Part IV of the Sunstone Classics Series

Linda Sillitoe was a reporter for the Deseret News, co-author of Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders, and author of many novels and poetry collections. This piece is excerpted from a Sunstone article published in 1990. It starts on page 12 of issue 80. 

[Beginning in 1979, Sillitoe spent a year covering Sonia Johnson and the LDS Church’s battle against the Equal Rights Amendment. When she met Johnson, she wrote:]

I learned that Sonia and I had much in common. We were both Gospel Doctrine teachers, though she also was ward organist and taught in Relief Society; we were both married; she had four children, I had three of similar ages; we both had temple recommends but she had a two-year supply of food in her basement. Sonia was nothing if not committed: A devout if questioning Mormon, a staunch Republican, and a new convert to the Equal Rights Amendment, which she had first heard about at an anti-ERA meeting in church.

[She covered Johnson’s story right up through her excommunication, which she flew to Virginia to attend. She wrote two stories on Johnson, one for Utah Holiday and one for Sunstone.]

While I wrote those two stories, our family blessing on the food extended to include the request, “Please help Mom to finish the article.” A cat moved in while I was preoccupied and ate half of one final draft. Our nine-year-old wrote to President Kimball informing him he would not get away with the excommunication. Our five-year-old took a copy of Utah Holiday to kindergarten show-and-tell in a grocery bag, but returned from Junior Sunday School saying, “Mom, you are going to get excommunicated.” Our two-year-old expressed her anxiety by sitting on my lap as I typed or telephoned, and by staying awake nights. My brother who works for the Church wrote a letter to Sunstone defending the Church’s stand—certainly his right. My husband fortunately was no longer employed by the Church History Department, but still found himself frequently defending my honor, then Sonia’s honor, then the Equal Rights Amendment—which he had supported for years.

Every relationship in my life had been wrenched. I had flashbacks of the candle-bearing priests, women clergy, legislators, government officials (including Congresswoman Pat Schroeder and Utah’s own Esther Peterson, then a member of President Jimmy Carter’s cabinet), Sonia’s children, and ordinary people who had gathered around an unlit, guarded stake center one frigid night in Virginia. Because I felt and understood the outrage of Sonia’s ward members, invaded by reporters and other gentiles. Because every time I walked into my chapel, I had flashbacks of Sonia Johnson at the organ the morning after her trial, pumping confident strains into a room ugly with tension. Because the gospel doctrine class I taught was boycotted, until the deserting members found that other gospel doctrine class so boring they were forced to return. Because the arthritis that had dogged me for a couple of years moved into my jaws on Sundays until, by afternoon, I literally couldn’t open my mouth. Even I understood that metaphor. Once everything calmed down, I stopped teaching. And attending.

My problem was I had gone to Virginia not as a witness for Sonia Johnson but as a witness for the community that wanted to know; I had seen, I had absorbed, and I couldn’t forget what no one any longer wanted to hear. I couldn’t adjust enough to make many other people or myself comfortable. For a long time, I felt the tension barometer rise every time I entered a room. Later, writing about Vietnam veterans, I realized what had happened. For many months, I was under so much pressure so publicly that I had done, to a lesser degree, what soldiers do in combat: I froze my emotions in order to think and act more effectively. Now I had a good case of post-traumatic stress syndrome. “How do you feel?” people asked all through that time. How did I feel? Did I feel? Something hurtful or offensive would happen to me and then my husband, John, would blow up. I wouldn’t feel a thing. Finally, one summer day I said to myself, Okay, it’s over. How do you feel? I didn’t feel. But gradually I began to feel, and then I felt like a nuclear bomb; one jostle and I would explode the world.

During the aftermath, I was excommunicated-by-rumor several times, and I began to dream of excommunication. One night I dreamed I was ascending through the floors of a large house in a throng of people, accompanied by my mother and sisters. The mood was sorrowful, even oppressed, and as we inched upward through the rooms, I realized that this sorrow had to do with my own fate, as it had with others’ earlier fates. When we reached the top floor, I divined I was going to be plummeted down a long plastic tube and I was not expected to survive—they were putting me down the tube, quite literally. In the dream, I protested this discovery to my patient-but-unmoved loved ones. It dawned on me that they were already looking beyond this unhappy moment to the feast after the funeral, the dawn after the dark; yes, it was too bad about Linda going down the tube, but it was a correct principle, after all, and life would go on. I found this fate unacceptable, and I escaped the only way I could—by waking up.

If the person I had been was dying, someone new was being born, and various friends helped with the birthing. During the first decades of my life, I had loved the Church and disliked God, who seemed to me an arbitrary and judgmental chessman. He was judgmental, but what I realized was that I had mistaken him for God. I remember one transcendent moment that came in the chaos of writing the excommunication stories. I was lying in bed in the dark, reliving the events in Virginia and in Salt Lake City. Suddenly I had another feeling of suspended time, an image of Sonia Johnson and her bishop, Jeff Willis, playing their roles in a drama that was at once archetypal and human. I saw myself, too, reflected in the window by my desk, typing there between the lamp and the darkness outside. In that moment, everything within me shone; I saw the play, the dance, we were all involved in, and I wasn’t sorry to have a part.

Around that time, I had a recurring dream. I was always in a house I had lived in as a child, but I was discovering rooms I had never known, sometimes whole wings. As I awoke, I would mentally reconstruct the house, establishing walls and dimensions. Then I went with my husband to the Mormon History Association meeting in Rexburg, Idaho, felt the tension barometer rise as usual when we walked in, had our familiar discussion over dinner about whether to leave Utah, the Church, or both, and then that night had the dream again. This time not only were there extra rooms but also racks of costumes and clothing that I examined with amazement and delight. As I woke, instead of reconstructing the literal walls, I asked myself, What does this mean? Why do I keep dreaming this? In a moment, a little answer teletyped itself like a fortune cookie message in my mind: “There’s more room in the house than you think.” More room in what house? The house I grew up in, the Church, the Mormon culture? How much room did I think there was? Absolutely none; I had acute cultural claustrophobia. But there were costumes in my dream. Did that mean there were other roles I could play? “There is more room in the house than you think,” the message plinked. I decided to stay.

[Soon afterward, Sillitoe was hired by the Deseret News and covered the Mark Hofmann bombing case. Afterward, she and Allen Roberts (a former Sunstone editor) wrote Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders. Ultimately, however, Sillitoe removed her name from Church rolls.]