Salvation on Sand Mountain

by Dennis Covington

  “Amen,” Carl replied. He was pulling for me. I looked at the congregation again. They seemed remote and unfamiliar to me now, someone else’s family reunion. I couldn’t pick out Vicki or Melissa among them.

  “It was after they had crucified Jesus,” I said, “and some of the women who had stayed with him through it all came down to the tomb to anoint his body with spices. Am I in the Word?” I looked over to Brother Carl.

  “You’re in the Word,” Carl said.

  Amen, the congregation answered.

  “But the stone had been rolled away from the tomb,” I said, “and a man in white, an angel, was sitting there, and the angel said to the women: ‘He’s not here. He’s risen.’ Am I in the Word?”

  “Amen,” Carl said. “You’re in the Word.”

  “I’m in the Word,” I repeated, and I moved along the platform like I’d seen Carl do so many times. “And who did Jesus appear to first after his resurrection?”

  “The eleven,” Carl said.

  I turned back to him. “No. He didn’t appear first to the eleven.” And I walked slowly across the platform again, heading straight for Carl’s son Virgil, who was standing by his drum set, sticks crossed in front of him. “He appeared first to Mary Magdalene!” I said, and I drove each word in the direction of Virgil’s chest with my finger. “A woman out of whom he had cast seven devils!”

  There was no amen.

  I whirled back around and faced the congregation again. “The angel had told her to tell the disciples that Jesus was risen, but she was afraid, and she didn’t do it. So Jesus himself appeared to her, and when she told the disciples that he had risen, none of the men believed her!”

  I was waiting for an amen, which still hadn’t come. “That’s when Jesus appeared to the eleven and upbraided them for their unbelief!”

  “Amen,” Carolyn Porter, Carl’s wife, finally said.

  I knew I was in the Word now. It was close to the feeling I’d had when I’d handled. “Mary Magdalene was the first person to spread the news of the risen Christ!” I shouted. “She was the first evangelist, and the men didn’t even believe her! So when we start talking about a woman’s place, we better add that a woman’s place is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ! In Him there is no male or female, no Greek or Jew!” And I spun on Carl. “Am I in the Word?”

  “No,” Carl said. “You’re not in the Word.”

  “Are you telling me I’m out of the Word?”

  “Yes. You’re out of the Word.” He smiled. It was a smile of enormous satisfaction and relief. At last, we had reached the end of our story, his eyes seemed to say.

  I looked back at the congregation. No help there. I was confused. I’d never heard the place so quiet. Anna Pelfrey sat with her feet crossed at the ankles, her hands folded in her lap as though she hadn’t heard a word. Some of the men were looking at the floor. Others were stretched out with their arms on the back of the pew. They seemed suddenly curious about the ceiling. Only the teenage girls were animated, heads bent toward one another, whispering furiously, but without a sound.

  “Well, if I’m out of the Word,” I said, “I’d better stop preaching.” My heart was beating fast, and I could feel the blood in my cheeks. I put the microphone back in its stand and walked slowly off the platform and down the aisle. Nobody would look me in the eye except Nancy Frazier, the mother of the groom. She was smiling and pointing to the pew in front of her, the one I was headed for. That’s when I saw that Aunt Daisy had moved from the front of the congregation to our pew in the middle, where she was sitting next to Vicki and laying hands on her.

  Aunt Daisy had put her pale forehead up against Vicki’s chin. Her hands were in Vicki’s hair, and then on her forehead, her shoulders, her neck. “You young people are right,” she was crooning. “I don’t have much time left, but in the time I’ve got, I’m going to spread the gospel.” It was what Vicki had wanted, the blessing I knew she would receive. I slid into the pew beside her, and Vicki continued to sit erect, her eyes closed, while Daisy made over her. The church was silent except for Daisy’s warbling voice.

  Punkin Brown suddenly leapt to his feet and wrenched the microphone from its stand. “You know, I was supposed to preach tonight, and I had me another sermon in mind.” He said this with disdain, as though he hated to waste valuable time on matters as transparent as the ones I’d raised. “But if we can’t stand on sound doctrine, boys, we might as well not stand at all.”

  Amen.

  Punkin bent down, unclasped the lid of a serpent box, and brought out a big yellow-phase timber rattler, which he slung across his shoulder like a rope. “Haaagh,” he said. It sounded like steam escaping from an underground vent. With the snake in tow, he started strutting across the front of the sanctuary, bent nearly double, his face contorted and red. “If we can’t stand on sound doctrine, boys, we might as well give this thing up. Haaagh.

