EVERY SATURDAY, ELIZABETH and Marcus dropped off his maternal grandmother at the Ephesus Community Seventhday Adventist Church in San Jose.
One of the church deaconesses started coming by the house in the months before Sebhrenah was born. Sister Harris, a black woman in her seventies who wore white tennis shoes with her long black skirts and colored longsleeved blouses, would talk for hours with Marcus about God and the Bible while Elizabeth dozed on the couch. Sister Harris slowly started taking the kids to church, led them in Bible study, and finally managed to get Elizabeth to come to church, too. Marcus got into the act as well.
One Saturday after church, Marcus introduced his wife to a girl he’d met at choir rehearsal.
“This is Illabelle,” he said, explaining that she had just moved to San Jose from Tennessee.
Elizabeth smiled at Illabelle, a beautiful blonde with blue eyes and the sweetest southern accent, who stuck out at the predominantly black church. Not only were the two of them the same age—nearly nineteen—but Illabelle was pregnant, too.
After they dropped Illabelle at her apartment, Marcus explained that she’d left home after becoming pregnant by a black college student of whom her racist parents had not approved.
“She needs a friend,” he said. “She’s all alone.”
That was something else the two girls had in common. The only person Marcus would allow Elizabeth to spend time alone with was her mother. He didn’t even want Elizabeth to chum around with her sister Rosemary, whom he saw as a “bad influence.” Elizabeth often had to beg and plead with him, pointing out that Rosemary could help them get food, before he would let Elizabeth visit with her sister.
In the same vein, Marcus didn’t like Elizabeth talking to his male friends, a subject on which most of their fights centered. If she walked into the same room, or if one of them talked to her, Marcus would ignore her for up to a week.
“You have an adulterous mind,” he’d finally tell her. “You were thinking nasty thoughts about other men.”
“No I wasn’t, Marcus. I swear.”
Elizabeth couldn’t even imagine leaving him for another man. At times, she wished she could get her kids away from his discipline, but she never gave it any serious thought, particularly after Marcus told her what he would do if she left him.
“You know, there are ways you can kill a woman without people knowing it,” he said in the middle of an otherwise casual conversation.
“What are you talking about, Marcus?” she asked apprehensively. She knew he’d been reading spy novels lately; he’d also been talking about undercover assassins.
“Trust me, there are ways. If you were to ever leave me, Elizabeth, I would make sure you never had sex with another man.”
“Marcus!” she yelled, turning red. “Don’t talk like that.”
“I would hunt you down and come to where you were,” he said as she stared at him in disbelief. “First, I would cut off your legs with my hunting knife, so you couldn’t run away.”
Marcus always wore a hunting knife in a sheath around his ankle. She knew he had it on that very minute.
“Then, I would cut off your arms, so you couldn’t touch anyone again,” he continued, leaning in closer to his wife. “Next would come your tits. I would cut off your tits and then mutilate your pussy, so you couldn’t have sex. I would leave you alive, though. I want you alive, but disfigured so no one would ever want you.”
“That is so gross, Marcus.”
He smiled mischievously. “That is what I would do to any woman who tried to leave me,” he said.
Elizabeth had no doubt he was telling the truth.
A COUPLE OF days after Marcus introduced Elizabeth to Illabelle, the church was putting on a revival with the evangelist George H. Rainey. Illabelle didn’t have a ride, so Elizabeth suggested they bring her along. At the time, Elizabeth had no idea what she was getting herself into.
Marcus had dated the daughter of a prostitute while he’d lived in Europe, and he’d come home with some strange ideas about sex and polygamy. He’d been talking about wanting to have more than one wife ever since Elizabeth was twelve or thirteen—he’d also tried to sell her on wife swapping after Adrian was born, so it didn’t come as a huge shock when Marcus brought up the idea of a second wife again.
“I was thinking about Illabelle,” he said. “What do you think about her?”
Elizabeth said what she always said when this conversation came up. “It’s wrong,” she said. “You’re not supposed to have second wives.”
