Salvation on Sand Mountain

by Dennis Covington

  After everybody in Brother Carl’s church had been served, he held up his Bible and said, “It says here they ate his flesh and drunk his blood and sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives.”

  So we sang a hymn, accompanied by guitars, drums, and Carl himself on cymbals, and then Junior McCormick and Gene Sherbert brought out pans and pitchers filled with water for the foot washing. I’d been waiting for this part. I’d heard of foot washing, but had never done it. I liked what it was supposed to represent — the idea of following Jesus by becoming a servant to others.

  Carl put down his cymbals and got his Bible out again. “If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.” Then he looked up. “I want the women to go downstairs now,” he said. They would wash their feet in private. I watched the women file out. Vicki had dressed the girls in Holiness fashion, in modest, long dresses. Ashley’s was teal-blue, Laura’s ivory. Vicki had attempted to make herself plain, too, tossing aside her dangling earrings at the last moment. Once the women disappeared down the wooden stairs, the men gathered on the deacons’ bench and began taking off their shoes and socks. Brother Carl didn’t say anything.

  The bare feet were gray and bruised looking in the fluorescent light. Most of the feet had thick yellow nails and crooked toes, rough heels, tufts of hair. I was a little apprehensive as I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up the legs of my jeans. I didn’t want to go first, and was relieved I didn’t have to. Brother Carl volunteered to do that. Junior McCormick and Gene Sherbert sat on either side of him on the deacons’ bench. When Carl put his feet into the pan of water, he also placed his hands on the shoulders of Junior and Gene as they leaned over to rub his feet and splash water against his legs. All the other men gathered around. It was like a rugby scrum. Everybody tried to get a hand in the water, which was slick with the olive oil Carl had poured in. Carl’s head was thrown back, his eyes closed. “Lift him up, Lord,” said Brother Bill Pelfrey.

  I was sandwiched in between Brother Bill and Charles McGlocklin. They were jiggling against me as they stirred the water in the pan. Brother Bill stomped his foot twice. The keys he wore on a chain through his belt loop jangled. “Ah-canna-helimos,” he said. “Co-taka-helican.”

  “Thank God,” Carl said.

  “Yes, Jesus,” said Brother Charles.

  I groped around in the water. I felt Carl’s ankle, his stiff toes, and the hands of the other men. It was peculiar and intimate to touch other men like that.

  The men began praying out loud. The voices spiraled louder and faster.

  “Thy will be done!” shouted Bill Pelfrey.

  “We ask it in the name of Jesus!” echoed Brother Charles.

  “Jesus!” shouted the other men.

  “Sweet Jesus!” said a blond-haired boy with buck teeth.

  Carl opened his eyes and looked at the boy with studied surprise, as though he were seeing him for the first time.

  “Do you want to go next?” he asked.

  The boy nodded. I don’t know whose son he was, although I remembered seeing him earlier in the service with a large family Bible in his hand. Carl lifted his feet out of the water, and Gene Sherbert dried them off with a towel. Then Carl and the boy changed places.

  The movement of the men changed now. They were more methodical, more delicate. During the washing, Bill Pelfrey offered up a long and intricate prayer that collapsed into tongues at intervals, like the breaking of a wave. I stepped back from the men and looked at the boy’s face through their shoulders and heads. His shirt had miniature sailboats on it. His eyes were closed, his lips parted. His front teeth, one of which was chipped, glistened in the overhead light. And his body seemed to rock with the motion of the men’s hands on his feet. I was moved by something I could not name. It was like desire, and not like desire, a longing for something that could not be possessed. It was what I felt sometimes when I looked in on my daughters sleeping and was suddenly aware that they were not merely bursts of restless energy and sound, but bodies, solid and temporal, that had been entrusted to me.

  “You next?” Brother Charles asked me. I’d lost track of what was going on. The boy had already moved to another spot on the bench, where one of the men was drying his feet.

