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ARRANGED MARRIAGE
Creek (pronounced “crick”) is the name current and former residents give to Hildale and Colorado City, after the town’s original name, Short Creek, before it was split. “Once a creeker, always a creeker,” goes the saying.
For the last 12 years, Cook has fought that fatalistic saying tooth and nail.
Born into polygamy in Salt Lake City, her father Francis C. Olds was a Methodist who converted to Mormonism, then fundamentalism. Her biological mother was a refugee from East Germany. Cook shared two mothers with three siblings. “We couldn’t dress like kids in the world,” she says. “I worked for my father from when I was 6. No bikes, no roller skates, no free time to play.”
When Cook was 12, she asked her parents if she could move down to the Arizona Strip. “I didn’t fit in in Salt Lake. I didn’t fit in down in Colorado City either, but it was the better of the two.”
In the Creek, she shuttled back and forth between two women, Fawn Broadbent, sister of Mayor Fred Jessop, and Viola Broadbent, Fawn’s daughter-in-law. “You had to be like everybody else, or you were looked down on. Viola was afraid of not raising me right, that my Salt Lake ways were too entrenched.”
Yet in this town where boys and girls aren’t allowed to talk to each other, she says she found in her first years, “a little piece of heaven.”
At age 16, her heaven took on a darker hue. A member of the seven-strong priesthood council (one-man rule came in the early ’80s with prophet LeRoy Johnson) told Cook they wanted her to marry Keith Holm, a 22-year-old Hildale resident. Cook told the council she wanted to finish school. “Get back to us,” the ruling council told her.
Cook says Holm was no happier about the match than she was. “He planned to marry someone who would let everybody know he was deserving of the best. Then he had to marry an Olds from Salt Lake who wasn’t trained right. He wanted so much to be in the inner circle, but instead he felt picked on.”
Holm doesn’t agree. “She was a sweet gal, very pretty. I felt good about it. A guy’ll try to do what he’s asked.”
Cook says she agreed to the marriage under pressure from the community. “I honestly thought if I didn’t do it, I would be forsaken by God. The fear of not obeying felt more real than what I was being asked to do.”
The first years were marked by poverty. While Holm, she says, worked for free for the community, she had to contend with a trailer roof that leaked in 11 places, no oven, no money for groceries or power and water bills, a backed-up sewer line. But she made no requests for help from the church’s storehouse for fear it would embarrass her husband.
Between the 1975 wedding and their 1994 split, Cook bore Holm eight children, even as her marital satisfaction—what there was of it—waned. “He didn’t get that I needed more than a contracted marriage. I needed to feel cared about, loved, valued—not just given to him by God and that’s it. My only value was as long as I obeyed.”
After her older children rebelled against the community, the church and the priesthood, her husband demanded she discipline them or kick them out. “He told me, ‘I answer to the prophet, you answer to me, the children answer to you,’” she says.
Holm, who still lives in Colorado City, proffers no comment about those years. “It’s between her and me.”
But Cook was having increasing problems of her own with the church’s dogma. “It made no sense anymore.”
It wasn’t her absence from church that enflamed town prejudices against her—those were already at an all-time high. Rumors accusing her of everything from prostituting her daughters to having affairs with teenagers and other women circulated during her last two years in town, she says.
“That was because I allowed teenagers to come home and watch movies, rather than go out and get drunk in the mountains. Because I wasn’t accepted anymore, my kids were treated much worse.”
Her son Davis was thrown out of friends' houses by their parents. "Sometimes you wonder about the violence they're capable of," he says. Cook recalls how one daughter, then 12 years old and well-accepted by the town, one day came home and told her she was embarrassed that Cook was her mother. "She told me the town thinks you're no good."
WALLED IN
The Vermillion Cliffs cradle the back of Hildale. A cemetery sits near the base and, looking back, you can see the town below. Gravestones mark homesteaders born in the 1890s. A few cedars dot the rectangular plots, tiny plaques planted in front of oval mounds of red dirt. Cook searches for her mother’s grave. She hasn’t visited Gerta Olds’ resting place since her 1999 funeral. No one told her about her mother’s death. She found out from a relative outside the community. Olds had moved down to Colorado City after divorcing Cook’s father. She disowned her daughter for leaving the FLDS Church.
While she wanders the lots, several white trucks—the town’s vehicle of choice, judging by their numbers on the streets—drive through the cemetery. One stops at the back of Cook’s car, as if checking out her plates. Ten minutes later, two police trucks pull up, one blocking the nearest cemetery exit.
An officer asks if Cook might be Carla Jeffs. He has an outstanding warrant against Carla’s husband, he says. Carla is also one of Cook’s daughters; Cook is driving Carla’s car that morning.
After checking Cook’s record, the officer drives off. On his radio, the voice of a cop back at the station squawks, “But they were walking around taking photos.”
Cook continues her search. “One of the nicest guys I ever knew,” she says in front of one plot. “Ran over my eldest son Davis when he was 21 months old. Minded his own business. Went to Vietnam. Died of a brain tumor.” She stops in front of another familiar name. “Died in a car crash. Got kicked out by Warren, his family given to someone else. He stayed single and faithful to the religion as asked. But they don’t have a religion here anymore. It’s just Gestapo tactics.”
