Hearts of the Children

From the editor: This piece contains poetry and journal excerpts from the author’s ancestors. The spelling and punctuation have been left in their original forms for authenticity.

’Neath persecutions road we smart
For pilgrims pathway roam
From loving wives and children part
And leave our much-loved home.
’Tis true we neither drink nor swear
Nor enemies dispel
Treat others kindly everywhere
And live by honest toil.

We found a barren desert here
Where no one else would come
The Indian in his wild career
Had claimed it for his home.
But soon we dug the sagebrush up
Asked God to bless the soil
We plowed and sowed, it yielded up
Rich harvests for our toil.

And now where once the sagebrush grew
See apples, pears, and plums
And golden grain spread out to view
And countless happy homes.
Where night and morn the song of praise
Swells on the balmy air
Where loving family circle raise
Their hearts in humble prayer.

But still the feeling deep and strong
Our enemies parade
That we have sweet in peace too long
Our peaceful homes they raid
They gather like a hurricane
Polygamy they say
Is not at all American
And must be done away.

’Tis not American to wed
More wives than one just now
But mistresses are kept instead
Americans allow.
The world with women go astray
One wife and harlot then
They ask us turn our wives away
And be like other men

We might drink and swear and pander
To the vices of the day
And with lewdest harlots wander
But put our wives away.
We might kill our children slyly
Disrupting nature’s way
Be cunning, base, and wily
But put our wives away.

Change our virtues for their vices
In all things be like them
And adopt the world devices
Polygamy condemn.
All the world would then receive us
Would treat us as its own
And force our wives to leave us
Then cruelly disown.

Then Utah would be made a state
Appear on fame’s fair rolls
And all her people would be great
Admitted to the polls.
They say it is an idle dream
To fight this nation’s will
We know great odds against us run
But God is greater still.

’Twas He in majesty and awe
Commanded us obey
This ancient Patriarchal law
We cannot cast away.
For better perish at the stake
Or die in loathsome cell
Then leave the truth and choose to take
The downward road to hell.

To home, our covenants, and to God
They bid us be untrue,
Forsake the path the Prophets trod
Our wives and children too.
They ask us barter heaven away
Our hopes of priceless worth
They ask a price we cannot pay
For liberty on earth.

We love our wives and children more
Than all that earth can give
Without them we’d feel wretched poor
And would not wish to live.
We’ll meet them in a finer crime
On the celestial shore
Away beyond the shores of time
Then mortals weep no more.

My great-grandfather, Samuel Rose Parkinson, penned these stanzas in 1886 while doing time in an Idaho penitentiary for refusing to give up his three wives prior to the Church’s 1890 Manifesto calling for an end to the practice of plural marriage.

Sent by Brigham Young to colonize what is now Franklin, Idaho, Samuel kept a series of journals spanning from 1873, when he was forty-two years old, until 1919, the year of his death, recounting his life as a merchant, a farmer, an entrepreneur, a man of faith, and a father to thirty-two children, the last being my grandmother. His daily accounts are spare, most no more than a sentence or two, and devoid of emotion, even when recounting his marriages to the sisters who became his second and third plural wives.

What was he feeling as he entered into these marriages? What were the feelings of Arabella, the wife of his youth? I will never know from his journals, though they provide a wonderful, if factual, account of pioneer life in a pivotal period of the Church’s history. No, it is only in his poetry, written in elegant, flowing cursive, that deep feelings rose to the fore. And reading it, I gain a new perspective on a practice that has always appalled and offended my feminist sensibilities. He was simply following God’s will as he understood it, like so many men and women of that era, causing me to ponder the many other things done over centuries in the name of God’s will.

My great-grandfather served for six months in the penitentiary. It speaks to his trustworthiness that he was periodically permitted to leave the grounds to do errands for the warden. Samuel, who prided himself on his grooming, was also spared the indignity of having his hair and flowing white beard shaved off, perhaps because of the dignified way he conducted himself. When his time was up, the warden asked him which of his wives he was going home to.

“Warden Hailey,” Samuel replied, “I’ll stay as long as you say, but when I leave, I’m going home to all of them.” He made it plain. He loved them all.

