My ancestors were polygamists and, I admit, this bothers me. I’m not entirely certain why it bothers me. I’m married to a good man and I am his only wife. But here, even writing just that sentence bothers me. I am his only wife. As if he’s controlling himself somehow and worse, as if I should be grateful.
I discovered my ancestors were polygamists when I was nine years old during an annual summer trip to my parent’s home state. You know the one. The state with a big lake so salty that as children, we lay on our backs across its surface, squinting at the high desert sky, testing our mother’s theory that we’d never sink. Both of my parents were proud of their origins, their mutual birthplace and its landmarks. They brought us to these sights on every summer visit so we’d been to the Beehive House before but for some reason on this one particular visit in 1976, I finally put together the purpose of this particular landmark. Maybe someone said something on the tour. Maybe there was a pamphlet; I could read well by then. It’s possible there might have even been a plaque to commemorate this fact. Somehow or other I learned quite suddenly that many wives of only one husband lived in this house. Brigham Young was the husband and in fact, only twenty-seven of his wives lived there. The rest lived in The Lion House next door.
I don’t know why I’d missed this fact on previous visits. I suppose I imagined The Beehive House was intended for many families or for one very large and extended family. I thought of The Beehive House as a dormitory for church families that got along well. The thought of a house full of families and children seemed like a swell idea and so to me, The Beehive House seemed inspired and remarkable. But a house full of wives sharing a single husband took me off guard.
At school, we’d played at marriage and going steady. Marriages were arranged by a small group of politically capable girls who delivered news about marriage assignments on wide-ruled paper folded in quarters and passed through our small but elaborate third-grade social underground. Assigned girls always showed up on the marriage consummation date at Kissing Court, a shady hole carved beneath two pine trees with heavy low-hanging branches. More often than not, assigned boys showed up as well. But love is fleeting in elementary school and it wasn’t uncommon for a girl to take an interest in another boy, already betrothed. This was no cause for social disruption or angst, however. So far, I’d been married to three fellow third-graders: Phil, Sam and Dennis. Between each marriage, a divorce had been arranged and carried out by way of pencil to notepaper in loopy, novice cursive, polite and amicable so that new marriages could take place without delay. Never in any of our time playing marriage at Kissing Court did anyone, girl or boy, propose a polygamous arrangement.
My face grew red at the thought of it. It was one of those unspoken things in life you just knew at a gut level wasn’t fair, like hiding in your house during our neighborhood Hide and Seek games. We all knew that poking around in people’s houses was off limits and hiding there would give the hider an unfair advantage. It just wasn’t fair. All who played must stay outside and no one had to explain why. Polygamy seemed similar to me and I was startled by this information about our ancestors.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Summer 1976
The Beehive House
“Mom?” I called out.
She was five paces ahead, in front of another family, on her way to the exit. I pushed my way through the tourists to reach her.
“Mom!”
She stopped. Our eyes met. The tourists shuffled past, pink shorts and t-shirts, flip-flops and white tennis shoes.
“What in the world?” my expression asked. But I did not speak.
“And what on earth is all the fuss?” asked her expression.
By then, I had learned a few things from my religion about the benefits of traditional roles in the home. Women raised the babies and kept house, men worked outside the home to provide the funds. Chastity, modesty, marital loyalty – all highly-regarded traits and so I’d also acquired a level of prudishness about intimate relationships. Although I found the concept of polygamy in keeping with much of the gender role training I’d received, I found it dirty and suspicious relative to my education about human sexuality and it was at this very moment that began what would become a life-long struggle with the mismatch.
“Brigham had twenty-seven wives?” I tugged at Mom’s shirt sleeve. “What did he need twenty-seven wives for?”
Tourists shuffled past. A yellow and burgundy quilt hung over a rack in the staged room behind my mother’s profile. I thought I saw a twitch of her lip, a blink or two. But then she looked at me directly and squared her shoulders.
“Back in those days,” she said, “it was normal for a Mormon man to have many wives.”
She turned and strode ahead, toward the exit.