  I nodded and sat in the boy’s place on the bench. When I put my feet into the water, I immediately felt the men’s hands all over them. They were praying aloud and invoking the name of Jesus. Brother Carl put his hand on my head, and I felt a vibration move along it and into my scalp. But the washing of my own feet seemed anticlimactic. The heart of the experience was watching the boy’s chipped tooth glisten as his feet were washed by men.

  The next morning, when we got back to Birmingham, I took out my father’s green binder, which had sat since his death in a bookcase underneath a stack of magazines and unanswered correspondence. Until then, I hadn’t really felt a need to know where my people had come from. But there was something about the way Ashley had responded to the snake-handling service, the sight of her clapping her hands and stomping her feet, that convinced me we were connected in some way to a distinctive mountain culture. Ashley would write in her school journal: “Mother and Daddy took me to a snake-handling church for New Year’s Eve. They had copperheads, rattlesnakes, tambourines, and we got our feet washed at midnight.” Her teacher would casually bring the journal out at a parent-teacher conference, and tilt her head as if to say, “And do you want to elaborate?”

  I had grown up in the 1950s, with radio and television and Reader’s Digest, and I had assumed that everyone around us was pretty much alike. The past didn’t matter. The only history we knew was who we’d fought against in World War 11. All we cared about was the present. And all our parents seemed to care about was the future.

  East Lake was a solid neighborhood, just shy of middle class, with families trying to do things right, making sure that teeth got filled, shot records were up to date, church attendance pins got won, spelling words learned. Our parents were preparing us to do better than they had, as they had done better than their parents, but beyond that we had no idea who we were. All we knew was that wherever we came from, we didn’t want to go back there.

  My mother and her sister had been born in a rural crossroads town southeast of Birmingham, but their father had moved them in and out of the city numerous times, following rumors of work. They’d grown up poor in the mining camps of Jefferson County, where, for a time, my grandfather was a hired gun for the coal company. My mother remembers hiding in the cellar while striking miners broke out all their windows with bats. She and her sister found a dead man in their yard one time, no questions asked. They often went hungry. Their mother, my grandmother Nellie Russell, washed coal dust off their clothes outdoors in a number-ten tub. She had never smoked in her life, but she wound up dying of emphysema anyway. My grandfather, Charlie Russell, the strike buster and eventual railroad detective, died in the state mental hospital of the syphilis he’d contracted riding the rails. For many years my mother kept his revolver in a wooden box on the top shelf of her closet. Before he got too sick, he and my grandmother had lived in a big rock house in Pinson, Alabama. But it was the mental hospital I remember best. We’d visit him on weekends, picnic on the grounds. I used to think of the gold-domed mental hospital as our equivalent of Tara.

  My father had fared better as a child. His father, though, had been born in Summit, Alabama, a ridgetop west of Sand Mountain. Only one of my grandfather Covington’s four siblings survived past adolescence. Her name was Tetie. She died in 1916, at the age of forty-six. She was the first of the children to be born in Alabama, which meant that the Covington family had come to the state sometime between 1862 and 1869. But exactly where the Covingtons began their journey, where they crossed the mountains, how they lived, what they believed, who they were, nobody knew. Nobody asked. The Covingtons were a people who’d left their pasts behind. A door had been shut somewhere.

  Most of what my father had
written in the green binder were the names, birthdays, wedding dates, and deaths of his eleven siblings and their children, a hefty enough task. The history of the family, though, was slim. Dad’s paternal grandfather, Richard Covington, had been born somewhere in North Carolina around 1826 and had married a Mary Clark from South Carolina in 1858. Their oldest child, Anna, was born in 1860 in North Carolina. The family disappeared after that and reappeared in the 1880 census in Summit, Alabama. Five more children had been born by then. Three of them had already died. The remaining two, Tetie and my grandfather, John, would be the only children of Richard and Mary Covington to live into the twentieth century.

  Dad didn’t know who the parents of Richard and Mary Covington were or where exactly they had lived in North Carolina or what had happened between 1860 and 1880, years during which they migrated from North Carolina to Alabama. Searching the microfilm at the Southern Collection of the Birmingham Public Library, I finally found the family at another location in Alabama in the 1870 census. Prior to the years in Summit, Richard and Mary Covington and their children had lived just south of Huntsville, at a place called Valhermosa Springs. The census taker had described both my great-grandfather and great-grandmother as illiterate. He had also checked the boxes for deaf, dumb, blind, insane, and idiotic. That was the end of what I knew about the Covingtons.