If his wives kept journals, I don’t know about them. Women’s voices lost yet again. But from stanzas in an undated poem he wrote about Arabella, I can surmise that whatever her misgivings about sharing a husband, she was secure in his love and in their life together:

Down in my heart’s deep well
Love has treasured thoughts of thee
And thy spirit like a spell
Ever clings in faith to me
Mid clouds and sunshine ever
I will be to thee the same
And time and distance
Never shall efface thy cherished name.

I will ever cling to thee
Our plighted love grows stronger
For more beautiful to me
Art thou as time grows longer
Four and thirty years have past [sic]
Since thou gave thy heart to me
And I love thee more today
Then when making love to thee.

Mid toil and self denial
We have trod life’s rugged road
Together sharing trial
Helping bear each other’s load
Older now thy face has grown
Bearing marks of toil and care
And the hand of time has sown
Silver threads among thy hair.

In sun or cloudy weather
Thy love has never altered
We climb life’s rugged hills together
Thy heart has never faltered
Fervently I grasp thy hand
Fervently breathe a prayer
Father lead us to that land
Where eternal joys we’ll share.

It’s been over one hundred years since Samuel entered that land of promise, but though I only met him through his journals and poems, he is as much a part of me as if he lived next door. In a sense, he does. Stories, crafted from the records we leave behind, do that.

His daughter, my grandmother, Vivian Smart Parkinson Taylor, also kept journals recounting her life as a wife to two men (though not at the same time), as a thrifty homemaker who never bought what she could make (including laundry soap), as a determined matchmaker for grandchildren at BYU, and as the successful owner of a piano business that she ran from her home in Provo well into her eighties when she wasn’t ice skating on Utah Lake. Contemplating a second marriage myself after the death of my husband, I relished the entries detailing her courtship as a seventy-three-year-old widow. “I constantly think of Wayne,” she wrote. “He is so fine and understanding and loves me so. It was hard for him to leave last night but he never gets fresh.”

Having navigated the complexities of love for two men—seemingly with less confusion than I—she gave me reassurance that loving someone new did not diminish the love I would always feel for my first sweetheart.

Grandma was a force larger than life. Impatient after a seven-year courtship, she was thrilled when Grandpa (her first husband) finally put a ring on her finger. Did she give him an ultimatum? We’ll never know for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise anyone who knew her.

Some years after their marriage, they built a summer cabin at Wildwood in Provo Canyon. At first, it was nothing more than a wood floor with a tent erected on it. As they saved more money, they added on. It was Grandma, not Grandpa, who built the linoleum-covered table for the kitchen, generous enough to accommodate her growing posterity. Broom in hand, she was also the one who dispatched the occasional rat.

But what I most remember are her pies and bread and rolls. As far as I know, she never once bought a loaf of bread, and she loved sharing the products of her oven. I smile at this 1970 entry from when she was seventy-eight and I was living in Provo while attending BYU:

I mixed and baked 6 loaves of bread and took one to Cherie. Went to the ward dinner. It was lovely. Served turkey slices with a sauce on it. Wayne and I were in a dance and song part and sang old-fashioned songs. I wore my grey lace dress that was 5 inches from the floor. Wayne wore a yellow shirt and a black bow tie.

Unlike Grandma’s, my relationship with yeast and pie dough is tenuous at best, though under her instruction I learned to can and did so for many years, until I decided that a larder full of home-canned fruits and vegetables and jams and jellies was not a requisite for salvation in the highest degree of glory. (My mother, having been raised in the East, felt no such compunction.)

After Grandma married Wayne, a BYU professor emeritus and president of one of its college stakes, her journals recount an endless flurry of basketball games, concerts, plays, and firesides, not to mention frequent dinners with friends and family, many of which she happily hosted. As she noted on a scrap of paper stuck into one of the journals:

Our life together is no picknick [sic] believe me. Its [sic] getting up at 6 to work in the garden or getting Wayne off at other mornings to the temple.

Its bottling fruit together after midnight. Its washing up the dishes as a team after a party. Its having folks in to breakfast.

