The Book of Mormon Girl (4 page)

It would be many years before I learned to sort out the stories that had been sown into me like tares amidst the wheat. I did not yet know and would not know for many years that
even when I was a child there were in Salt Lake City Mormon historians who had found evidence that in the early days of the Church black Mormons had truly belonged just like the rest of us, that there had been black Mormon men whose hands had blessed and baptized and anointed. And I did not yet know and would not know for many years that priesthood had been yanked away from black men and a host of excuses allowed to grow up and take the place of doctrine.

These are the unspoken legacies we inherit when we belong to a people: not only luminous visions of eternal expanses of loving-kindness, but actual human histories of exclusion and rank prejudice. We inherit not only the glorious histories of our ancestors, but their human failings too, their kindness, their tenderness, and their satisfaction with easy contradictions; their wisdom as well as their ignorance, arrogance, and presumption, as our own. We inherit all the ways in which our ancestors and parents and teachers were wrong, as well as the ways they were right: their sparkling differences, and their human failings. There is no unmixing the two.

signs of the times

D
uring the Reagan years of the Cold War, my mother and I would watch jets and helicopters traverse the skies over the orange groves behind our house.

Standing by the swimming pool, my mother pointed out all the strategic targets within a few miles of our house: Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, south across the orange groves; John Wayne Airport to the west, across the asparagus and strawberry fields; and two massive concrete blimp hangars at the Marine Corps Air Station Tustin.

“They’ll drop the bombs right on top of us,” she said, her eyes on the horizon.

“We’ll be fine. We’ll be gone in the twinkling of an eye.”

A green Marine CH-46 helicopter made its way down eucalyptus-lined Peters Canyon toward the Pacific Ocean. Tandem rotors whirred.

“No radiation sickness for us. No losing teeth and hair. No starving out the nuclear winter,” my mother continued.

“We’re the lucky ones,” she told herself, then turned and headed back into the house.

I was eleven years old. A Mormon girl living, as we did in those days, at the convergence of so many great and terrible narratives. Cold War arms race. Domino theory. Star Wars missile defense systems. Last days. President Ronald Reagan was the white-cowboy-hat hero of our end-times dreams, a rugged horseman of the apocalypse who rode out from the West to save our divinely inspired Constitution from the dangers of one-world government, Communism, taxes, and other godless destruction. And we Mormons, we who had once been a renegade prophetic sect driven by mobs into the deserts beyond the United States, had undergone a wondrous transformation into the finest patriot partisans of the end-times. How to reconcile it? I did not know. All I knew was that, somehow, history was swinging our way, the way the prophets had always predicted, toward the great destruction that would bring the opening of the skies and the return of a beautiful Jesus, with healing in his wings. On the refrigerator in the kitchen hung a full color print of that moment: Jesus in his blue-tinged robes, a pink sash around his waist, arms open, troops of heavenly hosts raising their trumpets on either side, the heavens themselves parting, a breach in the fabric of time.

•   •   •

My mother and father prepared our family for that final moment, as well as for more everyday Southern California catastrophes—earthquake, riot, fire—in the most practical of ways. First, all six of us—my mother, father, brother, sisters, and me—had blue canvas backpacks equipped with seventy-two hours’ worth of the necessities of life:

a change of clothes

five packets of nuts and raisins

one silver space blanket

three freeze-dried food bars

two water bottles

a poncho

a tiny first-aid kit

a candle

matches

a bright-orange plastic flashlight

Second, industrial-size water barrels lined the back of our house. This was in case a nuclear attack or ash falling from the skies made the swimming pool unfit to drink. Cupboards in the garage were stocked, on direction from church leaders, with a year’s supply of food for us all: giant tin drums of hard red wheat kernels, textured vegetable protein, powdered milk, potato pearls, pinto beans, dried apples, and cooking oil.

