Breaking Free Read online

  Dedication

  I dedicate this book to my children, Ember, Majasa, Rulon, Lavinder, and Nathaniel, and to anyone and everyone who has had difficult experiences in their lives. You can be strong and fulfill your dreams.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part One 1: You Could Drive a Car Through My Family Tree

  2: Sins of the Father

  3: Mind Games

  4: Rebellion

  5: Keep Your Enemy Close

  6: Heavenly Father Offers a Blessing

  7: Wedding

  8: Love, Plural Style

  9: The Prophet Rises

  Part Two 10: Plural Wife

  11: Do You Have Cows?

  12: Land of Refuge

  13: This Is What Hell Feels Like

  14: The Good Years

  15: The Raid

  16: Life Goes On

  17: The Noose Tightens

  18: Purgatory

  19: Back in the Fold

  Part Three 20: Solitary Confinement

  21: Enough

  22: Flirting with Damnation

  23: Sister Secret

  24: First One Out

  25: Over the Wall

  26: Answered Prayers

  Epilogue

  Family Tree

  Acknowledgments

  Photos

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  I am not a victim, and I do not want anyone’s sympathy. I wrote this book to help others who have suffered from similar experiences, whether in the FLDS church, or in thrall to some other circumstance beyond their control. I want people to know that it is possible not only to overcome their trials but also to use those difficult experiences to help others. No matter where you came from or what you’ve been through, we are all in this together.

  Prologue

  One week into my marriage, I was a wreck. I couldn’t eat. My skin felt prickly, like I was being poked all over by a thousand invisible needles. This was a new experience for me, being a plural wife, but it was also new for my sister wives to have me there. They hadn’t asked for another woman to join their ranks, and I was starting to get the message that they weren’t exactly pleased I had been added to the family, or that I was sharing our husband’s bed. They didn’t know that I was just sleeping in it, and not very well at that. On nights when one of the other ladies shared our husband’s bed, I slept on the couch in the living room. I didn’t have a room of my own.

  Four weeks into my marriage, I was still getting acclimated. I didn’t love my husband, Rich, yet, but I had started to like him. I enjoyed his company, anyway.

  One afternoon, I was helping him with some yard work.

  “Rachel, would you please go get my pruning shears?” Rich said. “They should be in the closet in my room.”

  I put down my rake and went into the house. In his bedroom, there was a beautiful bouquet of roses on the desk, with a small balloon attached that read “I love you.” There was also a little note: “Dear Rachel, happy 4 week anniversary, I love you, Rich.”

  I’d cried a lot since the wedding, but the tears that fell now felt different. I was grateful that Rich wasn’t there to see my reaction, because I cared what he thought about me. I couldn’t have explained my feelings, because I didn’t understand them myself. I found the shears and went back outside.

  “Thanks,” I said, as I handed the shears to him.

  Rich smiled at me. “I wanted to do something for you.”

  “I like it,” I said, and meant it.

  It was a full two months after our wedding before I finally summoned up the nerve to ask Rich for a baby. I had been way too frightened to be intimate with a man I’d met only one day before he became my husband. I was still a little scared, but he had a big grin on his face when I said it.

  “Do you know how to make a baby, Rachel?” Rich said, with genuine concern in his voice. The church separated boys and girls before puberty hit. At home and at school, we were kept apart. Crushes weren’t allowed. Dating wasn’t even an idea. Marriage was our introduction to intimate relationships.

  Nonetheless, I said, “Yes.”

  Rich’s eyes opened wide, and he tilted his head to the side like a dog that’s just heard an unfamiliar sound. “Really? How do you know?”

  “I just do,” I said, turning my face away from him. I couldn’t look him in the eyes.

  That night I joined him in his room. Rich undressed himself, then undressed me as I lay on the bed. “Do you want to see?” he said, hovering over me.

  “No!” I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “My other ladies wanted to see.”

  “I don’t. I really don’t.”

  Over the next nights, I started to relax, and being with my new husband got easier. I soon learned that I was pregnant. When I was about four months along, Rich said, “How did you know about sex before we were married?”

  Rich was my husband, and now the father of my unborn child. I had kept this secret for so many years, I hardly knew how to answer him. And then, just like that, I did.

  “Father taught me.”

  Part One

  1

  You Could Drive a Car Through My Family Tree

  There is only one man on the earth at a time that can receive direct revelation from God, and it is God’s Prophet.

  —Warren S. Jeffs

  Hildale, Utah, November 25, 1986

  “Rachel, Becky, come here.”

  Father was standing next to the Prophet’s casket at the front of the meeting house. The Prophet was Leroy Johnson, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) and the only man on earth worthy of receiving the word of God, but we knew him as Uncle Roy.

  My sister Becky and I walked over to the casket. Our father was Warren Jeffs, and he was the principal of our church school. Father took one of our little hands in each of his, and we held on tight. I had just turned three years old, and Becky was two months younger than me. Our mothers, Father’s first two wives, were sisters, and had been pregnant with Becky and me at the same time.