“Why?” I asked as I followed her. “Mom, why?” We shuffled down the steps of the exit, my feet at her heels, our hands on the railing. She stopped and turned to face me one step below. From this position, I was her same height and our faces met squarely. The huge colonial mansion with its twenty-eight rooms loomed behind me, I could feel it, the beehive on top as a symbol of sisterly order and cooperation.
“When the Mormon pioneers arrived here and Brigham Young said ‘this is the place’ many of the Mormon men had perished from the journey.”
Mom’s face glistened from the heat, her short brown hair was flattened to her scalp. She swiped her forehead with the back of her hand and flung a spittle of sweat on the steps before placing her small hand on her hip. The drops darkened the concrete and dried instantly, such a brief impact.
“Wives were left with no husbands to help care for the children,” she implored, gesturing with the hand that still gripped the railing. Wasn’t this enough? Did she have to explain further?
She huffed in response to my continued glare and a couple excused themselves around us. A large camera hanging from a fat-bellied man’s neck swung into the space between my mother and me. Mom waited for them to pass and glanced over her shoulder before continuing.
“So that we could prosper, the men were commanded by God to take many wives. So they did. Because they had to. And Brigham Young, because he was so generous and giving, had the most of all, which is why he needed this great big house, so that each wife could have a room of her own.”
That was it. End of story. Until I remembered something. A small detail I’d learned before. I did this often. It was sometimes difficult for me to enjoy television and movies because I remembered small facts, discrepancies in the plot, pattern disruptions, details that didn’t line up logically. Like when Cousin Oliver showed up on The Brady Bunch. Where did he come from? There were no siblings of Carol and Mike present during the first episode when they wed, no Auntie Mildreds or Uncle Howards. For such a family-oriented family to suddenly produce a similarly-aged child relative was preposterously unbelievable and I, for one, could never accept Cousin Oliver as even a visiting member of the Brady clan, let alone a full-fledged addition.
“But, Mom,” I scooted down the steps behind her on my tiptoes. “I thought it was the women and children who perished on the journey, not the men. Wouldn’t the surviving women have more husbands than the other way around?” I remembered this. I remembered this detail because I’d imagined it. My mind had created images of pioneers pushing handcarts, swollen feet, blisters and calluses, babies dying of hunger or cold in the arms of sickly mothers who toppled in their dresses and petticoats, caving to the hardship, giving up on a life too harsh while the men plodded on, rifles harnessed over slumped but broad shoulders, wide-brimmed hats hiding their grief and discomforts.
She stopped once more and turned to speak over her shoulder.
“Well, things turned out differently in the end, that’s all,” she said, and headed toward the parking lot and our car.
I skipped to keep pace with her.
“So where did Brigham sleep?” I asked.
She waved a hand behind her and I slowed to a walk, a paved parking lot widening the distance between us.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In the earliest years of the LDS church, the practice of polygamy defined it. Joseph Smith is thought to have had 34 wives and Brigham Young had even more though the exact number is a matter of debate among historians – at least 27 and possibly as many as 55. Virtually all Mormons who migrated from the Midwest to Utah in the mid 1800s practiced polygamy. My own relatives converted to Mormonism by missionaries visiting Europe. They migrated from Denmark, England, and Switzerland to Utah around 1850. The part of their stories I have been told is that they were persecuted by their communities and disinherited by their families after they joined the LDS church. The part of their stories I have not been told is why they joined. Based on what I know about church history, I have to presume that they either joined the LDS church because of polygamy or they faced a huge surprised when they finally reached Salt Lake. But either way, they all ended up in polygamous marriages.
The United States declared polygamy illegal in 1862. It would take another twenty-eight years for the Mormons to officially suspend the activity. The government was relentless in its pursuit to abolish the behavior and their efforts culminated in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, likely the key motivation for the fundamental change in Mormon practice. The Edmunds-Tucker Act dissolved the church’s incorporated status, prohibited church-endorsed polygamy punishable by fines and prison time, and authorized US marshals and deputies to seize all church assets in excess of $50,000. By September of 1890, Wilford Woodruff, the LDS President and spokesperson for God at the time, reported that he’d received a revelation that became known in church circles as the The Manifesto.
