Your Sister in the Gospel by Quincy D. Newell

Author:Quincy D. Newell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Jane’s reasons for requesting that her patriarchal blessing be read to the gathered group cannot be fully known, but the convergence of this request with the performance of the master–servant sealing ceremony is striking. Jane was concentrating the sacred resources available to her, gathering the temple ceremony and the patriarchal blessing together in time, balancing the ceremony that was shielded from the world’s eyes, and even from her own eyes, with the blessing that could be read out for everyone to hear. Attached to Joseph Smith as a servant, she claimed again the blessing of Hyrum Smith, his brother, that she would “have a knowledge of the . . . Mysteries of [God’s] Kingdom.” Excluded from the temple because of the curse of Cain, she made sure everyone heard the patriarch’s words that she had “a promise through the Father of the New World coming down in the lineage of Canaan, the Son of Ham” and that God could even “stamp upon [her] his own Image.”28

The day after the public reading of her patriarchal blessing, Jane’s son Jesse died. The city’s death records listed paralysis as the “remote” cause of death, and “3° stroke” as the “immediate” cause of death. Jesse had been a porter in a hotel on East Temple Street. In 1880, he was listed as a boarder at the hotel where he worked; he was the only black man living in the building, according to the federal census. But Jesse was apparently paralyzed in July 1893. Jane took him home and cared for him for ten months. Jesse occupied Jane’s time, her energy, her thoughts. In a Relief Society meeting that fall, Jane addressed the group. “Sis. James then spoke for a short time and related a dream she had had regarding her son,” the secretary reported, somewhat cryptically. Jane had long thought of her dreams as a conduit for divine communications. Near the end of her life, she recalled that before she had left Connecticut as a young woman, she saw Joseph Smith in a dream and understood that he was a prophet. That dream allowed her to recognize Smith in the flesh immediately when she arrived in Nauvoo. Jane found the dream she narrated to her Relief Society sisters similarly noteworthy. The group’s secretary did not indicate which son it concerned. Jane had given birth to at least four boys, only two of whom were still alive in 1893. The dream may have reassured Jane about Silas’s state in the afterlife, or about the salvation of her stillborn son Isaac. It seems more probable, though, that it dealt with Jesse, who was, at the time, occupying Jane’s home and likely taking up more than his usual amount of real estate in Jane’s mind. Whether the dream contained warning or reassurance, the secretary’s notes did not say.29

A couple of days later Jane went to a Retrenchment Society meeting. The memberships of the Retrenchment Society and the Relief Society overlapped, so it is likely that at least

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