Salvation on Sand Mountain

by Dennis Covington

  In captivity, timber rattlers can live up to thirty years. Their tenure among the handlers is much shorter, rarely exceeding a season. I have seen timber rattlers die while being handled. They are not made to be jerked around like that. On the other hand, some of the snakes are well cared for, but simply released into the wild after a few months. Handlers don’t like to keep snakes that look puny, and they are always in search of new ones, always trading specimens back and forth. It appears to be a ritual after services for handlers to give snakes to one another, like an offering of brandy or afterdinner mints or hand-rolled cigars in other circles. Some of the handlers regularly catch their own snakes, most of the time in conventional ways, with a snake stick and burlap bag or pillowcase. Occasionally, the Holiness hunters will fall under an anointing to handle right there in the woods. Others buy snakes from professional exhibitors at prices the handlers complain are getting more outrageous every year, as much as forty-five dollars at last reckoning.

  However the snakes are obtained, they often become objects of affection in the homes of the handlers and their families. The first rattlesnake that Aline McGlocklin took up, for instance, was called Old Crooked Neck, because of the injury it had received during capture. The big copperhead in the terrarium on the McGlocklins’ kitchen counter used to be called Mr. Hog, Charles said, until it had eight babies and they had to start calling it Miss Piggy instead. And Darlene Summerford had testified at Glenn’s trial that the photographs she carried in her purse were of her favorite rattlesnake.

  But no amount of affection or care can insure that a rattlesnake or copperhead won’t bite when handled. They do not tame in a conventional sense. They are not hamsters or gerbils. No one can predict what will happen when a handler reaches into the serpent box. And contrary to popular misconception, multiple bites do not result in immunity to snake venom, but may even increase the risk of death because of allergic reaction.

  Around eight thousand people in the United States are bitten each year by poisonous snakes. Of this number, only a dozen or so die. Experts advise that the best first aid is to keep the patient calm and get him to a hospital as quickly as possible. Based on the severity of the bite, doctors determine whether to use antivenin therapy. Sometimes the risk of an adverse reaction from the antivenin is of as much concern as the bite itself. Recent literature suggests electric shocks administered to the site of the bite may be helpful, but research about this therapy has been inconclusive.

  To date, at least seventy-one people have been killed by poisonous snakes during religious services in the United States, including the man said to have started the whole thing, George Went Hensley, who died vomiting blood in a shed in North Florida in 1955. Hensley had started handling around 1910 and had been bitten more than four hundred times before the fatal blow. Scholars attribute to him the spread of snake handling beyond Grasshopper Valley to other parts of Tennessee, and to Kentucky, the Carolinas, Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana.

  But snake handling sprang up independently on Sand Mountain around 1912, the work of a former Baptist preacher named James Miller. By 1934, poisonous snakes were being taken up in outdoor worship services in the eastern part of Birmingham, among racially mixed congregations. The only recorded injury from these early days was sustained by a man named N.C. Brownlee, who fell off a roof while trying to get a better look at a rattlesnake brought to a service in a glass bread case. The rattlesnake’s name was Pete.

  “The first place that I ever heard of people handling serpents,” Charles McGlocklin once told me, “was just the other side of New Hope, Alabama, when I was seven or eight years old.” That would have been in the late 1940s. “In those days,” Charles said, “they kept the serpents in lard cans in the smokehouse.”

  The Alabama legislature apparently got wind of the practice and passed an act in 1950 that made it “unlawful for any person to display, handle, exhibit or use any poisonous or dangerous snake or reptile in such a manner as to endanger the life or health of another.” The crime was described as a felony, with a prescribed punishment of one to five years imprisonment. But the handling continued in spite of the law.