  But Dad had been able to go back one generation further on his mother’s side. My grandmother Covington had been a Howell. Her father had been born near Morristown, Tennessee, her mother in Nashville; at some point, they had migrated to that ridgetop called Summit, Alabama, where my grandmother, Hattie, was born. Hattie’s mother’s people had been Leas, and it was this line that my father had gotten the most information about. In particular, he had discovered that my great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Lea, also a Tennessean by birth, had served for three and a half years in the Confederate Army, and had been captured and held for six months in a Union prison camp. After the war, he became a Methodist circuit-riding preacher in northeastern Alabama. The center of his first circuit was Larkinsville, a town four miles west of Scottsboro.

  Scottsboro. Glenn Summerford’s home.

  I felt as though I were closing in on the resolution of a mystery. I wondered what kind of doctrine my great-great-grandfather had been preaching in the precise area where snake handling would spring up less than a generation after his death. My reading in the history of American religion suggested an answer. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had challenged believers, through his doctrine of sanctification, to lead lives that were holy and set apart from sin. After the Civil War, with America’s rapid urban industrialization and secularization, the calls for holiness became more strident and pervasive within American Methodism. The chief tenet of this Holiness movement was that after “salvation” or “new birth,” there occurred a second act of grace, which believers called the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit.” The result of this baptism, whether immediate or gradual, was moral purification. Later, the phrase also came to mean, for many believers, anyway, an imbuement of power from on high, as evidenced by spiritual gifts. Signs and wonders. Healing, prophecy, casting out devils, and ultimately speaking in tongues. My great-great-grandfather rode on horseback to preach baptism of the Holy Spirit to congregations around Scottsboro and most likely on top of Sand Mountain, where Methodist camp meetings, complete with brush arbors, drew enthusiastic crowds. My great-great-grandfather had probably preached brush-arbor meetings on top of Sand Mountain. I have no reason to believe he took up serpents, but I do have reason to believe he was a precursor of those who eventually did. In 1870, when he began his circuit-riding ministry in Alabama, Methodism was in the sway of the Holiness movement. It flourished for the next two decades, and broke out of Methodism only in the years immediately following his death, when the Methodist Church, its ranks swollen by middle-class urbanites, officially distanced itself from the rural and generally lower-class believers in sanctification and spiritual gifts. Out of Methodism came Holiness. Out of Holiness came Pentecostalism. Out of the Holiness-Pentecostal belief in spiritual signs and gifts came those who took up serpents.

  Carl Porter’s father, for instance, had gotten the Holy Ghost in a Methodist church in Alabama. Whether we were blood related or not, the handlers and the Covingtons at least shared the same spiritual ancestry. And about the time I came to this realization, a librarian in the Southern Collection of the Birmingham Public Library handed me a clip file containing, among other pieces, an Associated Press article from 1953, datelined Florence, Alabama:

  SNAKE-HANDLING BROTHERS FINED $20 AND COSTS

  FLORENCE, July 25 (AP) — Three snake handling brothers today were fined $20 and costs for disturbing religious worship by carrying a rattlesnake into a rural church.

  Lauderdale County Law and Equity Court Judge Raymond Murphy imposed the fines on Allen Covington, 37, and Mansel and George Covington, 39.

  The brothers had been held in the Lauderdale County Jail since July 14, after they were arrested for a disturbance at the Bumpas Creek Church.

  Pat Murphy, one of the state witnesses, said that when the brothers brought the snake into the church “The people sort of scrounged back and acted like they were kind of afraid of it.”

  When asked by solicitor Frank Potts if the brothers broke up the service, Allen Covington replied, “The people broke it up themselves by leaving.”

  Mansel Covington, a big man dressed in overalls, held a Bible in his hands throughout the trial.

