Educated

depend on my husband’s righteousness: the more nobly he lived, the more
wives he would be given.
I had never made my peace with it. As a girl I had often imagined myself
in heaven, dressed in a white gown, standing in a pearly mist across from my
husband. But when the camera zoomed out there were ten women standing
behind us, wearing the same white dress. In my fantasy I was the first wife
but I knew there was no guarantee of that; I might be hidden anywhere in the
long chain of wives. For as long as I could remember, this image had been at
the core of my idea of paradise: my husband, and his wives. There was a
sting in this arithmetic: in knowing that in the divine calculus of heaven, one
man could balance the equation for countless women.
I remembered my great-great-grandmother. I had first heard her name
when I was twelve, which is the year that, in Mormonism, you cease to be a
child and become a woman. Twelve was the age when lessons in Sunday
school began to include words like purity and chastity. It was also the age
that I was asked, as part of a church assignment, to learn about one of my
ancestors. I asked Mother which ancestor I should choose, and without
thinking she said, “Anna Mathea.” I said the name aloud. It floated off my
tongue like the beginning of a fairy tale. Mother said I should honor Anna
Mathea because she had given me a gift: her voice.
“It was her voice that brought our family to the church,” Mother said. “She
heard Mormon missionaries preaching in the streets of Norway. She prayed,
and God blessed her with faith, with the knowledge that Joseph Smith was
His prophet. She told her father, but he’d heard stories about the Mormons
and wouldn’t allow her to be baptized. So she sang for him. She sang him a
Mormon hymn called ‘O My Father.’ When she finished singing, her father
had tears in his eyes. He said that any religion with music so beautiful must
be the work of God. They were baptized together.”
After Anna Mathea converted her parents, the family felt called by God to
come to America and meet the prophet Joseph. They saved for the journey,
but after two years they could bring only half the family. Anna Mathea was
left behind.
The journey was long and harsh, and by the time they made it to Idaho, to
a Mormon settlement called Worm Creek, Anna’s mother was sick, dying. It
was her last wish to see her daughter again, so her father wrote to Anna,
begging her to take what money she had and come to America. Anna had