  In 1951, a New Hope farm wife named Ruthie Craig, fifty, brought a glass jar containing a large rattlesnake into religious services at her home. “I’m going to handle the snake and anyone who doesn’t believe had better leave,” she said. Then she tried to extract the snake from the jar. It wouldn’t budge, so she broke the glass. The rattlesnake slithered onto the floor and toward an open door. Mrs. Craig tried to catch it, but it turned on her and bit her four times on the right forearm and shoulder before it escaped. Asked later if she wanted a doctor, Mrs. Craig said, “Anything for ease.” But someone in the congregation said she would lose her faith if she called a doctor, so Mrs. Craig rejected help, fell into a coma, and died four hours later. The Madison County coroner ruled it an accident.

  The death of Ruthie Craig was the first in a string of highly publicized fatalities among handlers in North Alabama and Georgia during the 1950s. Sawmill worker Jim Thomas Gifford died in Fort Payne, Alabama, in 1954; lay preacher Reece Ramsey died two months later at a brush-arbor meeting south of Rising Fawn, Georgia; and Lee Valentine, a father of seven, was bitten at the Old Straight Creek Holiness Church on top of Sand Mountain in August of 1955. He died a few hours later. All had refused medical help.

  In 1956, Lloyd Hill of Fort Payne, the first man tried and convicted under the Alabama snake-handling law, came to Birmingham and was bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake at a church on the outskirts of East Lake, at the foot of Ruffner Mountain. He was taken to the old Hillman Clinic emergency room, where he refused treatment. Charged for a second time with snake handling, he discovered his next stop was the city jail and then the county jail, where he made his threehundred-dollar bond and promptly disappeared.

  Lloyd Hill survived that bite. Another preacher who handled snakes in Birmingham didn’t. David Henson, a retired coal shaker operator who had been preaching and handling for thirty years, died in 1959 less than an hour after being bitten by a twenty-four-pound rattlesnake in Robinwood, a working-class neighborhood just the other side of the Birmingham airport from East Lake. Henson’s death was ruled a suicide, although members of the congregation at his Free Holiness Church knew otherwise. Close to a thousand people filed by his open coffin to pay respects. On our side of the airport, in that same year, a black man was kidnapped and later castrated by members of the Ku Klux Klan. I cannot help but believe there is a connection between the two events. Henson’s funeral was conducted at Roebuck Chapel, where my father’s funeral would be held thirty years later. My father was not a snake handler, but he was a segregationist.

  There are snakes, and there are snakes. Some are literal, some not. While I was handling common water snakes in a sewer at the end of our street in East Lake, people were taking up rattlesnakes in a church a few blocks away. We didn’t know them. They didn’t know us. We might as well have occupied parallel universes, except for one thing: we had come from the same place. We were border dwellers. We had sailed for the promised land. We had entered the mountains and come down from them again. We were the same people. And all of us were handling one kind of snake or another.

  The literal snakes are the easiest to identify: my water snakes, their rattlesnakes. The metaphorical snakes are another matter. One of them, I see now, must have been our uncertain past. When I was growing up in East Lake, among families reaching for the middle class, the past was problematic and embarrassing because it contained poverty, ignorance, racism, and defeat. This legacy of Southern history was as dangerous as any rattlesnake. No one wanted to claim it. No one wanted to take it out of the box. No one, of course, except the Klansmen who paraded past our house on Eightieth Street in the 1950s, their lead car bearing a cross made of light bulbs. How strange those processions at twilight seem to me now, how out of place on the quiet streets of East Lake. I wonder why my father didn’t sound the alarm. During World War 11, he had been a civil
defense warden for our neighborhood. My older brothers said that during air raid drills, he would stand on the darkened street corner in his white pith helmet with the civil defense insignia on the front and smoke a cigarette as he looked for low-flying enemy planes. Where was he when the Klan motorcades came down Eightieth Street?

