Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [4]
When it comes to marriage, members practice something called the Law of Placement, in which all marriages are decided by the prophet and based on a revelation that he receives from God. Everything the prophet proclaims is said to be the word of God, and thus if he directs a union, it is akin to God commanding the union.
Several weeks after his conversation with Uncle Roy, during one of Dad and Audrey’s visits to southern Utah, the revelatory word came from the prophet. At the direction of Uncle Roy, Dad and Audrey drove to the home where my mom lived with her family to make an introduction. Mom was in the living room when they arrived, and not knowing what was about to take place, she rose to leave when her father instructed her to stay and meet her husband-to-be. My mother had already been told of the prophet’s placement for her, but when nothing immediately happened she worried she would not be married because traditionally, marriages are “sealed” by the prophet within days, and sometimes hours, of a revelation.
My parents were married that very same day. With no time to sew a wedding dress, Mom made do by wearing her favorite pale pink dress for the ceremony. That night, she was on her way to Salt Lake City to start a new life with my father and Mother Audrey in their six-bedroom house on the “benches” of the Wasatch Mountains.
This would be one of the first nights my mother had ever spent away from her large family. Though it was a difficult and sudden change, her steadfast faith allowed her to see it as positive. The union represented an important milestone: the prophet had found a place where she could start to build a new family. More than anything, Mom was thankful to have been placed.
My mother came of age during a time when the local authorities in southern Utah and northern Arizona were very committed to ending plural marriages. For a time, her father, my Grandpa Newel, had become a target of routine raids, with police turning up unannounced at his ranch in hopes of finding plural wives. As a result, much of her childhood was spent hiding her family’s polygamous living arrangement from authorities and moving between Utah and Arizona to evade detection and capture. In an effort to avoid arrest and possible imprisonment, Grandpa Newel had begun stashing the women and children in various locations around the region. My mother was sent to live in a home near the Arizona border, where some of her siblings could attend school. However, authorities somehow learned of their location, and an anonymous call was placed to my biological grandmother, Alice, alerting her to their knowledge and offering friendship and a way out. Much to the astonishment of law enforcement, none of Grandpa’s wives were unhappy or seeking help. In fact, all five of his wives wanted little more than to be left in peace to live out their lives according to their religious teachings and beliefs. It has often been said that Grandpa Newel and his family were a model to be followed by all.
As traumatic as the moving around and evading authorities might seem, it only made my mother’s faith more entrenched. She firmly believed in the traditions of plural marriage and the teachings of the church, and her positive experience growing up shaped every part of her outlook. Whenever she spoke of her childhood, her voice resonated with affection—even when she spoke of the family’s persecution. Nostalgic stories of living on her father’s ranch would mix with dramatic scenes of evading capture, leaving me scared and imparting the clear lesson that all strangers—especially the police—were not to be trusted. One story in particular about my mother and her young siblings crawling through a hole in the backyard fence of their “safe house” near the Arizona border to