“Press dispatches having been sent for political purposes, from Salt Lake City, which have been widely published, to the effect that the Utah Commission, in their recent report to the Secretary of the Interior, allege that plural marriages have been contracted in Utah since last June or during the past year, also that in public discourses the leaders of the Church have taught, encouraged and urged the continuance of the practice of polygamy—
“I, therefore, as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, do hereby, in the most solemn manner, declare that these charges are false. We are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage, nor permitting other number of plural marriages have during that period been solemnized in our Temples or in any other place in the Territory.
“One case has been reported, in which the parties allege that the marriage was performed in the Endowment House, in Salt Lake City, in the Spring of 1889, but I have not been able to learn who performed the ceremony; whatever was done in this matter was without my knowledge. In consequence of this alleged occurrence the Endowment House was, by my instructions, taken down without delay.
“Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.
“There is nothing in my teachings to the Church or in those of my associates, during the time specified, which can be reasonably construed to inculcate or encourage polygamy; and when any Elder of the Church has used language which appeared to convey such teaching, he has been promptly reproved. And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.”
But unlike the former plural marriage revelations from God through Young and Smith, Woodruff’s message had a decidedly political and apologetic tone and many Mormons did not obey this new revelation. Including some of mine.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
We don’t talk about polygamy in our family. I discovered at age nine and later as well that it was one of those things for us, our elephant in the living room. Some families don’t discuss Uncle Albert’s excess of the drink or Aunt Matilda’s hump or little Jason’s preoccupation with fire. I get it. And our family doesn’t talk about polygamy but the subject pesters me in an itchy sort of way. I won’t deny it. What I feel about polygamy borders on irrational paranoia. It doesn’t apply to me. I am not personally threatened. It’s not my business. But even when I try not to think about it, the topic appears in my life at random, like a creepy circus clown with a familiar face following me around and ducking out of sight each time I turn to catch him.
There I am, minding my own business watching television, not thinking about my religious past at all when, flash, right there on an ad for the five o’clock news is a group of hyper-pioneer-looking women in prairie-wear, their trancelike eyes tearing over as they describe a Child Protective Services raid on their Texas ranch. I know it won’t be good for me, but I am compelled to watch. Others watch these news reports with a mild curiosity, perhaps reminiscent of how they might view Quakers or Amish. Maybe it’s even charming in a way. But this is not my reaction. I look at those women and seethe, small and quiet for I know I cannot find the words to describe the injustice – unspoken it is – or why I care so much about the choices of others. I listen to the reporter describe the ranch as not in any way affiliated with the church of my ancestry, and I roll my eyes at the lack of exposure about the theological basis for these fundamentalist ideas, ideas that remain printed in holy scriptures from my youth as directions from God for our futures in heaven. I shudder and flip off the television and then I forget about it again for a while until, flash, the flame re-ignites at a Barnes and Noble as I pick up a displayed bestseller, propped up and prominent with dozens of fresh, hardback copies piled beneath and around it. A woman on the cover clutches an old-time photo of herself as a youth, bound to a married man by way of arrangement in a polygamous compound in Arizona. The girl in the photo succumbed, but the grown woman the girl became escaped. A woman with a last name I recognize.
I set the book down and vow to forget about it, but within minutes I am at the checkout buying the book and within a week, I’ve read it front to cover. And even though I know it’s best to ignore that ridiculous clown, I must ask my mother about it. There is more to her story, which is the foundation for my story, and I must scratch that itch.
So I phone her while my children sleep on Mother’s Day, hand-strung macaroni circling my neck. When Dad answers, he says she has been despondent all day. Despondent. I prepare myself and reconsider whether I will ask her about the book.
“I’m so glad that you called, Tammy. I didn’t think any of you would remember me. Always, it’s you. Thank you.”
She sounds pathetic but relatively cheerful, the mother I know well, and I relax in the living room chair, put my feet up on the wicker ottoman and fiddle with the macaroni at my neck. We talk about nothing for a while. I ask her if she’s seen the psychiatrist and if everything is all right, to which she replies, “no comment.” She asks how I feel about the presidential election. A Mormon man is running, which perks my mother’s undivided interest and support. I tell her I’m neutral and don’t care for any of the candidates particularly, which isn’t far from the truth. She seems in adequate spirits and so after a few more unimpassioned thoughts about politics, I ask her what she thinks about the polygamous communities in the news.