Third, every year the members of our Mormon congregation
held drills to practice what we might do in case of catastrophe. We walked the house-to-house routes we would use to check on one another. At church, even eleven- and twelve-year-old girls like me learned the bare skills of survival: how to build fires, lash tables from tree branches, and perform advanced first aid. “Keep lots of trash bags around,” said Sister Tucker at one of our Tuesday afternoon youth meetings. “You may need them for latrines, or to dispose of dead bodies.” Another Tuesday afternoon, she taught us how to tie off a severed artery. “Just reach in, find the one that’s spurting, and tie a knot in it,” she said.

We prepared for the end-times mentally and spiritually as well. I studied the picture of Jesus’s second coming on the refrigerator, slowly accustoming myself to the idea of a breach in time, surprised by the relief the idea afforded me. My family prayed together every night, fasted once a month, and read our scriptures, a discipline that would sustain us through any disaster and ready us to receive the promptings of the Spirit that would guide us all to safety. In Sunday School we rehearsed the lists of signs of the times compiled from the words of the prophet Isaiah, John the Revelator, Book of Mormon prophets, and our own local homegrown experts, balding, heavyset men who worked as aerospace engineers during the week, led Boy Scout outings on Saturdays, and studied Egyptology in their home offices on Sundays after church. These signs of the times were:

Wars and rumors of wars.

Earthquakes in diverse places.

The desert blossoming as a rose.

The teaching of organic evolution in public schools.

The construction of a great highway from the north.

The organization of the United Nations.

Bar codes on everything.

Drought.

Fires.

Famine.

Pestilence.

Strikes, anarchy, and violence.

Love waxing cold.

False prophets and anti-Christs.

The gospel being preached in every nation, to every kindred, and in every tongue.

The literal gathering of the twelve tribes of Israel from their hiding places around the globe.

The killing of two missionaries or prophets in Jerusalem, their bodies left to rot in the streets for two days.

The building of the New Jerusalem in Missouri.

The endangerment of the Constitution of the United States, which would hang by a thread, to be rescued by righteous Mormons.

The ancient archenemy forces of Gog and Magog threatening the destruction of Israel.

A war of Armageddon.

The continents coming back together into one land mass.

My parents read the writings of experts like W. Cleon Skousen, staunch anti-Communist patrolman of the Mormon corridor, whose books lined the shelves of our Orange County ranch houses:
The Naked Communist
,
The Naked Capitalist
,
The Making of America
,
The Miracle of America
,
The First 2,000 Years
,
The Third Thousand Years
,
The Fourth Thousand Years
,
Prophecy and Modern Times
.

Back in 1963, Skousen sniffed out the secret goals of the Communists in our midst and compiled a list of warning signs published in anti-Communist bulletins from Florida to California. These warning signs of Communist infiltration included:

Diplomatic negotiations with enemy nuclear regimes.

Nuclear disarmament, or the promotion of nuclear disarmament.

Free trade between all nations.

American aid to all nations.

Recognition of Red China.

Abolition of US loyalty oaths.

Liberal control of school boards and curriculums.

Liberal control of newspapers, radio, television, and movies.

Communist-plant artists and teachers celebrating ugliness everywhere.

Elimination of prayer in schools.

Criticism of the Constitution and Founding Fathers.

Pornography, homosexuality, divorce, atheism, secularism, and psychiatry.

On the clay hills of Orange County, we studied and watched and prayed for the smoke plumes of the end-times to rise. What a thrill of relief I felt in the fall of my eleventh year, when the Santa Ana winds blew jets of fire down our dry canyons and the skies turned red, and we loaded our family photographs and books of genealogy into the station wagon and prepared to drive away. As the line of wildfire approached, burning through the eucalyptus groves, I monitored my insides. Terror, panic, tears, the urge to seek comfort from parents—these I observed and then canceled, proud of my emotional preparedness. In these moments, I soberly reasoned, there was no room for such extravagance.

