I’m sure Mom felt like she had no other choice —she was obeying my father’s order. Ervil LeBaron led The Church of the Lamb of God, a radical offshoot of the Mormon Church, and Anna Mae was the fourth of his thirteen wives. Like the other wives, she learned early on to do as she was told.
My mom, raised in Arizona, had met and married her second husband, Nephi, when they were both part of the traditional Mormon Church, known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nephi attended one of Ervil LeBaron’s exhaustive talks and eventually bought into my dad’s more radical offshoot of Mormonism. He hurried home to tell my mom that the way they’d been living out Joseph Smith’s teaching was all wrong. When she remonstrated, Nephi invited Ervil to their home to convince my mom that they needed to convert and follow this new prophet. Ervil was powerfully persuasive —so much so that Nephi and my mother not only converted, but agreed to relocate to Colonia LeBarón in Chihuahua, Mexico.
Nephi stayed in Arizona to sell their home, but my mom went ahead with their five children. During this transition, she spent an inordinate amount of time with Ervil, who —while tall, handsome, and charismatic —was also narcissistic, entitled, and manipulative. He proclaimed that he had a revelation that it was God’s will and plan for my mom’s life that she leave Nephi and marry him instead. She fell madly in love with Ervil, and like the other sister-wives before and after her, she succumbed to his potent influence. They married and she had seven more children with him, including me.
“Please, Mom, don’t go.”
On the driveway, I wrapped my arms around Mom’s waist, my tears dampening the front of her faded denim dress.
“Anna Keturah,” she said firmly. Like most mothers, Mom always included my middle name when I stirred up trouble. She named me, her tenth child, after herself, but insisted on a different pronunciation (Ah-nah) that she heard while pregnant with me.
“Stop crying! You’re seven years old. Crying doesn’t do any good.” She bent over and kissed my cheek. I placed my hand over the spot to hold in her warmth as long as possible.
Helpless, I watched her get into the beat-up Chevy with three of Dad’s other followers. Along with the other kids and a few remaining adults, I watched them drive away, hoping Mom would turn around and wave or smile at me one more time. She didn’t. My thirteen-year-old sister, Kathleen, took my hand, pulled me into the house, and did her best to comfort me. This wasn’t her first time being left in charge of the kids in my mother’s absence.
Those of us left behind in Dallas were supported by the adult women in our group who worked at the family’s used appliance business, although the majority of the income generated from the family business went to my father. The sister-wives, even nursing mothers, spent long days —often twelve to fourteen hours of backbreaking labor —at the store, just one of many abuses they endured under my father’s control. We children witnessed some of the other abuses, but all of us had been conditioned to keep silent.
While the women were gone, Kathleen cared for me, Adine, Hyrum, Celia, Marilyn, Manuel, Virginia, and other children of my mom’s sister-wives. To pass the time, Kathleen played games and read to us, activities she preferred over the never-ending housework. Though Kathleen did her best to scrape together meals to feed us, when the sister-wives got home, they would scold her for not cleaning up the messes made by so many toddlers and young children.
When we were all together, I quietly observed the interactions between the sister-wives. Some had petty jealousies, and a few spoke cattily behind each other’s backs. Others got along well, especially biological sisters married to the same husband. As teenagers, two of my mother’s daughters, Ramona and Faye, were given in marriage to Dan Jordan, my father’s right-hand man. Ramona became Dan’s sixth wife at age seventeen.
Later, Faye was “sealed” to him following her sixteenth birthday, along with my step-sister Amy. Since the “blessed event” making them wives number seven and eight took place on the same night, Ervil flipped a coin after performing the double ceremony to see which of the girls would share the marriage bed with her new husband that first night. Faye was relieved when Amy was chosen to spend that first night with the forty-plus-year-old man.
These hurried ceremonies were performed in secret; in many cases, the other wives knew nothing until after the fact. Even if the girls in our group dreamed of being courted, dating, or marrying different young men, they never experienced that kind of happily-ever-after; those types of relationships were seldom allowed. The older men in Dad’s sect preferred younger and younger wives, and they managed to get their way with each successive marriage. At first, group members frowned upon underage unions and quietly protested when the older men began to court teenage girls, but the leaders became ever more emboldened, and the disapproving whispers and looks from the older wives did nothing to stop this practice.
A few months after my mom left us in Dallas, Kathleen roused me from a deep slumber. “Wake up, Anna. It’s time to go.”
As usual, no one had told me that we were moving again. But I knew the drill. I gathered a couple of items within reach and padded down the long hallway behind my older siblings. None of us had many personal possessions, since we left behind most of our belongings with each move. What we did have, we kept in small cardboard boxes, which, if we were lucky, we could grab before leaving the house. An extra change of clothes and a few special trinkets were treasures that we would keep well-hidden so other siblings wouldn’t take them, claiming them as their own. We felt rich when we had a full deck of cards for a card game, a diversion that would keep us entertained for hours. Speed, War, and Slapjack were my favorites.
When we got outside, I blinked several times, then wiped the sleep from my eyes as I tried to see my surroundings under the heavy cloud cover.
“Keep moving,” a husky voice barked.
I felt someone thump me on the back of my head. I turned slightly and stuck out my tongue at my brother Arthur, only because I knew he couldn’t see me in the inky darkness. I was wearing flip-flops, and with the next step, I stubbed my toe on a piece of the crumbling driveway and nearly fell. My rubber sandal fell off, and I had to scurry back a couple of steps to retrieve it. Another man, Alex, helped herd us kids as well. Clearly, they were in a hurry to get on the road.
“Anna?” cried the thin, fearful voice of Celia, my sister closest in age.
“I’m right here.”
She took my hand, and I asked her to help me find my sandal. We felt around in the dark until she found it just off the driveway in the weed-ridden yard. I quickly slipped it back on, and we fell back in line with the others.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Celia whispered again.
“I heard Arthur say something about Colorado.”
“Oh, I hope so. That’s where Mom is.” We clung tightly to one another, and to the hope of seeing our mother again.