped as everyone realized what had happened. All of us were shocked by the awful sight.

The bus driver sat there chewing his gum. If he noticed the weeping child who had just gotten on his bus, he didn’t show it. The door closed and he pulled away from the curb as if nothing had happened. I felt sick to my stomach. I couldn’t even play on the playground that day. Everything went by in a blur.

After school I was waiting in the bus line with Linda when I saw the school’s double doors fly open. The principal of the school came running out, chasing his mentally retarded son, Kendall, who was ten. Kendall was screaming and trying to run away from him. His pants were wet with urine. We could all see the wide circle of dampness. The principal caught up with him and grabbed him. He kicked him so hard that Kendall flew off the ground and landed in a heap on the sidewalk. He yelled at Kendall to get up. Kendall started running away again. The principal kept chasing and kicking him. I was so sickened by what had happened to Randi earlier that day that this overwhelmed me. I could not absorb what I was seeing. In the weeks and months ahead, I would see this again and again. Kendall would wet his pants and his father would beat him. Some of the other children on the playground made fun of Kendall for wetting his pants. Others stood still, shocked to witness a father’s brutality and terrified because he was the principal of the school.

That day when the school bus pulled up with the same expressionless gum-chewing driver who scared me so much, I said to my sister that I was not getting on his bus, no way. Linda pulled my arm. “Carolyn, you have to get on this bus.” But she wasn’t strong enough to pull me past my determination not to ride home on the school bus. Linda gave up. I told her I would run home.

It was about a mile. I thought if I ran fast enough, I could get home before the bus and then maybe Mama wouldn’t spank me. I looked at the bus driver again. I wasn’t riding on his bus, even if it meant getting spanked. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore and then walked until I caught my breath and could start running again.

I dashed into the house just as the bus was dropping off my two sisters. Mother was in the kitchen. “I got home before the school bus, Mama,” I said. She said I was silly and asked why I didn’t ride home with Annette and Linda. But I never told her.

By now I was in the second grade and I walked to school or ran home for the rest of the year. One day the gum-chewing bus driver hurt Laura’s little sister. When Laura got off the bus she said she hated him and stuck out her tongue. She stopped riding the bus after that and walked with me every day.

First grade was the only year I didn’t have a violent teacher. It was not until I was in the upper grades that teachers stopped using violence. In the lower school it happened all the time, except in first grade. Most families controlled their children with scripture and a whip. This philosophy extended into the classrooms, too.

I saw teachers beat students with yardsticks until they broke the yardstick. It wasn’t uncommon during a school assembly for the principal to kick and slap students around onstage for the entire school to witness. He did this to terrify students so that no one would ever want to be sent to the principal’s office. When he singled out a student, he chose one whose parents he knew wouldn’t complain. It was common practice at school to make an example of one student so others would comply.

Whenever we walked in lines there would be an adult assigned to monitor us with a yardstick. Anyone who misbehaved in the slightest would be cracked on the head.

Control mattered more than academics in the classroom. Brutality toward children was the norm within the community, but there were different levels of tolerance among families about the level of violence that was acceptable. But families would never judge one another. Even if a family knew there was severe abuse going on in another family, no one intervened. This was part of the religious doctrine that said no man had the right to interfere with another man’s family.

We would hear stories about sexual and physical abuse in other families, but nothing was ever done to stop it. As a community, the feeling was that the outside world was our enemy. Its laws and rules did not apply to us in any way. There was no way that someone in the FLDS would report abuse that they’d witnessed or suspected to the authorities for investigation. Anyone who did that would have been seen as a traitor to the entire community.

Many of the teachers at school were nonviolent and would never hit a child. But there were enough violent ones to make me always feel unsafe at school. But I did love learning. No matter how frightened I was by the possibility of what
could
happen, my fears never overrode my desire for knowledge.

The school was a public school that was funded by the state, but it operated as a private school in fact. Virtually every student was a member of the FLDS community. Religion was taught openly in school, and if a subject contradicted our teachings, it was dropped. It was very common to get textbooks with entire chapters missing because they’d been cut out. We were taught things that were patently false—such as the “fact” that dinosaurs had never existed. In some classes, the teachers taught stories from the Book of Mormon. The school got away with this because everyone who worked there back then was part of the FLDS. The state had no reason to investigate because no one ever complained.

I remember learning about sex on the playground when I was in the fourth grade. One of my classmates announced to the rest of us that her brother was teaching her how to have a baby. She had told him she didn’t want to learn, but he insisted. He wanted to show her, not just tell her.

She said he pointed to the parts on his body and told her what he was going to do with them on hers. Then he did it. When it was over, he said this was how her husband would make babies with her. She said she hated it and hated him. We all felt repulsed by the story and said her brother was a big liar. We knew our parents would never do anything like that.

But she said we were wrong. This was sex, S-E-X. When we went back into our classroom she got the dictionary and slammed it on a desk. She read us the definition of
sex
and we all felt uncomfortable. Just because it was in the dictionary didn’t mean it was true. We felt her brother was wicked, and we talked about this for months. Those with older siblings would come back with more information, so I finally had to conclude that it was true.

We were never taught about sex in the FLDS. When we had health education in the fifth grade, the chapters about reproduction were cut out. Sex was something a husband was to teach his wife on their wedding night. There were women who married thinking babies came from kissing.

One year Linda had a harrowing experience at school. Her teacher was a man with a reputation for not maintaining order well in his classroom. He’d promised Linda’s class that they could earn a paper airplane party as a reward for doing something well. Whatever it was, they managed to do it and earn the party.

That afternoon the principal, Alvin Barlow, heard a ruckus coming from a sixth-grade classroom. He didn’t know that this was a planned party, nor did he ask. He stormed into the party and began slapping students across the room and kicking them to the ground. The students in the row closest to the door were his first targets and got the worst of his wrath. Linda watched one girl get her head slammed into her desk.

The principal was halfway down the second row of students before he asked the teacher if he’d given the students permission to misbehave. The teacher lied and said he had not. He feared what the principal would do to him if he knew the party was originally his idea.

This increased Barlow’s rage. Linda was so terrified she could hardly move. The principal grabbed the hair of a girl sitting in the row next to hers and slapped her face so hard she hit her head on the desk and got a bloody nose. Somehow she managed to run out the door and down the hall to her mother’s second-grade classroom. Barlow suddenly stopped. Linda said that if he hadn’t, she would have been next.