She was so sure polygamy was a sin that Marcus dared her to find a prohibition against it in the Bible.
“Okay,” she said, accepting his challenge. “I’ll prove it to you.”
The problem was, she searched through the whole book but couldn’t find a single problem with second wives. So, when they talked about it again, Marcus was able to persuade her that it wasn’t a sin. In fact, he said, Elizabeth was going to enjoy having the other woman around.
“Illabelle can be your friend,” he told her. “You’ll have someone to help you with the kids and the cooking.”
Elizabeth really liked Illabelle. The two of them enjoyed each other’s company, so she agreed—on one condition.
“The only way this is going to happen is that you cannot have sex with her and she cannot have any children. I can’t handle that,” she told Marcus. “Will you still love me?”
Marcus put her fears to rest. “I will always love you,” he said. “You will always come first.”
Elizabeth felt even better once Marcus explained how it would work: Illabelle would have to prove that she could be a good, loyal wife for seven years before it was a done deal. Meanwhile, he promised Elizabeth that he wouldn’t have sex with Illabelle, and Elizabeth naïvely believed him. In her childlike mind, Marcus loved her too much to cross that line.
After Sebhrenah was born, Elizabeth and Marcus were well on their way to having the twelve children he wanted, at a rate of one per year. Elizabeth got pregnant again, and two days before Mother’s Day in 1979, she had her fifth child. But unlike her other pregnancies, this one ended in tragedy. The boy’s umbilical cord had wrapped itself three times around his tiny neck, choking him every time Elizabeth had a contraction. Even though they didn’t get a chance to know each other, Elizabeth would never stop grieving for the son Marcus had already named Stefan.
Wasting no time, Elizabeth got pregnant again and had another son, Almae, a year later.
Marcus and Elizabeth often brought their five children to play with Illabelle’s daughter, one of the few children with whom Marcus would allow his kids to spend time. Meanwhile, Illabelle would teach Elizabeth how to make little pizzas on hamburger buns, how to bake fresh bread from scratch, and how to make crust for banana cream pie. Illabelle, who had grown up on a farm, also showed Elizabeth how to can the fresh tomatoes, peas, corn, and cabbage she grew in the garden.
Sometimes, Marcus would leave Elizabeth and the children at their house while he went over to Illabelle’s for “Bible study.”
It never even occurred to Elizabeth to be jealous.
THE WESSON FAMILY was living on welfare even after Marcus started working part-time as a teller at Wells Fargo in 1977. Marcus took full advantage of his military benefits, applying for a G.I. loan so they could buy some rural property they’d been eyeing in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
After Marcus got the loan in 1980, they bought ten acres for ten thousand dollars. They cleared the land to lay a foundation for a three-bedroom home, and lived on the property in an old city bus, which Marcus converted into a motor home while they developed the land. Illabelle rented a cottage in nearby Aptos.
In September 1981, Elizabeth was about a month away from having her seventh child, Donovan. The family was over at Illabelle’s when it came time for Elizabeth to go to her prenatal checkup. Marcus didn’t feel like driving her to the doctor’s and told her to take the bus.
Elizabeth did what she was told, so sh
e was tired and irritated when she returned to Illabelle’s cottage. She saw the children playing in the kitchen of the small studio, so she went searching for the adults in the other room. She pulled aside the curtain that Illabelle had strung across the doorway and stopped, aghast at what she saw.
Illabelle was standing bare-backed in a skirt behind Marcus, who was seated at a small desk, enjoying the sensation of Illabelle’s naked breasts pressing against him. Realizing that Elizabeth was in the doorway, Illabelle whirled around with surprise, covered her breasts, and ran, embarrassed, into the bathroom.
Marcus turned around nonchalantly and looked at Elizabeth as if she was the one to blame for coming in at the wrong time. Elizabeth was so shocked, angry, and hurt that she stormed out and headed straight for their friend Melissa’s* house next door, where she poured out her troubles for the next two hours. Melissa, Illabelle’s college roommate, and a woman named Linda, whom they’d met at Illabelle’s, were the only two women with whom Marcus would allow Elizabeth to be friends. He especially liked Melissa, who was a free spirit and bisexual.
