A Painful Visit to the Past

“Red Water,” Judith Freeman’s latest novel, is nothing less than the story of a haunting--families, meadows, an entire religious community haunted by a massacre. Questions about faith, fundamentalism, passion, perseverance, humility and justice sneak up out of the southwestern landscape and from the smallest movements of the characters.

In 1857, a wagon train of migrants from Arkansas crossed Utah. Gentiles, as they were called by the Mormons whose territory they were crossing. They were carrying more than 1,000 head of cattle to market in Northern California, as well as horses, clothes, gold, jewelry and many supplies. The Mormons were not a happy people at the time, almost at war with the government: Joseph Smith, the prophet, or head, of the Mormon Church, had been murdered in 1844 after announcing his candidacy for president, and an apostle of the church, Parley P. Pratt, had been murdered in Arkansas. At the same time, the Mormon community had been steadily expanding its territory from Missouri into Idaho and Utah.

John D. Lee, a prominent and wealthy Mormon, had been charged by the church to create a settlement in southern Utah and to develop a relationship with the Indians there. Because of his influence with the local tribes, he was able to order the Indians to attack the wagon train first. The Gentiles retreated. A few days later, Lee rode into their camp waving a white flag. He ordered the women and children to leave the wagons first, and then the men. He assured them that the men would be escorted to safety by a Mormon man. Instead, they were shot or clubbed to death. More than 120 people, a majority of them women and children, died. The murders were blamed on the Indians, and the massacre was later dismissed as the work of a renegade group of Mormons. John Lee was executed in 1877 for his role, but the church never took responsibility. While the story is barely acknowledged in Mormon history, it remains a source of shame and division within the church that persists to this day, especially for the descendants of the participants.

She Married at 17,

Divorced at 21

Freeman was born in 1946 in Ogden, Utah, and was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon Church is officially known. She married at 17, had a son at 19, and divorced at 21. As a single mother, educating herself by reading Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf, among others, she drifted from the church, from which she remains estranged. Still, most of her writing is about the Mormons. “I never kid myself about the fact that my background always informs the way I look at the world,” she wrote in a recent essay, “and how I write about it.”

“Red Water” follows her three previous novels, “The Chinchilla Farm” (1989), “Set For Life” (1991), “A Desert of Pure Feeling” (1996), as well as “Family Attractions,” a collection of short stories (1988). But “Red Water” differs greatly from Freeman’s other work in that it is set in the past and based on historical events. The voices she uses--three of Lee’s 19 wives, Emma, Anna and Rachel--are of real women. Freeman relies on their diaries, as well as John Lee’s, on research and her own imagination.

Freeman, whose novel will be released this month, looks a lot like the musician Laurie Anderson; she has that same impish smile, short hair, round face and eyes. She has a deep, sudden laugh but still seems serious. Thoughts are weighed carefully, but she appears comfortable not knowing all the answers. Like any good writer with a national reputation, she does not want to be pigeonholed as Mormon or western but wonders why so many people come to the West, write books as if they understand the region and then get national acclaim. Freeman was handed the truth as a child, tore it up as a young adult and is making her own version right now.

“Red Water” challenged whatever faith she had left in her religious upbringing; yet she says she got a few answers and a lot of peace from the writing of it. This is evident in her demeanor and her calm, quiet voice as, dressed all in black, she sits down for a Japanese meal in downtown Los Angeles. She talks in a voice that is full of emotion and yet measured, speaking with a combination of reverence, relief and amazement.

“Red Water” did not come easily. In 1996, Freeman came across a book by Juanita Brooks, a Mormon and a self-taught historian, called “The Mountain Meadow Massacre,” written in the 1950s. “I knew, growing up, that the Mormons had done something terrible, unspeakable, involving such treachery that it could not be talked about. I knew vaguely that it was blamed on the Indians,” Freeman says.

“Someone gave me a diary of one of John Lee’s wives, Anna Lee, called ‘My Life With the Saintly Devil,’ an account she had clearly written to make money. Juanita Brooks had also written a short monograph about Emma, whose journals, since she came from England in 1855 when she was 19, cover the entire colonization. Rachel, another of Lee’s wives, also left a journal. In many ways she was the hardest voice to capture because she was so devout. Her diary consists of bland entries, for example, minutes taken of meetings at Fort Harmony where Lee and his wives lived, but things leak through--the number of Indian children brought into the Fort, how many of them died, how much ammunition they kept and how many sides of beef. I think, using these diaries, that I was able to get pretty close to what their lives were actually like in that brutal environment. It was just a question of how to tell the larger story.”

