Favorite Wife: Escape from Polygamy

Favorite Wife, by Susan Ray Schmidt

Mormons fascinate me. Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Polygamy, Breakaway Sects -- I'm a sucker for it. What's up with all the secrecy? What's going on behind closed doors? I just want to know! Plus, I'm not the most religious of people, so I am interested in how people can believe that God wants them to do all these things that I consider just plain unusual. I saw Favorite Wife at Borders. It has a picture on the front of a man and seven women, and the blurb on the back mentioned something about "life inside one of North America's most notorious polygamous cults." Yep, I needed to read it.

It was pretty fascinating. At several points, I had to say, "What? Really? You honestly believed that to be true?" This book is an autobiography that tells the story of Susan's life in Colonia LeBaron and Las Molinas, both in Mexico. They are settlements of the "Church of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Times." Growing up, I thought ELCA was a lot to say when talking about what kind of Lutheran church I went to! This church was run by the LeBaron brothers (namely Joel, Verlan, and Ervil). Joel is the Prophet on earth, and Verlan and Ervil are church leaders. They believed that it was a man's duty to have several wives and to be their "spiritual head." Pretty much, if you were a woman, you weren't getting into heaven unless you were the plural wife of some man -- preferably some man about 20 years your senior. You and your children became the jewels in his heavenly crown, and only by being a plural wife was your salvation ensured.

Susan was 15 when she married Verlan and became his sixth wife. Verlan was in his 40s. And it was her choice to marry him! She wanted to! Over the next few years, Susan has five children and Verlan marries four more women. They live near one another in Las Molinas, and briefly in Nicaragua. Eventually, issues between the brothers arise, and Ervil's group break away and begin a blood feud with the original church.

I enjoyed reading this book, although there are an awful lot of names to remember (I guess that's to be expected when it's a book involving polygamy...). Reading about this group from one of its former members, and from someone who truly believed that this was how God wanted them to live was extremely interesting. It was almost unbelievable at times, and at other times I got so mad at Susan, Verlan, and the others that I had to take a break from reading.

Two things in particular I liked about this book. 1) It has a few pages of pictures! I love it when true stories include pictures of the real people. 2) It has an epilogue that tells what happens to the other people in the book after the author's story is done. This one also contains a list of some other books about the LeBarons that I will have to look for this summer.

© 2006, First Lyons Press
ISBN 978-1-59921-494-8