A Lost Boy comes home and finds sadness:
 A son of Bountiful speaks out about the loneliness of sharing his dad with 26 siblings
 
By Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun
 
CRESTON - Whenever he can, Jerry Blackmore hugs his son and daughter and tells them he loves them.

Every day he spends as much time with them as he can because he remembers growing up in a polygamous family in Bountiful and sharing a father with 26 others.

"I hated it that I didn't have a dad to do things with," says 29-year-old Blackmore, who left Bountiful when he was only 13.

"My whole life I remember seeing other kids with their parents doing things and hating it that I didn't have that. I hate it still and I don't know who to hate."

Growing up, he hardly ever saw his father, Charles Quinton. His parents never lived in the same home and he has his mother's last name. But Blackmore wasn't the only one who didn't really know his dad. Few kids in Bountiful did. How could they when some men had 40 and 50 children?

Blackmore certainly does not hate his mother, who was a plural wife. Blackmore says she single-handedly raised her five children, filling the role not only of mother, but breadwinner.

It's only because of his mother that Blackmore was in Creston this week with his two children and his wife. It is sheer coincidence that his first visit back in years was the same week as the meeting that the Bountiful Women's Society organized to dispel what they say are the myths about their polygamous lifestyle.

Blackmore caught the last part of the meeting and stood outside at the end, talking to his relatives and friends.

He heard nothing that convinced him that having more than one wife is good for anyone, particularly children. He rejected polygamy and the fundamentalist Mormon beliefs when he left Bountiful 16 years ago. Today he belongs to the mainstream Mormon church -- the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- that rejected polygamy in 1890.

Since he's been back, Blackmore hasn't heard anything to change his fervent wish for his own children that they go to school, have many, many choices of careers; that they travel and experience the world. What he's heard has only reinforced his even stronger hope that his children not marry before they are at least 20 years old.

Blackmore said what he heard has only convinced him that what is being practised in Bountiful is not even about religion. Instead, Jerry Blackmore says, it seems that it's all about one man having power -- whether it's Winston Blackmore over his faction or Warren Jeffs, the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who controls the other half of Bountiful.

"Every other religion I've gone to, they've invited new members in. This, if you're born into it, you stay and nobody outside ever comes in," says Jerry Blackmore. "There are a lot of changes that have happened out there [in Bountiful], but nothing to do with religion."

When the fundamentalist Mormons have church services, he says, they don't even seem to talk about God any more or share the sacrament (communion) as other Christians do. Now it's all about a single prophet who tells them what to do.

Blackmore is struck by the sadness that pervades Bountiful because of the split between the Blackmore and Jeffs factions where daughters and mothers in opposite factions can no longer speak; where grandmothers can no longer see their grandchildren.

It's hit his family hard. Even though he and his two brothers and his mother have all left, his two sisters remain. One is married to Jim Oler, who was appointed bishop by Jeffs after Winston Blackmore was excommunicated.

The Jeffs faction didn't attend the polygamy summit. Its members have been told to have no contact with the rest of the Bountiful community and their contact to the larger community is more limited than it has been for years.

Blackmore talked by phone to both of his sisters. But he didn't try to see them. He didn't want to cause them any problems.

Both seem happy and he didn't encourage them to leave their homes or husbands. Nor does he wish that for them since their faith is strong and they believe what they are doing is right.

One of the first things Blackmore did when he got to his mother's house was to watch the tapes she'd made when he was a kid.

"I had some great memories of that place," he says. Lots of rambling and rough-housing and "not much education or schooling." He was a good kid "in my own way."

It was tougher for his sisters and the other girls. All he remembers them ever talking about was being wives and mothers.

In retrospect, it was only his stunning naivete that Blackmore credits with his decision to leave after he'd finished Grade 7. Unlike many of the other young men who have left and wash up at his mother's place on weekends -- his mother's house is a kind of half-way house for the so-called Lost Boys -- Blackmore didn't turn to drugs, alcohol or sleeping around.

For the first six months, he was in Calgary with his aunt, Debbie Palmer, an outspoken critic of Bountiful who recently co-wrote a book about the community called Keep Sweet.

But after about six months in the large public school in the large, strange city, he needed something more familiar. He came to Creston and to his mother who had also left Bountiful by then. But even the Creston high school was intimidating to Blackmore after the intimacy of the Bountiful elementary-secondary school where he was related to almost all of his classmates.

But he graduated and started working for the large company that he still works for in Kelowna.

And although he's very clear about his hopes and dreams for his own children, Blackmore is less so about Bountiful.

There might be a role for the government to play, he says. "More than one wife is just ridiculous."

But beyond that?

"I don't know. The community just seems too protected, too closed off. There is too much quietness there."

dbramham@png.canwest.com
 
Vancouver Sun
Originally published Saturday, April 23, 2005
 
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