Several graves, belonging to men once powerful in the community are distinguished by tombstones, one listing his six wives on the back, another his 18 children. Dozens of infants form outer rings around the plots of prominent families.
There’s been prolonged publicity to babies succumbing to rare genetic disorders due to community inbreeding. Lesser known are the many children and adolescents who were killed in farming accidents, run over or drowned in the local reservoir.
“No swimming classes in the Creek,” Cook says. She blames this carnage on what she describes as the Creek’s lawlessness. Few use seat belts—children sit up front on their parents’ laps. The lack of car insurance or registration isn’t a problem unless your car is totaled. “If you have an accident, you just shake hands, go home and get it fixed yourself,” Cook says. Later she points out a boy, no more than 12, driving an enormous black truck on his own, barely visible above the wheel.
“Why he doesn’t have a headstone 2 feet tall, I don’t know,” Cook says, standing in front of the grave of long-time FLDS Bishop Frederick M. Jessop. “Uncle Fred loved people, kept the spirit of the community alive.”
“Uncle” is the moniker applied to bishops and prophets both by Colorado City residents, and those who have left but can’t break the habit. In the case of Jessop, many saw him as a family presence.
Uncle Fred, Cook recalls, organized plays and shows performed by different families and local businesses. He set up spring, summer and fall fairs, as well as an Oktoberfest celebration. At the summer parade, those who had served in the military were at the front on horses. Behind them came floats from the store, the dairy—famous for its “squeaky cheese,” so-called because of the noise it makes between your teeth—and the service station, along with clowns on stilts throwing out candy to the crowd.
In the ’80s, Cook says, Uncle Fred had overseen the building of Cottonwood Park, close to the center of town. Drive through the park today and you see tattered awnings, peeling paint and tipped-over chairs. A sign hangs over some tables. “Good neighbors,” it reads.
This motto, however, was not one that Uncle Fred—who ran the storehouse—necessarily practiced, Cook says. He played favorites. “He oversaw who got help and who didn’t,” she says. “He should have taken care of his own people, regardless if they were in favor or not.” Cook says if it hadn’t been for food stamps, she and her family would have starved within the first five years of her marriage. Finally she finds her mother’s grave at the back of the cemetery. “I didn’t even bring flowers,” she says, heading for town in search of a floral tribute.
A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN OF GOD
Cook’s brightest memories of Colorado City social life center on Friday nights. Even so, darkness rims the borders of her recollections.
Every other Friday there was a movie screened in the church meetinghouse. In a town where girls and boys cannot fraternize, holding hands in the dark while Herbie Rides Again, Flubber or Black Beauty spooled out across the auditorium was a victory of sorts.
Movies alternated with weekly dances. Girls wore three-tier lavender and purple dresses with flounces, boys donned suits and dark blue ties. There was girls’ choice and boys’ choice. Along with waltzes, Scottish dancing was popular. Dances like The Shepherd’s Crook let a man parade on the floor with several wives at the same time.
Church leaders watched over the hall, Cook says, no doubt making matches for the future. A boy who showed a preference for one girl by dancing with her too many times received a severe reprimand. So would a girl who went to the dance without her hair done up in a braid, wave or bun. In that case, men at the door sent her home. “Long hair is a status symbol of obedience,” Cook says. “Cutting your hair is disgraceful to what a beautiful woman of God should look like.”
In time, prophet Rulon Jeffs, Warren's father, brought the dances to a halt. “He said there was too much boy-girl interaction" Cook says. “It felt like a reprimand, that we weren’t good enough, that we couldn’t control ourselves, so it was taken away.”
Fun became as obsolete as the 30 refrigerators that stand, doors attached, in a field, or the rusting air-conditioning units piled up against a fence.
Jessop was kicked out by Jeffs for arranging a ceremony dedicating a monument commemorating Arizona Gov. Howard Pyle’s 1953 raid against the community. Jessop’s crime was not having first consulted the prophet. According to Cook, Jeffs claimed that because a journalist photographed the ceremony, Jessop brought unnecessary media attention to the town. But the resulting purges of those who threatened his power base, Cook adds, generated far more headlines and media attention than anything Jessop did.
The recent upswing in media attention has also fueled tensions between polygamists and neighboring towns.
On the outskirts of Colorado City stands Centennial Park, Ariz., home to former FLDS Church members who broke away to form their own church. Centennial-based plural wife Linda Earl remembers one woman in a market pulling back a baby’s bonnet, saying, “I just want to see what little urchin I’m paying for.” Centennial women say that in the last two years, St. George residents have frequently rolled down their car windows and screamed “plyg” at them. “Plyg” is a slang word polygamists use to describe each other, but which outsiders use as an epithet.
The flip side of this, says Elaine Tyler, who runs St. George-based anti-abuse activist group HOPE, is people lining up to buy chicken in a supermarket and seeing a polygamist woman buying $400 worth of steaks with food stamps.
For Centennial polygamists, reporters knocking on their doors are very much double-edged swords. While publicity for their lifestyle might well be productive, it also makes it much harder to employ teachers for Centennial Park’s Masada Charter School, headmistress Leanne Timpson says. “They hear where we are and they hang up the phone.”
Some Centennial residents chafe at the constant intrusion, at media insistence that they debate and defend their lifestyle. “We’re tired of being called brainwashed victims,” says Ann Wright. “We don’t want to be rescued.”
