Salvation on Sand Mountain
Page 9
We posed all kinds of questions to one another: Why didn’t anybody get bit? Maybe the loud music disorients the snakes? Snakes don’t have ears. But they must be able to feel the vibrations. What about all the times there wasn’t any music, and everything was still? I had been to scores of services by now. Something extraordinary had happened tonight. Jim and Melissa agreed, a sort of group hypnosis, group hysteria. “Of course, it could also have had something to do with” — and here I paused, not because I knew how Jim and Melissa would take this, but because I, too, was surprised by my thinking it — “the presence of the Holy Ghost.”
Jim looked at me. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”
The rain stopped completely sometime during the night. The next morning started off cool and bright, but by afternoon the last of the summer heat had returned. The air stayed clear, though, as fine as glass, and that evening when we drove up to the church again for the Saturday night service, the light through the trees was low and red.
The crowd was larger that second night. There were many more members of the press there, among them a television crew from North Carolina who had shown up with their blinding lights and impeccably dressed Asian-American anchorwoman. Her suit was gray flannel, her hair perfectly in place. She was poised and articulate in front of the camera, but she didn’t seem to have a clue about what was going on in the church itself.
Sister Barbara Elkins, the ailing matriarch, had shown up with a fruit jar of strychnine solution. She had mixed it herself. “She mixes it strong,” Jeff Hagerman said to me. “If you get scared or get your mind off God, you start to feel it.” Throughout most of the service, Sister Barb sat behind the pulpit with her handkerchief to her head. She was a large, flaccid woman in a black shift. She seemed to be in enormous pain. Her husband, Brother Bob, preached awhile, as did visiting pastors from neighboring states. When the snakes came out, the handling seemed a bit less spontaneous than it had the night before. Maybe it was the television crew’s lights, maybe the presence of Sister Barb. I was at the front with the handlers, as I had been the previous night, when Brother Bob suddenly unscrewed the lid of the fruit jar on the pulpit and took a few swigs. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and handed the jar down to Jeff Hagerman, who did the same. After drinking from the jar, Jeff shook his head and then started whirling with his arms outstretched, faster and faster, while he clicked his heels on the hard wooden floor. Bless him! someone said. Give him victory! said someone else. The music mounted higher. Jeff threw back his head and howled like an animal in heat. Then he careened out of his whirling dance and staggered to a nearby pew. He was smiling. He was fine, just dizzy, and the congregation erupted in amens and thank Gods.
Sister Barb stood on unsteady feet, and Brother Bob handed her the microphone. She started at one end of the platform and worked her way down. She was wincing in pain, but there was something she wanted to make clear. She’d had it with outsiders in the midst of the handlers, and she had a few words to say about the subject: “These reporters need to stay back. This up here is for the saints of God. And it’s not a show. It’s for people that worship God.” She emphasized each word with a flick of her handkerchief. “We’re not a hateful people, we’re not haughty people, but these reporters, if they want to make their money, can make it back there and not up here where they endanger people’s lives.”
Sister Barbara walked back behind the pulpit, occasionally touching her handkerchief to her temple. Brother Timmy and his wife gave her an amen, but most of the other handlers were silent. I felt my own face flush as I realized she was talking most particularly about me.
“I’ve been in this little better than fifty years,” she said. “I’ve been bit about sixteen times. It was the making of me. But I know you go down in the jaws of death. Just about all of us here that handle serpents has come to that point.” She leaned into the pulpit for support. “I hope I make it. I hope we’re saved.” It was not rhetorical. She seemed to understand her time was short, and that she and the other handlers had better have chosen the right way. “There’s more to it than handling serpents, anyhow,” she said. “They come to get pictures of serpents, but you know there’s more to it.”
I knew that full well, but the idea seemed fresh to her. It seemed to rouse her. She brought herself up to full height and stepped back from the pulpit. “I know my blessing was handling serpents,” she said with dignity. “Handling fire. But they was other things that went with it.”