  “Can we get these girls a stool so they can see?” Father asked one of Uncle Roy’s wives standing in line, waiting to pay their respects to Uncle Roy. I could hear people crying.

  A lady with gray hair brought over a small yellow stool and placed it in front of the casket. Father helped me up onto it first. I had never seen a dead person before. I looked inside the coffin, curious and frightened, at the withered, pale figure lying there. He didn’t look at all like the bald man with the benevolent smile I’d only seen in pictures. He was so very old, and his face looked white and fake. He had been sick for a long time.

  I hadn’t met Uncle Roy while he was alive, but I knew he had been the leader of the church since before my father was born.

  Father leaned into me, put his mouth next to my ear, and quietly said, “Uncle Roy was the greatest man on earth. Rachel, I want you to never forget what a privilege it is that you have seen the Prophet.”

  The most important rule in the FLDS religion is this: Never question the Prophet. Even after Uncle Roy’s death, Father continued to read his sermons to us every day at 6:00 a.m. before breakfast—before we did anything else at all, in fact. These readings were considered vital to our spiritual growth.

  Uncle Roy’s teachings were very specific. People in our church should conduct themselves with humility and obedience—to the church, to our parents, to our husbands. Women had to wear long dresses, with sleeves to their wrists and skirts to their ankles. Boys should not so much as touch a girl’s arm before marriage.
The Prophet determined who and when a person should marry.

  With Uncle Roy’s passing, my paternal grandfather, Rulon T. Jeffs, assumed the mantle of Prophet of the FLDS. While Grandfather Rulon was still alive, Father preached to us about the Prophet from the stand at the meeting house and from his living room chair almost every day. “God and the Prophet do right,” Father said.

  Being the descendant of a Prophet made you something like royalty in the FLDS. I, and some of my siblings, had Prophet blood on both sides of the family.

  Uncle Roy had been the Prophet since 1949, three years before declaring our church a completely separate entity from the Church of the Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City (commonly called the Mormon Church). Before that schism, our church had considered itself a subsidiary of the main church in Salt Lake, but in truth, Uncle Roy’s declaration was kind of a formality; our people had already been excommunicated from the traditional LDS Church back in 1935 for refusing to give up polygamy.

  In those days, the Prophet had been John Y. Barlow, whose older brother, Ianthus Barlow, was my maternal great-grandfather. Ianthus left the church when his brother became the Prophet because he didn’t want to follow his younger brother, but Ianthus continued to practice and teach his family to live polygamy.

  More than four decades later, in 1978, Ianthus’s son, Isaac Barlow—my mother’s father—rejoined the church with his family. By then, Uncle Roy was the Prophet. The Barlows stayed for only a few years, but it was long enough for Isaac’s daughter Annette, and three years later his daughter Barbara, to marry a young schoolteacher named Warren Jeffs. Both girls were seventeen years old at the time of their weddings.

  I was born in Salt Lake City in 1983, the oldest child of Father’s second wife, Barbara Barlow. That made me the first child born into his polygamous family, his first plural child. My sister Becky, who was summoned to Uncle Roy’s casket with me, was born to Barbara’s older sister, Annette, technically making Becky my cousin as well as my sister, although we never thought of it that way. It wasn’t uncommon for sisters to marry the same man. It was right after my mother’s wedding to Father that her family, the Barlows, left the church again. They objected to my mother’s not being allowed to choose her husband, but Uncle Roy had told my mother to marry my father, and that was that. The Barlows took all of their other children with them when they left, leaving Annette and Barbara to their fate within the church.

  According to the FLDS church, leaving is the most wicked thing you can do, and Father taught his young wives that they were so very blessed to have married him because the Barlow family would all be down in hell, and only the two of them were good enough to escape damnation. I don’t know if this was why Mother Annette and Mother Barbara weren’t affectionate with their children. I knew my mother loved me, but she was hard to get close to, and she didn’t talk very much. She would never hug one of her children for no reason; it just wasn’t her way. Mother Annette was the same with Becky and her other children. Father sometimes said it was up to him to be both mother and father to us, as though it was his role to be close to the children. Yet the mothers who came later, who came from families in the church, did not withhold their affection from their children.

  This is how I grew up in Sandy, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, knowing that we were different from everyone else. Our families were large, we dressed modestly, our hair had to be braided a certain way. We belonged to a church the outside world didn’t seem to understand.

  “It’s good to be different,” Father would often say to us children. “If we were like everyone else in the world, we would be very wicked like they are.”

  “That is why you children are so special,” he said, “because you are privileged to know the Prophet, the greatest man in the world. He gives us teachings straight from the Heavenly Father.”