  Dad had no use for the Klan. He was a gentle, principled man. But he must have sensed even then that the past he seemed bent on avoiding was bound to be claimed by someone, somewhere along the line. He was, as I’ve said, in theory if not in practice, a segregationist. Some of his arguments seem tamer now in retrospect, tempered as they are by time. But he was still a segregationist, in an era when legal segregation was our greatest shame. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 broke my father’s resistance, and his heart. The girls who died in the bombing were about my age. We heard the news on a small brown radio in the kitchen after church that Sunday. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. The bombing seemed to seal a permanent judgment on the city. “The shame will be ours forever,” editorialized a local newspaper at the time. But Martin Luther King, Jr., foresaw ultimate salvation in the tragedy. At the funeral for three of the girls, he said, “The deaths may well serve as the redemptive force that brings light to this dark city.” And it did. What happened in Birmingham in 1963 not only redeemed the oppressed. It also redeemed my people, although we haven’t been able to accept that yet. We haven’t yet taken that particular snake out and lifted it aloft in the light — the dangerous, unloved thing about us: where we came from, what we did, who we are.

  I don’t know exactly when it happened, but sometime during the spring of 1993, the idea must have started taking shape that in order to conquer the metaphorical snake that was my cultural legacy, I’d have to take up the thing itself.

  8

  SALVATION ON SAND MOUNTAIN

  And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us.

  — Acts 16:9

  That spring, Charles McGlocklin told me that Glenn Summerford’s cousins, Billy and Jimmy, had started a new church on top of Sand Mountain, near a place called Macedonia. Charles didn’t worship with them, though.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Brother Charles took a deep breath and surveyed the land around him, yellow and gray in the afternoon light. We were on the deck behind his and Aline’s trailer in New Hope, Alabama. Beside the trailer was a doghouse for their blue tick hound named Smokey, and behind it was a corral for their horse, a buckskin mare named Dixie Honeydew.

  “I know enough about some of those people to know I ought not to worship anymore with them,” Charles said. As a snake handler, he had set himself apart from the world, and sometimes he even set himself apart from other snake handlers. It was part of the Southern character, I thought, to be always turning away like that toward some secret part of oneself.

  “You know how much I love you,” Charles said. He put one of his big hands on my shoulder and shook it. “You’re my brother. But anytime you go up there on Sand Mountain, you be careful.”

  We could hear the sound of the wind through trees, a soughing, dry and hesitant, and then Dixie Honeydew neighed.

  “You might be anointed when you take up a serpent,” Charles continued, “but if there’s a witchcraft spirit in the church, it could zap your anointing and you’d be left cold turkey with a serpent in your hand and the spirit of God gone off of you. That’s when you’ll get bit.”

  We walked around the corner of the trailer, where Jim Neel was waiting for me in a truck that had belonged to his brother.

  “So you really watch and remember what Brother Charles tells you,” Charles whispered. “Always be careful who you take a rattlesnake from.”

  This sounded like solid advice.

  I got into Jim’s truck, and Charles motioned for us to roll a window down. “Y‘all come back any time,” he yelled. “And, hey, it’s not us that’s messed up, Brother Dennis. It’s the world.”

  My journey had come back around to the congregation on Sand Mountain, the remnant of Glenn Summerford’s flock that had left the converted service station on Wood’s Cove Road in Scottsboro and then met under a brush arbor in back of J.L. Dyal’s house until the weather got too cold. After worshiping for a while in the basement of an old motel, they finally found a church for sale on the mountain. It was miles from nowhere, in the middle of a hay field south of Section, Alabama, home of Tammy Little, Miss Alabama 1984. The nearest dot on the map, though, was Macedonia, a crossroads consisting of a filling station, a country store, and a junk emporium. It was not the kind of place you’d visit of your own accord. You’d have to be led there. In fact, Macedonia had gotten its name from the place in the Bible that Paul had been called to go to in a dream. Paul’s first European converts to Christianity had been in Macedonia. But that was, you know, a long time ago and in another place.

  Glenn Summerford’s cousins, Billy and Jimmy, negotiated the deal for the church. Billy was friendly and loose limbed, with a narrow red face and buck teeth. He’d worked mostly as a carpenter, but he’d also sold coon dogs. Jimmy was less amiable but more compact. Between them, they must have been persuasive. They got the church for two thousand dollars. A guy down the road had offered five thousand, Billy said, but the owner had decided to sell it to them. “God was working in that one,” he concluded.