Yes there was. Amen.
“God don’t play games,” she said.
No, he don’t.
“And if he sent me to you, I don’t care what was wrong with you, you’ll be healed.”
Thank God.
“I just love God’s people,” she said. “I’m glad some of my children turned out. I noticed one of my grandsons by marriage, he had enough respect; he wanted the pictures for his own use and he stayed back.”
Yes, he did.
“You know you can dishonor God.”
Amen. You sure can.
She was looking straight at me, but I held her gaze. Her eyes were flat, reptilian.
For most of the rest of the service, I stayed behind an imaginary line with the other journalists. When I stepped outside later for some fresh air, I could see the mountains clearly, great black silhouettes against the sharp-edged sky. The sight of them stirred something like homesickness in me. But if it was homesickness, it was for a place I’d never been. Brother Carl had followed me out. He hugged me and said, “I knew she was talking about you. I should have come to your defense. I’m sorry.”
I assured him it was all right, that I understood. Besides, my mind was somewhere else by then. The rain had moved on through the valley we were in, and the moon was visible through some high, gauzy clouds. Carl went back inside the church. As I stood in the dark outside, listening to the cicadas and the tambourines, I wondered about those border dwellers who had sailed for the promised land two hundred years before, in search of a new Eden. I thought about them finding their way through these mountains, the People of the New Light. I wondered whether they’d crossed the mountains around here somewhere, or farther south at the Cumberland Gap or Saluda Gap, or even farther still, at the great bend in the Tennessee River near Chattanooga, where the states of Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia meet, and the last great plateau of the Appalachians, Sand Mountain, begins its dead aim straight for the furnaces of Birmingham.
When I finally went back inside the church, my mind was still lingering on the mountains and the clouds that nearly hid the moon, but when I saw what was happening at the front of the sanctuary, my heart nearly turned in my chest. Aline McGlocklin had left her seat in the middle of the congregation and was standing near the front, exactly as she had stood under the brush arbor on Sand Mountain. Her hands were raised, her face upturned. Her lower jaw was trembling, and I imagined the sound before I heard it: “Akiii, akiii, akiii....” In front of Aline stood her husband Charles, with the four-foot black timber rattlesnake outstretched in his hands. He was getting ready to hand it to her.
The rattlesnake was so big Charles could hardly get a hand around it. He would later tell me that the Lord spoke to him in that moment and asked him, “Who do you love more, me or your wife?” Charles said the answer was God, and so he decided to go ahead and give her the snake. It was a moment that suggested that most ancient of stories — a garden, a serpent, a man and his wife. But now the story seemed oddly reversed, as though by giving his wife the serpent, the man could restore the communion with God that had been broken. Aline’s hands, which had been stretched upward, now suddenly turned to receive. But as Charles began to hand the rattlesnake to her, it rolled. He steadied it. It rolled again, doing a full turn in his hands, as though it were on a lathe. Charles stepped back and handed the serpent to Carl Porter, who prayed over it aloud before he stepped forward and lay it into Aline’s hands. Her face changed. It seemed to open out. The sound that she made did not resemble human speech
. Have your way, Lord. someone said as Aline trembled in ecstasy with the big black rattlesnake outstretched in her hands. I was only an observer, but I felt I had been drawn into something so painfully intimate that I was morally obliged to look away even as I stared the harder. I wanted to step in and rescue Aline, but from what? Wasn’t it the same thing that was happening to me?
6
ROOTS
An hour before sundown we reached another barren region inhabited by “poor white trash. ” Their houses were of the worst imaginable description, and how they managed to obtain a living upon such a soil, was a problem to us. Yet hither the pitiless monopoly of the slaveholding class had driven them, and, by some means or other, they manage to wring sufficient food to keep themselves and their children from starving, out of these inhospitable rocks.