Freeman divided the book into four sections: The Execution (inspired in part by William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”), Emma, Anna and Rachel. In this way, we see many sides of John Lee. Emma has the greatest physical passion for Lee. She has a reputation, in the novel and real life, for having the quickest temper, for putting up her fists at the slightest provocation. Anna, who left Lee before he was killed, had her heart set on a life of many adventures and did not relish the idea of being saddled with babies before she was 20. Rachel, who was with Lee during the massacre, was one of three sisters whom Lee married. He also married their mother. This framework demanded that the characters speak for themselves.

“You have to remember,” Freeman says, how persecuted the Mormons were in the 19th century. The governor of Illinois had issued an extermination order against them, and in the 1830s and ‘40s they were [often] tarred and feathered, their prophet was murdered, and they were forced into the wilderness. They hoped to build their own kingdom in Salt Lake City.” They were fearful and angry, she said, and in killing the Arkansan travelers, they were practicing a doctrine called blood atonement, which said it is better to relieve a man of life and speed his way to heaven. “It was religious fervor that brought 16-year-old boys to kill women and children.”

Something happened to Freeman while writing “Red Water.” She found a new sympathy for these individuals, particularly the women. She found in herself a kind of forgiveness and, more important, an understanding of their vulnerability.

Struggling With

Utah History in Italy

While she was working on the novel, Freeman’s husband, photographer Anthony Hernandez, was given a Prix de Rome to study in Italy for a year. The couple lived in a 16th century villa. From this perch, Freeman struggled to remember Utah. “It made some sense, the context of Christianity, a history of war and terror in the name of religion. It seemed that history played itself out again and again with different characters but the same fervor.” The pasta was excellent, but the section she wrote that year never saw the light of day.

For another section, Freeman spent a winter and spring alone in Idaho, where the couple, who live most of the year in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, keep a home and Judith keeps her horse. “I took myself up on some kind of edge,” she says, “until I felt I was teetering. It was just me, my dog, Scout, my yellow horse and the pristine landscape.” That section was also a contemporary section, a kind of “cry from the heart,” about our world on a crazy edge. “Why isn’t anyone screaming?” she wondered, as she wrote about violence in Rwanda and the unequal distribution of wealth in the world. The book was then called “Red Water, Red Bones.” But the section didn’t fit. “I was really crying out, ‘What is this book about?’” It wasn’t until she abandoned the section that she was able to complete the book, six months later. It was also the first novel she wrote longhand, which she says facilitated a more direct flow of thoughts onto paper.

One of eight children, Freeman says she is grateful that her shoe salesman father, the only Democrat in town, was one of the more liberal Mormons in their community. Her great-grandfather William Flake was a friend of Brigham Young and was jailed in Yuma, Ariz., for refusing to give up one of his wives when polygamy was outlawed in the 1890s. A photo of him in stripes was “proudly displayed” in the house in which Freeman grew up.

Much of “Red Water” is a study of “Living the Principle,” as the Mormons called it. It is a study of jealousy and how they overcame or didn’t overcome it, a study of communal living. “To all those who would denounce our Holy Principle,” Emma writes at one point, “I would say this: A child thrives under the care of multiple mothers. And a mother thrives, too, when aided by her sisters.”

Freeman’s first marriage, at 17, was to man six years older. They were married in a Mormon temple. “It was all so normal,” she says. “My two best friends married at 15 and 16. When I got married, I thought it would be some kind of out, like, this is how you have adventures. But within a month I was pregnant. My mother said to me, ‘There’s not a thing you can do about it.’” She moved to Minnesota, where her then-husband was a counselor on the campus of Macalester College. It was there that she discovered books. She joined a writing class, wrote a short story and won a prize.

For the next 20 years, she wrote about her own “meager” experience, “exotic yet quintessentially American and ordinary.” In several novels, Freeman reveals secret Mormon rituals, in “Red Water,” a marriage ceremony is described in detail. Freeman shudders, remembering that she once made the sign of a slash across her throat swearing she would never reveal church secrets, and a sign of disembowelment across her own stomach if she should betray it. For years after leaving the church she had stomachaches, until an article in the New York Times revealed the church had changed the ritual, deleting the throat slashing and disemboweling. Her stomachaches went away.

“Growing up Mormon involved an intense brainwashing,” Freeman says. “The religion encompassed every single aspect of life; it engulfed life, dominated politics and our education. I struggled for a long time to come to terms with my background. Writing this book gave me an enormous affection for the past, for the absolute uniqueness of that culture and its moral complexity, their sly humor, and for nature and the American ranch culture. There are no cozy judgments to be made.”