When Marcus finally came over to get his wife, Melissa wouldn’t let him in.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you right now,” Melissa told him. “She’s upset. You can’t come in.”
“Mind your own business,” he said. “I want to talk to my wife.”
But Melissa wasn’t moving. “If you come in here, I’ll call the police,” she said.
Elizabeth didn’t want to talk about it anymore; she just wanted to go home. “It’s okay,” she said.
So she and Marcus gathered up their children and drove home. Once a month, Marcus allowed Elizabeth to ask him anything she wanted, with the promise of full disclosure, so when they got back, she questioned him about his extracurricular activities with Illabelle. He confessed that they’d been hugging, kissing, and touching each other naked. She’d also been giving him oral sex.
The following month, on October 11, Donovan was born.
* * *
OVER THE NEXT few months, Elizabeth grew increasingly despondent. How could she stay with Marcus now that she knew what he’d done with Illabelle? He was her husband, and they had six children together, but she couldn’t be happy if this was how things were going to be.
Elizabeth not only felt distant from her husband but also had started to become suspicious about the motives of the woman she’d once considered a close friend. In January 1982, Illabelle asked if Elizabeth wanted to go for a walk so they could talk, and for the first time, the hair stood up on the back of Elizabeth’s neck. She was sure Illabelle wanted to take her into the woods and kill her, so she refused.
That night, Elizabeth had to tell Marcus how she felt. “If you want Illabelle, that’s okay, but I don’t want this anymore.”
Elizabeth, who had been sure Marcus would choose the beautiful blonde over her, was quite surprised when he said he’d never been planning to leave her. “Bee, I’d never do that to you,” he said. “I love you.”
With that, Elizabeth felt it was safe to tell Marcus what else was on her mind.
“I’m afraid of Illabelle,” she said. “I think she wants to hurt me.”
When Elizabeth explained what had happened earlier that day, Marcus surprised her again, saying that he, too, had become scared of Illabelle because he’d been dreaming that she wanted to kill him.
It rained for the next four days, washing out the mountain’s dirt roads and leaving them stranded for three weeks. But even after the roads were cleared, Elizabeth never visited Illabelle in Aptos again.
* * *
MARCUS BELIEVED THAT children shouldn’t be given medications, even Tylenol, because their immune systems needed to build up resistance to illness. He and Elizabeth argued constantly about this, especially when one of the children had a fever. She was often forced to go to her mother for aspirin or Tylenol.
But even then, Elizabeth knew she was in for a fight.
“They don’t need that stuff,” Marcus said.
“But the fever isn’t going down. It’s only aspirin, Marcus.”
“Not yet,” he said.
If the child’s fever wasn’t gone in a day or two, he usually gave in. “Fine, give it to them,” he would say, rolling his eyes.
If a child fell severely ill, Elizabeth fought with Marcus even harder, sometimes for days, until he let her take the child to the hospital.
That April, Elizabeth took Donovan to get his immunizations at a free clinic, used mostly by migrant workers, down in Watsonville. The doctor examined him and, seeing that Donovan had a cold, told her she’d have to bring him back after he got over the virus.
Two nights later, Donovan would not stop crying. Elizabeth was worried and wanted to take him back to the doctor, but Marcus refused. It was already 11:30 P.M., and it was snowing outside; everyone was too tired to make the forty-five-minute trip down the mountain, he said.
When they woke the next morning around six, Donovan’s eyes were glazed over and his breathing was shallow. Elizabeth insisted that they take him to the hospital, so they packed the kids into their white Volkswagen Bug and drove to the ER.
They waited about half an hour to see a doctor, who immediately recognized that something was terribly wrong. He ordered a spinal tap, and Elizabeth held her baby for the hour or so it took to get results: Donovan had spinal meningitis, an inflammation of the brain and spinal cord.
“We got it just in time,” the doctor told them. “Your son is going to be fine.”