Its taking our harvest of raspberries, apples and veg to our friends and family to share. Its getting together with his kids and my kids.

Its keeping track of our grandchildren and their romances and unromances. Its sending a letter to all the baby great grandchildren and trying to remember their new names. And believe me that isn’t easy.

Its rushing here and rushing there to keep apts, weddings, birthdays, graduations, ball games etc. But in spite of all this and more although our life is no picknick I must admit It’s a ball and we love it and we are having the time of our Lifes [sic].

I read these entries with a mix of envy and admiration—admiration for her energy and envy that her life was so full. Mine, by comparison, is rather quiet. But even though she lived two thousand miles away for most of my life, I know her in ways I never knew the grandma who lived close by, though I dearly love them both. Through Grandma Vivian’s journals, she opened windows into her life that I am ever grateful for.

Her son, my dad, Lester Parkinson Taylor, likewise kept a daily journal recounting successes as well as challenges in building a career as a salesman, a land developer, and a home builder who married the girl of his dreams, never mind the engagement ring on her finger from another boyfriend.

The winter I turned twenty-one, I left for a semester abroad in France. In noting the event, Dad wrote:

Priesthood & S/S this morning. Took Cherie to charter flight plane to return to school this afternoon. She is so lovely! Bright, talented, attractive, disciplined and solidly committed to the gospel. I tell Shirley over and over how incredibly blessed we are to have her and Lisa as children. She is going through such mental and emotional turmoil trying to make a decision on Carl Pedersen. She is so deserving of the Lord’s help in this matter and I’m confident she’ll receive it.

As the end of my semester abroad approached, Carl drove from BYU to our home in Bethesda, Maryland, to meet my parents and wait for my arrival. Dad’s entry was brief:

Carl came from Utah today. He is as Cherie describes him—quiet, good humored, not polished, well set up. A gentle man.

But it was clear my cowboy from Canada, who had taken a job driving Greyhound buses out of Philadelphia that summer, wasn’t quite who they had in mind for their daughter, as Dad’s journal reflected once I was home:

Carl came down from Philadelphia to see Cherie. Shirley and I are worried. Is he the right boy for her? We don’t know. I don’t know if we should urge her to go slow. We just don’t know.

I didn’t read these entries until after Dad’s death and after the death of Carl, to whom I’d been happily married for almost forty-five years. To their credit, Dad and my mother supported my decision and came to love Carl as much as I did. But I did not know, until reading Dad’s journal, how much he trusted my judgment.

As I wrestled over a future with Carl, Dad and three partners signed a contract for the most significant purchase of his life—a 1,100-acre estate with a stately Georgian mansion formerly owned by a nephew of George Washington. A hunt and country club with a swimming pool, horse barns, a golf course, and private homes set in the rolling hills of West Virginia—that was the vision, the culminating dream of his professional life. For two years, my dad lovingly restored the mansion, surveyed the land, tested the ground, developed marketing plans, held open houses, and made the rounds of banks and investors all over the country. It was more than a business proposition. It was a love affair with the land and the history.

But the money wasn’t there. The nation was about to head into a recession with slow economic growth and high interest rates. For cautious investors, the project carried too much risk. Nor had he been able to generate sufficient sales of home lots to pay the project’s mounting bills. I felt his despair as the deadline approached to repay the loan:

Time is running out and the deals we have been working on are falling by the wayside, one by one. I cannot bear the thought of losing it.

The grief he and my mother felt over that failed dream was painful to read, even fifty years later. Always the optimist, he admitted to not being his normal self. Yet even at this low point, he was still able to find perspective:

But then, what are my complaints? Business problems? They are nothing compared to the good things in my life I enjoy.

I think of those words when I feel discouraged. Now, more than thirty years gone from my life, he remains a steady guide through my own hurts and disappointments.

And what of my own journals stacked in a plastic bin in my closet? For I am a fourth-generation journal keeper, the urge to record my life as much a part of what I have inherited as the shape of my nose and the color of my eyes. Unlike the entries of my predecessors, mine are not daily ones. Nor are they short. My posterity, should they choose to read them, would have much to wade through, stretching as they do over fifty years. They range from hardbound eight-by-ten-inch journals embossed in gold leaf (their first blank pages always intimidating, as if awaiting something momentous) to small spiral notebooks, easily tucked into a carry-on bag to record a travel adventure.

