That’s because his father (born in 1906, murdered in 1977), was part of a fundamentalist Mormon group. “The year I was three, Daddy violated parole by moving our families to Colonia LeBaron, a ranch set in northern Mexico’s Chihuahua desert, to start a colony for Saints who were violating the laws of the land by living God’s holiest law of Celestial Plural Marriage.”
“HIDEAWAYS: Within And Outside My Polygamist Family” ($20 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) contains nineteen “creative nonfiction” stories imagined from family recollections, journals, and research. So while individual characters are not strictly historical, the fact remains:
“Being the family’s eighth son and fourteenth child, I am one of forty-eight children born to Dr. Rulon Clark Allred and his seven wives. My mother, Mabel Finlayson Allred, was his fourth plural wife, and her identical twin, Melba, was also her sister-wife.”
Since the LDS Church had outlawed plural marriage in 1890 (and reinterpreted the 132nd Section of the Doctrine and Covenants), family members frequently hid, devised cover stories, and moved to places where they hoped to establish sanctuaries for persecuted Saints (Mexico; Elko, Nevada; Colorado), all to escape Church officials and the FBI vice squad.
Jerry’s coming into the world was a difficult birth indeed but Rulon’s ministrations (he delivered thousands of babies in his lifetime) saved both mother and child. Allred writes with great sympathy toward his father. “Daddy was convinced that his faith should be, and eventually would be, true for every person who ever lived, or else.”
Yet in his teen years Jerry departed from his father’s convictions. He was learning about evolution and could no longer believe as his father did that God had created everything “all at once” a few thousand years ago. With compassion and deeply felt emotion, Allred takes the reader into daily life and painful separations, an inseparable part of his own journey.
An interview with Allred, conducted by Nancy Wiegman for Nancy’s Bookshelf on mynspr.org, is available at tinyurl.com/2rnd4d79.