  It was called the Old Rock House Holiness Church, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t made of rock. But it was old in contrast to the brick veneer churches out on highway 35, the ones with green indoor-outdoor carpet in the vestibules and blinking U-Haul It signs out front.

  The Old Rock House Holiness Church had been built in 1916, a few years before Dozier Edmonds first saw people take up serpents in Jackson County, at a church in Sauty Bottom, down by Saltpeter Cave. I’d met Dozier during the brush-arbor meetings. A rail-thin old man with thick glasses and overalls, he was the father-in-law of J.L. Dyal and the husband of Burma, the snake-handling twin. Dozier said he’d seen men get bit in that church in Sauty Bottom. They didn’t go to a doctor, just swelled up a little bit. He also remembered a Holiness boy at the one-room school who would fall into a trance, reach into the potbellied stove, and get himself a whole handful of hot coals. The teacher would have to tell the boy to put them back. There was a Baptist church in those days called Hell’s Half Acre, Dozier said. They didn’t take up serpents, but they’d do just about anything else. They were called Buckeye Baptists. They’d preach and pray till midnight, then gamble and fight till dawn. One time a man rode a horse into the church, right up to the pulpit. Out of meanness, Dozier said. Everything was different then. “They used to tie the mules up to a white mulberry bush in the square,” he said. Why, he remembered when Scottsboro itself was nothing but a mud hole. When the carnival came through, the elephants were up to their bellies in mud. There wasn’t even a road up Sand Mountain until Dozier helped build one. And it seemed like the Civil War had just occurred.

  Dozier came from a family of sharecroppers who lived on the property of a famous Confederate veteran named Mance. He had a bullet hole through his neck. He’d built his own casket. Every Easter, Colonel Mance invited the children of the families who lived on his property to come to the big house for an egg hunt. One Easter, he wanted the children to see what he’d look like when he was dead, so he lay down in the casket and made the children march around it. Some of the grown-ups had to help get him out. It was a pine casket with metal handles on it, Dozier said. Colonel Mance eventually died, but he wasn’t buried in the casket he’d made. He’d taken that thing apart years before and given the handles to the families who lived on his property, to use as knockers on the doors of their shacks.

  That was the kind of place Sand Mountain had been when the Old Rock House Holiness Church was in its heyday. By the time the Summerford brothers bought it in the winter of 1993, it had fallen onto hard times. Didn’t e
ven have a back door. Paper wasps had built nests in the eaves. The green shingles on the outside were cracked, and the paint on the window sills had just about peeled off. Billy Summerford and some of the other men from the congregation repaired and restored the church as best they could. It’d be another year, though, before they could get around to putting in a bathroom. In the meantime, there would be an outhouse for the women and a bunch of trees for the men. The church happened to be sited in the very center of a grove of old oak trees. Fields of hay surrounded the grove and stretched to the horizon. As you approached the church along a dirt road during summer heat, the oak grove looked like a dark island in the middle of a shimmering sea of gold and green.

  That’s the way it looked to me, anyway, on a bright Sunday morning in late June, six months after the Summerfords had bought the church, when Jim and I drove up from Birmingham for their first annual homecoming. Brother Carl had invited us by phone and given us directions. He was scheduled to preach at the homecoming. Other handlers were coming from all over — from East Tennessee and South Georgia, from the mountains of Kentucky and the scrublands of the Florida panhandle. If we hadn’t had Carl’s directions, we’d never have found the place. The right turn off the paved road from Macedonia was unmarked. It was one of several gravel roads that angled off into the distance. Where it crossed another paved road, there finally was a sign, made of cardboard and mounted at waist level on a wooden stake. After that, the gravel turned to dirt. Dust coated the jimsonweed. The passionflowers were in bloom, and the blackberries had begun to ripen in the heat. There were no houses on this road, and no sound except for cicadas, a steady din, like the sound of approaching rain.