Red Water By Judith Freeman Pantheon Books, January 2002. Hardcover. ISBN: 0-375-42092-4 Suggested retail price: $24.00 (US)
Reviewed by: Terry L Jeffress

In Red Water Judith Freeman examines how the Mountain Meadows Massacre changed the lives of John D. Lee and his polygamous family. In the first section of Red Water, Freeman uses an omniscient narrator to describe Lee's execution and two of his boys carting his body home to burial in Panguitch, Utah. This opening section does little to engender interest in the story and does little but set up an ominous tone for the rest of the book told from the perspective of three of Lee's wives.

The second and largest section comes from Emma Lee, John's eighteenth wife. This first person narrative switches between present and past tenses: present tense for an older Emma who waits for news about Lee's execution; past tense for Emma's memories of her life with Lee. Emma's narrative does not follow along chronologically, but you eventually get a full picture of Lee, how Emma came to marry him, and her life as a polygamous wife. Emma joined the Mormon church in England and got a loan from the Perpetual Emigration Fund to travel to Salt Lake City. Emma takes a job as a servant to repay her loan, and she meets Lee when he stays with her employer. Emma marries Lee (several months after the massacre occurs), and he takes her to his home in Harmony, Utah. Along the trip, Lee and Emma have sex every night, and Emma marvels at the sexual ecstasy that Lee gives her, but once they arrive in Harmony, Emma must share her husband with the other wives. None of Lee's previous wives become her friend, and she feels antagonistic toward a few of the wives.

Lee sets Emma up in a small house of her own, and she quickly demonstrates her value to the family through hard work in the fields, animal husbandry, and cooking. Emma prepares all the meals for special occasions, such as a visit from Brigham Young. A few years later, Lee marries Ann, a thirteen-year-old girl, and moves her in with Emma. Emma and Ann become friends and during more prosperous times they house the farmhands that help work Lee's fields.

Emma slowly begins to learn about the massacre. Like other new immigrants and even us today, she never seems to get a clear picture of the events and exactly who perpetrated them. She hears many rumors about Lee, but she rejects most of the rumors because they do not seem to fit her husband as she knows him. Eventually, Brigham Young asks Lee to establish a ferry across the Colorado River. The rumors suggest that Brigham wants to not only protect Lee, but to get Lee out of the public eye. Only Emma and her children accompany Lee to Lonely Dell, and from there she awaits the news of Lee's later execution.

The third section switches to an omniscient narrator and tells the story of Ann as she chases some horse thieves. When Lee moved to Lonely Dell, Ann remained behind to have a baby. She promised to join Lee and Emma after the baby arrived, but instead she left the baby with her brother and disappeared. Freeman then fabricates a possible history for Ann. After working as a prostitute in several mining and railroad camps, she establishes a horse ranch. When a man and his son steal her prize mare, Ann follows them. The thieves make their way to southern Utah. Along the way, Ann hears of Lee's death and she often thinks of her life with him.

Ann paints a much harsher picture of Lee. In contrast to Emma who felt an attraction toward Lee, Ann feels that Lee pursued her at thirteen-years-old and blackmailed her parents into letting Lee marry Ann. She also describes a Lee that believes in blood-sacrifice -- that by killing a Mormon persecutor, the spilt blood helps assuage God's anger against the sinner.

The fourth and final section reproduces (fictional) excerpts from Rachel's diary. Rachel, Lee's second wife, set up a home in the desert of northern Arizona. Rachel considers herself the most loyal of all Lee's wives. After Lee's arrest, Rachel joined Lee in prison and remained with prison until his second trial. Rachel move to Arizona to escape persecution from those who hated her husband, but as more Mormon move into the area, she again comes under condemnation for her association with Lee. When the irrigation system fails and her crops begin to wither, none of the community come to her aid. Rachel represents the Mormon idea of enduring to the end. She does not get much pleasure from life, but she hopes that her suffering here on Earth will reserve a place for her in heaven.

Of the three wives Freeman selected as main characters, Ann has the happiest life after Lee dies. The text makes Ann happy because her free spirit could not remain tied down to a religion or a single man. She needed more open space and freedom of expression to experience joy. But as the only woman to leave the Mormon church, Freeman sets up the implication that women cannot achieve ultimate happiness in a polygamous relationship.

Interestingly, Freeman makes all her characters unreliable. Each of the wives think of themselves as having remained faithful to Lee and remember the others having affairs. I think Freeman wants to make each viewpoint character unreliable to point to the uncertain nature of her fictionalization.

Freeman made some stylistic choices that distanced me from her characters. First, she never uses quotation marks for her character's spoken dialogue. She reserves quotation marks for the few documented historical facts, such as an excerpt from Lee's journal, for which she gives no source citations. Without quotation marks, the pages look like an intimidating history text and not an historical novel. The changes in point of view also bothered me. I don't mind switching from character to character, but switching from omniscient, to first person, to omniscient, to first person, made the sections feel like they belonged to different books rather than to a single book with a unified purpose.

With her stylistic choices, I got the feeling that Freeman wanted to make some grand literary statement with Red Water, but I never got a real sense of what she wanted me to take away from her book. I got a good picture of the difficulties of life in the early southern Utah. And for anyone involved with the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and especially John D. Lee, life got a whole lot worse. Life seemed so hard, I kept wondering why we never heard about anyone committing suicide. Or, perhaps Freeman wanted us to see that any single characterization of Lee (or any of his wives) doesn't paint an accurate picture. I don't think she wanted to make a grand statement about Mormonism, polygamy, or even the massacre.

So in the end, Red Water presents an interesting, well written slice of early rural Utah life that did nothing special for me.

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Terry L Jeffress
South Jordan, UT