“Mom, are we any relation to those folks down there in Texas and Arizona? That woman wrote that book, you know, and she has the same last name as your maiden name. I was just curious. Do you know?”
“Well, I don’t know, I just don’t know. But I do know that the recently retired director of the Tabernacle Choir is my third cousin. He really turned that choir around, too, from what I understand.”
Dirt, Mom. I’m looking for dirt, I think shamelessly. And she’s got it, I know she does.
“Yeah, but what about the relatives that went the other direction, what do you know?”
“It’s like this, I think, Tammy. Way back in our family there was a man named Joseph Smith Jessop.”
“Joseph Smith Jessop?” I can hardly hear her. We’re mostly wireless people and our landline phone service has never been good. It’s especially noticeable when I talk with my parents. They sound far, far away and grainy. Did she just say that I have a relative named Joseph Smith Jessop? Is she pulling my leg or has she slipped off her rocker completely? Perhaps in addition to depression, she is beginning to suffer from a Napoleon complex of the genealogy-obsessed Mormon housewife variety.
“Yes, but this was way before the Joseph Smith you’re thinking about, way back, like the 1600s or so. Anyway, he was a big polygamist. Even before the Mormons you know.”
What is she talking about, I wonder. Am I hearing her correctly? I decide not to bite on this distraction.
“Really, Mom? No affiliation with the Arizona groups?”
“Well,” and she pauses, which means she might crack, “there was a man named Yeates,” another pause before the rest spills out just exactly like beans on a glass tabletop, “who may have gone with the Short Creek group, which as you know became Colorado City but that’s all I know.”
Sure, Mom. That’s all you know.
I most certainly don’t believe that so I write her a letter pointing out that in 2005, researchers had begun to study polygamous African tribes for the high occurrence rates of epilepsy and other rare nervous disorders. I ask her to send me our family tree on the Jessop side to help me better understand my “seizure disorder of unknown cause” that began in my teens. She sends me a pedigree chart dating back to the early 1800s, having thoughtfully noted “polygamous” next to black and white photos of two great-great grandfathers – well-dressed bearded men, grim and pious. The women, my great-great grandmothers, are pictured as well, somber and stoic. I think I see my mother’s eyes in theirs. The same eyes as the women on the news. A dark spark. But tired, too. And frantic in a way. Trapped intelligence.
I don’t know why I want to know. It won’t cure the seizures. Nothing would change. Why try to expose that unfortunate clown? Best just to leave him behind. Ignore him. But when I think back to my childhood and consider the child-size question mark polygamy summoned for me then, I grow fierce and protective of the girl I was and of girls today as well. How close to the edge of something so extreme I had stood, close enough that I suspect my genes may have been singed by its flame. And although polygamy didn’t touch me directly, its remnants hung like a fog in our religion. Men were kings, women were peasants and while the ratio may have been closer to one king for every peasant by the time I was born into my family’s faith, many of the ideas remained the same. Men made the decisions, gave the blessings, and brought about order. Women kept the homes, produced the next generation, and served the kings without question.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the first time I ever mentioned polygamy to a male member of my family became the last time that family member and I would speak. It was nearly a year ago and that person is my brother.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Labor Day Weekend 2008
Interstate 5 Somewhere Between Portland and Seattle
“You’re talking about polygamy in your book,” he shot to attention after I’d mentioned a challenging passage I’d been working on most recently. We’d been having what I thought was a casual chat, he in the passenger seat, me in the driver’s seat on our way home from a weekend getaway to the Oregon coast. He’d joined our family for this particular trip, as he sometimes did. But suddenly his tone turned hostile and he sat straight and rigid in the passenger seat.
“I swear, if you publish your book I will fucking shoot you,” he said.
My one husband, Mike, stirred in the back seat, snoozing in spite of the boisterous kid chatter coming from the way back.