Donovan was moved to a baby bed in the ICU, where he was administered antibiotics through an IV. His little eyes looked so tired.
Marcus told Elizabeth the kids were hungry, so he was going to take them home for a while. Elizabeth wanted to stay, but because the doctor said Donovan was going to be okay, she let Marcus talk her into coming with them.
When they came back a few hours later, the nurse wouldn’t let her see her son. “You can’t go in there,” she said. “The doctor wants to talk to you.”
After speaking to the doctors, Elizabeth cried and cried. Her baby had died, alone, shortly after they’d left.
The doctor wanted to know what had gone wrong, so they got Elizabeth’s permission to do an autopsy. A day or so later, she and Marcus went to the hospital morgue to see their son’s body.
“We should ask the Lord to bring him back,” Marcus said.
So they knelt on the linoleum floor and prayed for half an hour, then went home and prayed some more. Elizabeth cried herself to sleep.
The next day, Marcus decided they should visit the funeral home, where they were preparing Donovan for his wake.
“He’s going to wake up,” he said.
Elizabeth, beside herself with grief, was willing to believe anything at that point. They stood at the top of the stairs that led to the basement, where the bodies were readied for viewing, and heard a baby crying. One of the morticians came up and took Marcus downstairs, leaving Elizabeth frightened and uncertain of what to think. Her rational mind knew that her son was dead, but she couldn’t help believing that her baby was alive in that room.
On the drive home, Marcus told her that he had brought Donovan back to life. But then he got scared, he said, and told God to take him back.
Elizabeth was too upset to know what was going on. She wanted Marcus to take her to the cemetery so she could watch Donovan being buried, but Marcus refused.
“He’s already in heaven,” he said. “We don’t need to go down there.”
“I want to go,” she said.
“If you want to go, you can go,” he said, but Elizabeth knew Marcus’s tone all too well. This was his way of telling her that she couldn’t go to the cemetery. After all, he was the only one with a driver’s license.
A week after the burial, Elizabeth insisted that Marcus take her to the cemetery, only to find Illabelle there, too. Illabelle gave Elizabeth her condolences; she left town shortly thereafter.
Years later, Illabelle sa
id she left Marcus after he told her she would always be his mistress and would come second to Elizabeth. However, Marcus still sent her letters occasionally, one of which was addressed to “Ilovebelle.”
* * *
ELIZABETH HAD MARCUS Jr. in December 1982, bringing the number of her births to eight and living children to six, and she was still going strong. Since the children were homeschooled and the family was still receiving government assistance, a welfare worker was supposed to check in with them periodically.
Marcus, who handled the appointments, met a female social worker at the bottom of the mountain and told her to follow him back to the house in her car. Twenty minutes into the windy ride, the woman pulled over to the side of the road, so Marcus stopped, too, and asked what was wrong.
The woman told him she wasn’t comfortable following him any farther, so she would report that the family had checked out. Marcus laughed when he got home and relayed the story to Elizabeth.
“She was too afraid to follow a big black man down a long dirt road,” he told her. “You should have seen her face.”
The social worker never came back.
Ten
The average high temperature in Fresno during July 2004 was a sizzling 98.9 degrees, so the air conditioner in my apartment ran almost constantly. The Wessons weren’t used to the frigid air, and although Elizabeth welcomed the change, Kiani and Rosie had to wear sweaters and wrap themselves in blankets to stay comfortable.
Aside from the temperature, I could tell the three of them were more comfortable all around. The most dramatic changes over the past two months were evident in Rosie, who was now initiating conversations, making eye contact, and laughing. Even her appearance was evolving, although that wasn’t completely her own doing.
Seeing their lack of clothing options, I went through my two closets, made a pile of items I didn’t wear much, then told the girls to take whatever they wanted. Rosie chose several button-down shirts in bright solid colors that I had worn with my work suits. Kiani, meanwhile, went for the trendier, tight, short-sleeved shirts I usually wore to go out on the weekends. The girls completely avoided my stack of pants, however, stubbornly holding on to their below-theknee skirts.
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