  He said he and his brothers walked into the church and sat down in the “Amen corner.” Mansel said they were praising the Lord.

  George Covington testified that he had heard of an Alabama law against snake-handling and the brothers were expecting to be jailed.

  “But we felt that we were obeying the spirit of the Lord,” he asserted.

  The brothers were tried under a disturbing the peace statute, not under Alabama’s anti-snake handling law.

  Snake-handling Covington brothers! But there was more. Two years later, Mansel Covington and his sister, Anna Marie Covington Yost, were bitten by rattlesnakes during a service in Savannah, Tennessee. Both were under suspended sentences for snake handling at the time. Mansel stubbornly refused treatment until the county coroner physically dragged him to a doctor for antivenin injections and then to jail. Anna Marie also refused treatment, and the next morning she died.

  There were seven children in this family of Covington snake handlers, three daughters and four sons. All were born in Alabama. The sons are dead now. But Anna Marie’s two sisters are still alive. Edna Covington, eighty, still lives in Savannah, Tennessee. I tracked her down and visited with her in the living room of the modest brick home to which she had retired after thirty-one years as a registered nurse, most spent at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.

  Edna was compact and athletic looking, with shortcropped sandy hair and a clipped accent. She invited me to join her on the floor, where she had been thumbing through a genealogy book in preparation for my visit. I didn’t know whether Edna and I were related, but she looked like a member of our family. She had our sharp chin and deep-set eyes. Her Covingtons, she said, had settled on the north bank of the Tennessee River, at a place called Rogersville, Alabama. My great-grandfather and his family, on the other hand, had settled on the south bank of the Tennessee River, forty miles away, at Valhermosa Springs.

  In 1932 Edna’s family followed the natural curve of the Tennessee River up to Savannah, Tennessee, a stone’s throw from Shiloh, where the seeds of the South’s defeat had been sown, and the twentieth century conceived. That’s where Edna’s brothers and one of her sisters took up serpents. Edna never handled any.

  “My brothers got into snake handling at outdoor camp meetings,” she said. “They were just fooling around. They didn’t keep busy enough.”

  Mansel Covington was the most outspoken of the brothers, she said. He was a big man in later life, but he had been
born prematurely. “He was like a little rat,” she said, continuing to flip through the pages of her book. “We’d put him on pillows to handle him. He couldn’t talk till he was seven or eight.” She paused to scan a list of names that may or may not have been her Covingtons. “Mansel and William were both eunuchs,” she said matter-of-factly.

  I asked what she meant.

  Edna gave me a sharp look. “They had high voices and couldn’t grow beards.”

  I wanted to hear more about this.

  “They were born without testicles,” she enunciated clearly, as though I were dense, and then lay her book aside.

  As a young man, she said, Mansel worked in the freezer department at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. He took hormone shots and began to shave, but he didn’t like his job in the city, so he came back to Savannah and started going to outdoor revivals, where he eventually took up serpents. Edna’s sister Anna Marie married and moved to Akron, Ohio, but she came back to Savannah alone and began going to snake-handling services with her brothers.

  When Anna Marie got bit and died at the end of a twoweek revival in 1956, Edna was working the night shift at the VA Hospital in Louisville. She didn’t see any reason to rush back to Savannah, since Anna Marie was already dead, but her brother George, the one with the harelip, insisted that she leave work right then and drive all night to get back. George said he and his brothers were going to raise Anna Marie from the dead through prayer, and since Edna was a nurse, he wanted her to be there to check her sister’s vital signs.

  “There was a big full moon that night,” Edna said.

  I left Edna’s house in Savannah, Tennessee, with that image in my head, of a woman driving all night under a full moon so that she could check her dead sister’s vital signs while their brothers attempted to pray her back to life. I still didn’t know whether Edna’s family and mine were related. All I knew was that we had settled on opposite banks of the same river. Edna’s band of Covingtons went one way, toward Shiloh, and wound up handling snakes. Our band kept coming south, first to Summit, and finally, in 1907, to Birmingham, where my father would be born and I would be born and my daughters would be born. Borderers. Hill people. New Lights.