“I mean it, Tam, I will disown you if you publish your book,” he said.
“Shit,” I said, “I’ve missed the exit.”
I’d lost my bearings and in the thick of traffic drove right past the great green and white North toward Seattle exit sign, such a chick thing to do. But I thought I’d play that up, call out my stupidity, seek his superiority and smooth this all over. I knew that routine well and could put it into action quickly with requests for help about where to turn off and what to do. It did not work.
“I don’t know, Tam, you’re on your own,” he said, an ominous warning of the future of our relationship and the last words he would address to me for about a week.
And then he sent an email and things got even uglier. He called me Tamara and asked me to stop with the nonfiction already. He didn’t mention polygamy again, only family privacy and his wishes that our history remain tucked away. But when I countered that I felt my story – including the history of our family – could be interesting and helpful to others, his outrage mounted until before he seemed able to stop it, he’d used words like reckless, irresponsible, selfish, and greedy and he’d tossed out the possibility of severed contact.
I couldn’t help but think to myself, what if I’d never mentioned polygamy in the car that day? Is that why this had all come about? He’d known I was working on a memoir for years, but suddenly the word “polygamy” flipped a switch for him. Perhaps the subject pesters him in a different way than it pesters me. I wish I could understand that as well. But I will not have the chance to ask because after a few more email exchanges – basically an ultimatum delivered and rejected — he did choose to end our relationship and asked that I not contact him again.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
But that was not quite the last of it. There was to be yet one more polygamy discussion before the lumbering subject I’d woken would settle back into its napping position. When I saw the crumpled envelope in my mailbox and read the faintly printed addressee: Mrs. Michael Dietz, I knew it was from her. She’d been going a little crazy over the years, depressed and reclusive, often tantrummy like a small child, and for a moment I considered placing the envelope in the trash, unopened. I even imagined it there resting on banana peels and coffee grounds.
She’d used her old manual typewriter to prepare the letter, I could tell by the slightly skewed p’s. I pictured her seated at the sewing table in the back of the house where the olive 1970-era typewriter sat next to the even older sewing machine. Mom sewed so many things for us over the years: pantsuits, dresses, costumes. It wasn’t until I became an adult and attempted sewing myself that I truly appreciated what she’d done. I couldn’t even get through a simple toddler dress for my daughter. The discipline and patience required to plan, plot, measure, press, cut, press again, stitch, press again, stitch some more and so forth, was more than my speedy-results temperament could handle. And although the sewing process sounds remarkably similar to the writing process I would later discover, my sewing machine now rests in the storage closet under the stairs beneath bins full of Christmas decor.
But Mom hadn’t sewn anything in years now, her children grown and gone along with all pride for matters domestic. She probably wore a lavender bathrobe that zips up the front with an unexpected frilly collar beneath her chin, her short dark hair finally giving in to new gray strands.
The letter said that she could understand why I might find polygamy questionable before I had children, but that she hoped I understood now why polygamy is so divine. She hoped that I could understand that men are not interested in children and by having many wives, they are in essence creating a more nurturing and pleasant environment for women and children. Women won’t have to raise babies alone and babies will have more adults to care for them. This is how she reconciles the portion of our family faith that promises an afterlife wherein polygamy is central to happiness.
So there it was. Mother and I had talked about the beast in our living room as much as we would ever speak about it and the final apology had been laid out. She was okay with it. What more was there to say? She didn’t have to explain to me that humans have probably been mildly polygamous for centuries and we descend from polygamous primates. She didn’t have to explain that according to our gene pool and DNA studies, the current more monogamous human practices have occurred for such a short period of time relative to human history, they haven’t even caused a hiccup on graphs that chart our genome make up, which concludes that fewer males have mated with larger numbers of females. In fact, science neither promotes nor dissuades her faith. To her, polygamy is not an earthly order, but a divine one. It has nothing to do with science and everything to do with the mysteries that bookend our time on this planet: what happened before we came to be and what will happen after we expire.
For her, being one of many polygamous Queens who help a single King populate a new world somewhere out in the cosmos makes as much sense as anything, I suppose.
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