I have often joked that, without my journals, I would have forgotten half my life. Perusing them now, I realize that’s not far from the truth. Whether or not they are of value to my descendants, they most certainly are to me.

I was twenty-nine years old, mother to four children, when I penned my first entry in 1977:

I have thought for some time now about the need for keeping a journal—partly because church leaders are stressing it, but also for my own benefit—as a means of keeping lucid the thoughts and feelings and events that shape my life. Two other events this past month have convinced me of the need for journals.

The first one was Grandma Bernie’s death. How we loved her and how we will miss her! But already, part of who she was is forgotten. Stories of her early life in particular are scanty, and yet her early years shaped the later ones. She had already lived more than half her life when I was born. Surely, it is just as important to know one’s progenitors in their youth as in their old age.

Another event convinced me of the necessity of keeping a journal. In May, after three years of intense research and laborious writing, my father published a book about the life of his grandfather. Much of his information about the time in which he lived and the kind of man he was came from his journals. As a result, I feel I know my great-grandfather as well or better than most of my living relatives.

It is important, I think, for one’s children and grandchildren to have a feeling for who one is outside of her role as a mother or grandmother or whatever the case may be. It is important for them to know of earlier times on a personal basis, to know the hopes and fears and challenges of those who have gone before, for often lessons can be taught and encouragement gained as they experience similar hopes and fears and challenges. And then, too, a journal answers a selfish need as well—that we might not be forgotten, that we might remain bright in some dear one’s memory—is any need more basic than that?

With most of my life behind me, I smile now at those earnest words. The young mother who penned them had no way of knowing what lay ahead, of course, or the challenges that would one day bring her to her knees in despair. Where did she fit in a patriarchal church? Where did a Heavenly Mother fit? Where did her gay son fit? No, what I read in the pages of my journals, in addition to the normal challenges of life, are struggles not mentioned in the journals of the family members who preceded me. Though my father was more nuanced in his faith than his mother and grandfather, his grasp of the iron rod more flexible, he would never have considered leaving the church that had nurtured him.

That has not been my experience, nor that of my children and grandchildren, as we have wrestled not only with troubling policies and practices in our era but the very nature and reality of God. Reflecting on a vacation to Utah two years ago, I wrote:

The only sad note was a text from ____ letting us know he had asked for his name to be removed from the membership rolls of the Church. He’d given no indication that this was on his mind. It was especially painful, given the years we have tried to answer his questions and spiritually mentor him. So many young people are leaving now for a host of reasons that I understand, but it doesn’t make it any easier, especially if they have also lost their faith in God. We as a Church and as a people are not doing a good job addressing the concerns that have led to the exodus and nor, apparently, have Robert and I.

Writing of my own spiritual struggles, as well as what keeps me on the path carved out so many years ago, may be one of the best gifts I can leave—as well as my hard-won understanding that every journey is different and legitimate and that God’s love, like my own, is unfailing, whatever our choices. My journals are a testament to an evolution to spiritual adulthood that looks different from what I had imagined when I was young. But its roots are deep, nourished by the fathers and mothers who preceded me. Who knows what branches it may yet reach?

Though I encouraged my children to keep journals, only one that I know of felt the need to continue, though perhaps postings on social media now take their place. I love reading the accounts of the children and grandchildren who choose to share but wonder about the preservation of those accounts, so quickly gone. What will be left for their posterity?

When my children were young, I made a construction paper chain one Christmas, each red and green link bearing the name of a member of our family. Children, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—they were all there, a visible reminder stretching across the hall, that we were linked, connected, joined to something that went beyond ourselves. So it is with family journals, tethering as they do one generation to another. They may not be what the prophet Malachi had in mind when he wrote of turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and the children to the fathers, but they have the power to bind and seal as surely as any ordinance.

I have been fortunate. Not everyone has this legacy. But it only takes one person to begin.