— dispatch from The New York Times dated April 14, 1862, “Advance into Alabama”
Right before he died, my father got interested in genealogy. “As far as I know,” he said, “no Covington has ever left anything to anybody, and I’m not going to be the one to break the tradition.” Dad meant it as a joke. He had already given me the best gifts — unqualified love, a moral education, and a good name. But there were three tangibles that he left as well. Before his death he deeded me two and a half acres of palmetto scrubland in central Florida, fifty miles south of Orlando. It was part of a massive real estate venture that had turned belly-up, the largest bankruptcy in the history of the state. River Ranch Acres, it had been called. Ranch, because it wasn’t on the coast. River, because there was supposed to be one nearby. The sales literature had been filled with drawings of horses and cattle. But the development had no roads, no power, no water. The plots hadn’t even been surveyed. My dad bought the two and a half acres anyway, as an investment, he said, the only investment he had ever made. But I think he really bought the land because he had always loved Westerns. His favorite movie was Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
The second thing Dad left was a wooden cigar box that had belonged to my grandfather Covington. In it were a straight razor, two shaving brushes still caked with dried lather, my father’s tortolseshell pocketknife, and a few yellowing buttons.
The third thing Dad left me was a green binder containing what little family research he’d been able to do before his lungs gave out. I couldn’t bear to look at it, the spidery handwriting on green ledger paper, done in pencil in case of mistakes. My father had been a supervisor in the production planning department at Tennessee Coal and Iron. His responsibilities included seeing to it that Continental Can received the exact quantity of tin they had been promised, and on time. He was, therefore, a perfectionist. Decades after his office moved to a hill overlooking the mills, he continued to get his hair cut by the same black barber downtown because the man always remembered, without having to be asked, to clip the hairs in his nose. The records Dad kept on his 1977 orange Astre station wagon included the original car dealership’s ad cut neatly from the paper. He had kept that ad for nearly twelve years. At the time of his death, he had the warranties for every electrical device, including can openers and toasters, that he and my mother had ever purchased, arranged in labeled envelopes. It broke my heart to open the green binder and see him hard at work again, trying to get one last record straight.
Glenn Summerford
Aunt Daisy, the prophetess
J.L. Dyal, Charles McGlocklin, and Carl Porter
The legendary Punkin Brown (left)
“Spread the word! We’re coming down from the mountains!” Brother Bob Stanley
�� MELISSA SPRINGER
The laying on of hands
Charles and Aline McGlocklin
“We’d better put our house in order!” Charles McGlocklin, the End-Time Evangelist
Handler Rayford Dunn
Bobbie Sue Thompson and Billy Summerford
Dewey Chafin
Dozier Edmonds
The healing of Gracie McAllister
Aline McGlocklin
I can tell you the exact moment I decided to take a closer look at the binder. It was New Year’s Eve, 1992, at the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Kingston, Georgia. Brother Carl Porter’s church. We were attending an all-night watch service, complete with snake handling, Holy Communion, laying on of hands, and chicken and egg salad sandwiches in the basement after we’d washed each other’s feet.
We arrived in mid-service. The moment occurred when the music got cranked up, and the snakes started coming out of the boxes. Vicki had been to a snake-handling church before, but this was the first time we’d brought our daughters, Ashley, then seven, and Laura, then five. We normally took them everywhere we went, but I was a little nervous this time. Our daughters are resilient and adventuresome. I didn’t want to press them too much, though.