  As principal of our private church school, Alta Academy, Father had full control of what we learned. Every morning at the beginning of the school day, there was morning class, held in the meeting room, which all of the students attended together. Father taught us about the dress code, about keeping our bodies covered, and that boys must not touch girls and vice versa. Afterward we all lined up and went off to our various academic classes. The boys and girls shared classes through fifth grade, and then the boys and girls were separated, and the girls no longer had any communication or social life with the boys.

  None of the teachers at the church school had gone to college, including Father, but Father was a very good teacher all the same. He’d taught himself how to program computers, and he could explain math all the way through trigonometry. We were also taught reading, science, history, and English up through eighth grade.

  In addition, we were schooled in the history of the Mormon Church (at least as the FLDS saw it). We learned that Joseph Smith had been a chosen Prophet of the Lord, and that Mormons had been persecuted and driven from their land in the nineteenth century. We were taught that the world was always, and would always be, against us. Our only protection was to obey the Prophet. And if we ever left the church, we would be damned, and of all of hell’s angels we would be the most miserable. If we were good and stayed sweet, then we would be blessed.

  We lived in a lovely area at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, about six miles east of downtown Sandy, and Father often took us hiking up the mountain across the street. Home was an unremarkable brick house built in the 1970s, but there were eight bedrooms, one for each mother, and the children shared with the siblings closest to our own age, which were usually half siblings. Boys and girls not only didn’t share rooms but were forbidden to enter one another’s rooms—ever.

  Becky and I were allowed to watch a couple of kids’ movies when we were little—I remember Bambi and Cinderella—on a VCR in our grandmother’s bedroom. We were also allowed a few children’s books and schoolbooks, from which we learned to read. Books from the outside world—“gentile” books—were monitored very closely. Romance titles, especially, were forbidden; it was wicked to even think about a boy, let alone like one.

  We had very little money—Father didn’t earn much of a salary as the principal of our church school. Most of the family’s income was generated by Mother Barbara, who did commercial sewing out of the house. We had several large industrial sewing machines in the family room. Sometimes we children would help Mother clip threads and turn her finished products right side out. But with so many of us to support, there was still never enough. Father refused to live off the government, so we did not have food stamps, Medicaid, or any of the other kinds of assistance that other FLDS families relied on when they needed to.

  As a result, all of our furniture and bedding came from secondhand stores. Nothing matched. There was ugly pea-green carpeting throughout the house, and our hideous secondhand couches were embarrassing. I loved it when every once in a while we’d get something new from Kmart or some other discount store. I dreamed of having a beautiful home with matching couches in the living room, coordinating rugs and towels in the bathroom, and my own bedroom where the furniture and décor harmonized.

  There were several bathrooms, but there was one no one used unless you were in danger of wetting yourself. That one was off the mudroom by the kitchen—we called it the mud bathroom. It was always messy, and the toilet seat was always freezing. Since no one liked to use it, it was a good place to hide and read a “gentile” book if you could get your hands on one.

  Every morning Father drew up a list of chores for us, and no one was left out. He would put a mother and certain children on kitchen duty to prepare the meals and clean up, another mother and several children on house cleaning. A mother and older children were tasked with tending the younger children.

  Every day, one mother and one of us girls was assigned to laundry duty, and it took all day. Laundry was an enormous chore, and I hated it when it was my turn. There were no laundry hampers, so there were always great piles of children’s clothes on the floor. The entire family’s laundry
pile looked like a mountain to me, and it had to be sorted and folded into each person’s individual basket. One mother overheard me complain about having to do all that folding and yelled down to the basement to me, “You can’t come upstairs until it’s done!” Complaining was considered a sin, so my punishment could actually have been more severe.

  We had a nice-size kitchen, but mostly empty cupboards. It seemed like there was never enough food to eat, and what there was, we children thought was pretty yucky. There were years when we didn’t eat much milk or meat, and we never had sugar or any kind of processed cereal or candy. The mothers would get buckets of raw honey when they could afford it. Mostly we subsisted on homemade whole-wheat brick bread, mush, beans, veggies in the summer when we grew them, and a lot of brown rice.

  In other ways, our childhood wasn’t so different from what children outside the church experienced, except we had a bigger family than most. I was the third of seven girls in a row before Father’s first sons were born. My sister Becky and I were practically twins. We shared a bedroom, secrets, everything. When we were five, Father had us start violin lessons with Jennifer Wall, who was extremely talented and made the learning fun for us. (She eventually married Father.) We played with our dolls and rode bikes, and we went swimming every Thursday at our uncle Wallace’s pool. Father taught us all how to swim when I was seven. He took extra time with me, teaching me all the different strokes and how to dive. Every Friday night we each had to get up in front of the family and perform a song or a play. Father took us fishing at least once every summer. When Father came home from a stressful day at work, he’d ask us children to act out plays and skits for him. Sometimes he would join in, acting out silly antics to make us laugh. He favored the girls, and spent far more special time with us doing fun things than he did with the boys.