As a 15-year-old virginal bride, Pamela Jones found her new husband’s evasiveness concerning. When she mustered the courage to ask him, just seven days into their union, what was wrong, his response floored her.
“I’m ready to pursue another wife,” he told her.
Jones, now 60, recounts her early life in the fundamentalist Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times in her unnerving new memoir, “The Dirt Beneath Our Door: My Journey to Freedom After Escaping a Polygamous Mormon Cult” (Matt Holt Books), with writer Elizabeth Riley.
“It had been drilled into me that if I ever tried to leave, God would punish me by taking my life and my children’s, and I feared I was about to die,” she writes.
The Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times was founded in upstate New York in the 1820s with plural marriage as a cornerstone. Though the practice was banned in 1904, it continued to be central to the sect. Members fled to Los Molinos, Mexico, where they lived off the grid in mortal fear that outsiders would discover their illegal, polygamous lifestyle.
Jones was born into the cult. Her father, Thomas Ossman Jones, was a drunk with 11 wives and 57 biological children, she writes. He spent his life spreading the cult’s gospel throughout Mexico, while on the run from Ervil LeBaron. The violent son of the Church’s founder, Alma Dayer LeBaron Sr., Ervil was known for murdering rivals and defectors.
Her mother, Pamela Hanson, was a waitress at a Bob’s Big Boy chain restaurant in El Paso, Texas, before moving to Mexico. She had 13 children. Jones was her second.
It was a life of abject poverty and little education. Dinner was usually grocery-store garbage infested with maggots and fished out of a dumpster.
At 15, she was forced into marriage with a relative of the cult’s founder.
He forbade her contact with her own family and moved her into a dirt floor sheep pen infested with cockroaches. There was no running water, no electricity, little food or limited contact with her family. He kept her perpetually pregnant: She gave birth to nine children and had eight miscarriages.
“I married [him] to escape from my abusive father, but now, I was even sadder and lonelier than before,” Jones writes. What was to be a godly life was a “big lie full of curses and deception.” When her beloved half-sister, Nancy, died in a car accident, her husband told her not to grieve for her because she was “a Gentile and God has no place in his kingdom for Gentiles.”
Jones eventually realized she had been controlled, manipulated, and ignored by a “lustful, carnal man,” and “as a plural wife, I’d been a second-class citizen for too long.”
When her husband was preparing to marry his third wife, Jones thought of escaping the cult for the first time, but if caught, she feared for her life.
“I was terrified,” she writes. “Our roots in the cult ran so deep, it would be decades before I could cut those ties, escape with my children, and finally break free from this violent, misogynistic, apocalyptic cult that denied women a voice while indoctrinating us with the belief that our lives had no value beyond serving a husband and continually giving birth,” she writes.
In 2000, at age 34, Pamela Jones finally made her move to escape.
She collected and faxed documents that established the American citizenship of her children to the US consulate in Mexico, stole a check and two credit cards she found in her husband’s office and a five-dollar bill she discovered in his laundry. She prepped her eight youngest children on how they would leave early one morning in a van and a truck and head for the US border at El Paso. Her plan succeeded.
She eventually settled in Minneapolis, happily remarried and never looked back at her hellish cult years. She started a successful house-cleaning service — Exclusive Services by My Girls — that now employs more than 40 people and has made her a multi-millionaire.
Jones writes,”The meek, frightened little girl who was raised in the cult to be shy, silent, and obedient to men learn[ed] not just how to use her voice, but how to roar when she needed to.”
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