September 16, 2006
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Truth is reason, truth eternal tells me I’ve a mother there. Eliza R. Snow.THE HISTORICAL SOPHIE AND MARY
IN COLORADO CITY I don’t know as much as I’d like to about Sophie and Mary Jewkes . The papers I assembled on the historical Sophie and Mary met an unknown end. An absurd Oregonian prognosis got me into a 1998 hospice bed some 7 years ago. Maybe my family grieved, maybe they did not. Perhaps belongings were seized by the Lane County Social Services and a despicable filthy mouthed cop. I remember a certain day of gaity when an outing was planned to seize my belongings. I said no. They particularly wanted my papers and computers. With these they could have found passages which, taken out of context, could secure the 2,000 a month they received for my internment, with regard to my writing life, in inperpetuity, tearing its meaning into shreds and flushing it. An endless litany of worse things that could happen to me gushed out of the holes in their faces. Life doesn’t have to “Clickety clack down the tracks like that.” Mine most of all. There was a way to walk away, shake the figurative dust of that place from my feet, and I determined to do it. My intellectual property rights were easily dismissed by them. They took the first letter from Sophie to her Mustang {American} Peeress–the grandmother of her son, and said it was overwritten and too flowery. Yes, I said to the Court Ordered Nuero-psycho- immunologist, Sophie was nervous and trying to impress. That did not mean there was anything wrong with my writing–but surely a cash cow couldn’t understand what such flowery language meant. A cash cow is first and formost a cash cow. He turned to another passage and grew quite angry–my book was written in many Victorian voices, most quite straigt forward for the period.
A few were rustic. But where was it written that those supposed to be dying might write? By holding me they could seize my house. This was easily done with my beautiful if small house, which a friend had built for me via my mother in accordance with all rules and regulation and to be payed off without me having notice. A friend who, with her older husband, had spent their lives in the Peace Corp and State department, a College English Teacher was interested in moving it onto their land. But my mother was told, right in Court, that she was to do only the direct opposite of what I asked of her. We have spoken only a few times since. She would have use of it for her kids, who were young adults. I am tied down here with my loved ones, though we have nowhere to nest together. They use the cops in oddly in Oregon. In the end they get the goods. There was one of the type who tormented Kip Kipling. Kip was the shooter in the seldom mentioned school shooting in Springfeild, Oregon. The man’s verbal abuse reached foul intensities which I have never heard matched while in my presence. He made, I would presume, broad accusations against his hippie parents, popular Junior College Spanish teachers who he then murdered. He returned him his gun. “When a son kills his father,” say the ancient i ching commentary, “or a servant his master, “the reason is not to be found in a single day.” The loss of my papers was excrutiating and I have cried more than once over the loss of the bonding between my mother and I. After 7 years it has evaporated–I have serious medical needs for which effective treatments exist. She liked to say “If I were you I think I’d give up the ghost.”
That is when I had some connection wirh her, when she was my mother. Unfortunatly, I did my research during the wide open Arrington era in the Church History archives. I doubt we, deeply interested in regional history, will ever have such access again. I greive my windows and skylight. I am still enraged by Oregon and its Schizo- phrenogenic attack on my mothers mind and our always fragile relationship. However beautifull the countryside and attractive the housing prices in Oregon, if you are disabled they have your signature and can use it whenever and however they want. Recapturing the faded American Dream there is a roll of the dice. Fortunatly memory serves with regard to Sophie and Mary Jewkes and their joint ahistorical husband, a Scott. A Scott is usefull in any Utah novel when compared to the overmarrying British, useful to the reader in keeping character and plot straight. Returning to the original topic of early Colorado City, it appears to me that the Jeffs were also Josephites–passing community stewardship from Father to son. These are the only two references I have heard to the Josephites. It may not be coincidental. Sophie and her Northumbrian bosom companion were inseperable, though only Mary was converted to
Mormonism. Brigham Young had asked the missionaries to comb the cities of Britain for women to care for the poorest of the poor, who were flooding into Utah Territory. Sophie’s grand daughter was likely, I thought, to be my children’s great grandmother, by the troublesome x1, my first husband. Sophie was a hospital trained midwife, convinced by the missionaries to gather to Utah with Mary, whose sisters in Zion required her professional medical expertise. An aside and I must sleep. Colorado City was settled and asked to begin with a large, communal crop of peas. The flowers came out in a profusion of colors–whoever ordered from
the catalogue got one or more of the numbers off. And so the unlikely town with it’s great red rock bluffs did their part in prettying up the lambing ground, but had to be bailed out insofar as food went. I’m sure the legumes helped the soil. It is permissable to laugh at such error. The handling of the Jeffs family on CNN was not funny. I asked a longtime contributer for
Larry King’s head on a stake. I don’t expect an UPS delivery anytime soon. Is it legal to say that? Beleive me, I have no antipathy toward women’s shelters and have, before I was ill, coordinated a Utah Crisis line, worked in drug rehab and finished the required 10,000 hours of supervised work. The mingling of older and younger women is always problematic. I think, though, that this may be Southern Utah’s first women’s help organization of any kind. Other populations near Colorado City need women’s services as urgently. The immense pity aroused by Larry King’s handling of this matter,
for Colorado City Mormons particularly, will bring in much more money than a battered Piede girl or Latina, or even a battered golf widow. Women all over the Country are expected to learn to get along without prior experience living with people whose cultures they know nothing about and who they resent. Support groups can meet these needs. I fear the alternatives, partially due to the much resented illegality of polygamy–a onetime trade off for Statehood. This was and is most resented by historians and the grandaughters and greatgrandaughers–
going back 7 or more generations, who feel patronized, overcontrolled and want to go back, in some way, to the institution that we never voluntarily gave up. We need decriminalization. To leave a marriage in the principle women will need help from outside the State. Utah is a poor state with few reasources. The current situation seems to me like a powderkeg. Crops fail and only someone out of touch with ranch life could conduct a witch hunt at haying time. Maybe Clinton could explain this to the egghead bureucrats. CNN made a start in bringing an understanding of one form of Polygamy to the American viewer. We have seeded and promoted a region-wide civil war in the Middle East, killing hundreds of thousands of women and children pitting Monogamist Shia against the Sunni who practice polygamy and if we terrorize the residents of one town or village, ought we not in fairness, terrorize them all? This is called sheiklekheit in German. If one Jew dies must not all jews be driven out?Not again, dear Lord, not again.
