Brigham Young had had fifty-five wives and fifty-six children. The
church had ended the temporal practice of polygamy in 1890, but it
had never recanted the doctrine. As a child I’d been taught—by my
father but also in Sunday school—that in the fullness of time God
would restore polygamy, and in the afterlife, I would be a plural wife.
The number of my sister wives would 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