•   •   •

There were a few signs of the times, signs of creeping moral decay undermining the social fabric of the divinely designed American nuclear family, that Cleon Skousen did not foresee. There was, for example, Phil Donahue, who wedged himself and his prodding microphone into Southern California network television in the early 1980s, his coming forewhispered
by my mother and other stalwarts against unwholesome television programming like
Three’s Company
and other screenfuls of cohabitational jiggling blondes that a simple turn of the dial might admit into our living rooms. Nor did Cleon Skousen foresee the national campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, to which the Mormon Church declared its formal public opposition.

When my teacher Mrs. Stick assigned our sixth-grade term paper, I immediately chose the ERA as my research topic. Finding nothing about the amendment on the shelves of my school library, I asked my mother for help. On the kitchen table, she laid out a rainbow arc of glossy pamphlets: the Mormon Church’s official briefing on
The Church and the Proposed Equal Rights Amendment: A Moral Issue
, mailed to every Mormon home, as well as slick little American-flag festooned brochures produced by Phyllis Schlafly, the carefully coiffured blond matriarch founder of the anti-Communist, pro-family Eagle Forum. I studied the pamphlets closely. From them, I learned that if the United States of America adopted into its Constitution the statement that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” these words would in fact not correct long-standing gender inequities but rather endanger our families, demean the special and sacred roles of women, and harm the nation. Married women and mothers would be drafted into the military. Courts would no longer require men to provide for their wives and children.
More women would become lesbians. And, worst of all, the new law might institute unisex bathrooms.

“Of course we don’t oppose equal rights for women,” my mother explained, precise and articulate as she placed a block of frozen ground beef in the microwave oven. “It’s just that the Equal Rights Amendment is the wrong way to go about it.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, a stack of blank notebook paper before me, with the chunk of frozen beef spinning, warming, and graying in the microwave, I listened and took careful notes
. Unisex bathrooms?
I tried not to imagine the giant shoes in the next stall, the sight of men’s backsides as they faced the wall holding their private parts: not the innocuous pink digit I had seen when I changed my baby brother’s diaper, but the unimaginable member of the adult male body. In what moral universe, I wondered, was the sight of a strange man’s penis a moral or political good?

Surely, if there were a sign of the times, unisex bathrooms could be it.

•   •   •

The summer after sixth grade I attended a special summer camp for girls at Brigham Young University, where, in addition to taking classes in scripture study, scrapbooking, and modest fashions, we gathered every morning in our Sunday dresses in great air-conditioned lecture halls to hear speeches
from the men who made a living teaching Church-sponsored seminary classes in Utah public schools.

Driving wood-paneled station wagons and wearing dark polyester suits, they came to point out all the wickedness and worldliness that threatened to engulf us on every side. They told us that we were a powerful generation, living in the sixth millennium since the earth’s creation, the Saturday of time, Sunday being the seventh millennium, the second coming of Jesus Christ. They promised that we ourselves would do battle with Satanic hosts, and some described their own experiences in the mission field. Like spiritual linebackers, they were, to hear them tell the stories, clashing with and blocking unseen powers of darkness.

One teacher named Brother Christianson specialized in the dangers of popular music, an urgent hazard facing us youth of the latter days. He told us that Satan specialized in presenting bad things in the guise of good things, transfiguring himself into an angel of light, just to deceive and confuse us. To illustrate his point, he related a local Utah high school legend: how some cheerleaders had once tricked haughty but unsuspecting basketball players into what they thought was a caramel-apple-eating contest at a pep rally; not until they had wolfed down half the “apples” did the players realize they were actually eating caramel-covered onions. That’s how Satan works too, Brother Christianson said: the caramel is music, one of the sweetest mediums on earth, but instead of wrapping it around wholesome,
inspiriting goodness, Satan wraps it around the stink of pure evil. Cunning as a vengeful cheerleader, he is, that old Satan.

Brother Christianson told us that the music our shaggy-haired seventeen-year-old cousins listened to—Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Styx, Electric Light Orchestra—had Satanic messages specially ironed onto its sonic backsides. He wheeled out a giant reel-to-reel tape player, and we all leaned forward in our seats in the BYU auditorium to hear Robert Plant make gurgling sounds Brother Christianson decoded for us as “Here’s to my sweet Satan.”