Laura, like my mother, is an artist. She took one look at Brother Junior McCormick dancing in front of the pulpit with two rattlesnakes draped across his shoulders and decided to spend some time outside in the van, where she drew pictures of rattlesnakes and tambourines. Vicki and I took turns keeping her company. Ashley, though, was transfixed. It was a surprise to me. Physically, Ashley is a dead ringer for a Covington. She has the Covington long arms and the Covington chin. And like my father, she is a careful person — exact in her reckonings and stubborn in her defense of what she believes to be right. But she doesn’t like to be startled, and she has no use for loud noises or extravagant gestures. I was afraid a serpent-handling service would be more than she could handle. But when the music started, she looked up at me wide eyed and grinning, and in no time she was clapping her hands and stomping her feet. The snakes didn’t seem to faze her one bit. “Cool!” she exclaimed over the uproar. It was as though the shouting and the shrieking and the raw hillbilly music had been imprinted on her genes, like something deep within her she was remembering. I thought of this thing called cell memory. I thought of a part of her — an ancestor — resurrected, alive, caught by surprise.
The sight of my daughter, so clearly a Covington, so clearly at home in the chaos of a snake-handling service, made me quicken. Were we actually kin to these people? I was going to look more closely at my father’s notes in the green binder. I wanted more. Who were my people? Who were my daughters kin to?
When the snakes had been put away, and the music had stopped, Vicki and Laura came back into the sanctuary. Brother Carl placed a bottle of Welch’s Sparkling Concord Grape Juice on one side of the pulpit, where minutes before a rattlesnake had stretched. On the other side, he put a bottle of Manischewitz wine. Between them sat a pan of unleavened bread. And I knew we were going to have Communion.
It was the first time Carl had celebrated Communion in the new sanctuary, which was three years old. Rituals like Communion are rare events in snake-handling churches, anyway; snake handlers don’t stand on ceremony or pay much attention to the traditional church calendar. I’d been in a snake-handling church on Easter morning when the word Easter was not even mentioned. But Carl’s church seemed to be striving for a measure of respectability, and he wanted to make sure that if they did something like this, they did it right.
Carl opened his Bible to a passage in Matthew. “And as they were eating, ” he read, “Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.”
Carl looked up from the book. “Now, he didn’t mean it was really his body.”
Amen.
“They weren’t cannibals.”
Thank God.
“Can you imagine me taking a big bite of Brother Junior over there, and him not even cooked? He’s forty something years old. He’d be tough as foot leather!”
Bless him, sweet Jesus!
Carl looked back at the book. “And he took the cup,” he read, “and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. ”
Again, he glanced up. “I sure ain�
�t gonna drink nobody’s blood.”
Amen.
“I ain’t no vampire.”
Praise God!
Carl solemnly closed his Bible and held it up in one hand. “This book here,” he said, “will tell you everything you need to know. It’ll tell you how to bake bread. It’ll tell you how to raise a garden, how to treat your wife, how to wash your feet. It’ll tell you how to comb your hair.”
Then he blessed the grape juice, wine, and unleavened bread. A certain awkwardness descended on us all, but at Carl’s encouragement everybody lined up either in front of the Welch’s or in front of the Manischewitz. Vicki and the girls and I chose the grape juice. Charles and Aline McGlocklin chose the wine. Drinking unfermented grape juice, Charles confided, would be like taking up a nonpoisonous snake. Bill Pelfrey, another snake-handling preacher from Newnan, Georgia, helped Carl serve the Communion in Dixie cups. As each member of the congregation took his cup, he also reached into the pan for a piece of unleavened bread and popped it into his mouth. The women stepped off to the side to drink their grape juice or wine. The men threw theirs back right where they stood, then crumpled the cups and looked around for a trash can. Occasionally one of them would throw his arms out and praise God. Carl’s cousin, Gene Sherbert, spoke rapidly in tongues.
It wasn’t quite like the Communions I’d taken in my family’s Methodist church in Birmingham. Back then, we went to the altar by pews and knelt. The organist played softly in the background. Brother Jack Dillard, in the black choir robe he wore only for this occasion, would serve the Welch’s grape juice in tiny glasses arranged on a circular silver tray. The host, also served from a silver tray, consisted of crumbledup Premium saltines. But except for those details, the spirit within the churches was not so different. We Methodists just didn’t speak in tongues, and prior to Communion we didn’t handle rattlesnakes.