Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [6]
TO EXPLAIN WHY BESSIE GILMORE might have wanted to punish her kin and homeland, I should begin by telling a bit about the people and history she grew up with. My mother was born into the world of early twentieth-century Mormon Utah—a place that, in many respects, was dramatically different from the America that surrounded it. The Mormons had long possessed a strong and spectacular sense of otherness and unity: They saw themselves not only as God’s modern chosen people, but also as a people whose faith and identity had been forged by a long and bloody history, and by outright banishment. They were a people apart—a people with its own myths and purposes, and with a history of astonishing violence.
My mother remembered hearing the legends of her people—their miracles and persecutions—throughout her childhood, and she passed these same tales along to me and my brothers in our childhoods. Chief among these stories were accounts of Mormonism’s early struggle for survival—in particular the powerful and haunting story of the church’s martyred founder, Joseph Smith, Jr. Smith was a man with a remarkable imagination and vision—indeed, he was among the most innovative mythmakers in the nation’s history—and he was also a man who managed to turn his most personal obsessions into a complex, epic mix of theology and folklore. Smith would build nearly his entire complex theology on what was essentially a dilemma of bloodline: how one might redeem the dreams and debts of one’s heritage, or else perish as the result of unfinished curses. By the time this question reached my own family, it had become a matter of fatal consequence.
Smith’s most lasting work, of course, was the Book of Mormon. First published in the late 1820s, the Book of Mormon has managed a staying power matched by only a handful of other American texts and novels from the same period, and for over a hundred and sixty years, it has been a central factor in helping to establish Mormonism as one of the fastest growing religions in modern history. The origins of the book are as fascinating as they are controversial: Smith claimed that the book had been transcribed from a set of ancient golden plates that had been presented to him by an angel of God named Moroni. Upon these plates was written the history of America’s ancient inhabitants and their dealings with the God of Israel—in effect, Smith was claiming to have discovered a long lost, sacred complement to the Bible’s Old and New Testaments. The book had—and still has—a tremendous impact on the minds of many Americans, and it is not hard to understand its almost primal appeal. Once you strip away all the Book of Mormon’s pretenses of scriptural import, what you have is nothing more nor less than a lusty tale of America’s favorite subject: families and murder.
Written—or at least narrated by Smith to his transcribers—in a voice that sought to emulate the King James translation of the Bible, the Book of Mormon tells the one-thousand-year chronicle of a Jewish tribe, the family of a righteous man and prophet named Lehi, who took his kin and friends and fled Jerusalem in the year 600 B.C., during a time of the city’s corruption. Under the direction of God, Lehi and his sons built a ship and sailed to a new land, where Lehi taught that the greatest purpose in life—the single path to redemption—was to win God’s love by obeying his laws. But there had always been a rivalry in Lehi’s tribe, and at the time of the old prophet’s death, when he appointed one of his younger sons, Nephi, as the family’s rightful patriarch and seer, the development was met with great resentment by the older sons, Laman and Lemuel. Soon, Laman and Lemuel swelled in their anger toward their father’s legacy, as well as toward the piety of Nephi and his Old World god. They threatened to overtake their brother and his followers, until Nephi was forced to remove his tribe from his brothers’ dynasty. God was enraged by Laman and Lemuel’s rebellion, and because of their pride and blood-thirstiness he struck them with the curse of red skin and proclaimed