  “There are people,” Punkin said, “who preach a false doctrine, that women can hold authority over men in a church. Haaagh. It’s the preaching of false prophecy, boys, of the ungodly, the unholy, the profane. Haaagh. The whoremonger and them that defiled themselves with mankind. Haaagh. God’s not in it, boys, and if we pay it any mind, we’re as lost as them that give it. Haaagh. We might as well deny the whole Word!”

  I glanced at Vicki, and she smiled back.

  “Oooooh!” he groaned. And his heels beat out a rhythm on the floor as he danced across the platform. “Haaagh!” And he flung the rattlesnake back and forth like a trunk. He wiped his forehead with it. He let it brush his lips. “Haaagh. Just let them do this,” he said, “and we’ll see who the Spirit speaks through! Haaagh. They’re deceivers, boys, Ahab and Jezebel, with her painted face and gold hoops in her ears! Haaagh. They wanted the vineyard of Naboth, boys, they killed him and stole it for themselves! And you know what the Word says about them. There was none like unto Ahab, which did sell himself to work wickedness in the sight of the Lord, whom Jezebel his wife stirred up. But the enemy’s defeated, boys. In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine. ”

  Punkin came to a stop at the spot where Brother Carl had harangued Melissa. There, Punkin caressed the rattlesnake as though it were a part of himself before he caught my eye in the congregation. “It’s a lie, Dennis!” he said. “There’s no truth in it! It’s a sin!”

  It was odd for me to see Punkin this way, so grotesque and funny looking, with his shirttail out and a big rattlesnake draped over his shoulder. He was just a child, I thought, an overgrown snake boy like myself.

  When Punkin had finished, it was Jamie Coots’s turn to prophesy along the same lines. He was still recovering from a severe rattlesnake bite, and so carried a certain weight of moral authority. By the time he finished, it was after nine o‘clock. I caught Melissa’s eye and nodded toward the door. She was ready, for sure. We’d have to get up and walk out in order to be back in Birmingham before midnight, and that’s what we did. But before we left, I stood and explained the reason we were leaving, that we had to get home to be with our children. I thanked Brother Carl and the congregation for letting us visit with them again.

  “Please pray for us,” I said.

  There were nods of assent from the congregation. Carl smiled and bobbed as he usually did. “We appreciate you and love you, Brother Dennis. You and Sister Vicki and Melissa and Jim.”

  It was as though nothing had happened, but of course everything had. I knew it could never be the same with the handlers. I had found my people. But I had also discovered that I couldn’t be one of them, after all. Knowing where you come from is one thing, but it’s suicide to stay there. A writing teacher of mine once told me to live in his house as long as I could. He didn’t mean his actual house, but the house of fiction he’d made. The only thing he asked was that when I left, I’d leave for good, and that I’d burn the house down. That was exceptionally good advice, and I believe Carl Porter had given it, too. I think he knew what he wa
s doing in releasing me back to the wider world. At the height of it all, after Macedonia, I had actually envisioned myself preaching out of my car with a Bible, a trunkload of rattlesnakes, and a megaphone. I had wondered what it would be like to hand rattlesnakes to my wife and daughters. I had imagined getting bit and surviving. I had imagined getting bit and not surviving. I had thought about what my last words would be. It sounds funny now. It wasn’t always funny at the time.

  The day after the wedding, I would talk to Carl on the phone. He’d not mention Melissa or Punkin, but rather say he’d been worried about what had happened at the service the night before. He said he hadn’t slept well, worrying about us.

  “The church I repented in,” he explained, “had a woman pastor over it, but I don’t believe that way now. I’m like Paul. I suffer a woman not to teach. And a woman can’t be a deacon.”

  There was nothing peculiar or odd about Carl’s views. The majority of ministers in our own Southern Baptist Convention probably felt the same way about women in the church. So I didn’t tell him that Vicki was already a deacon in our home church in Birmingham. I just told him, truthfully, that she had gotten a blessing out of the service.

  “I saw that,” he said in the soft voice I’d come to love. “You know, the Lord led Daisy back there to her.”

  On that, we were both agreed.

  It’s been several months since I’ve talked to Carl. Occasionally I get a call from Charles and Aline McGlocklin, though. The theme of these conversations is that they knew what was going to happen that night after the wedding and couldn’t bear to watch. They knew we’d gotten hurt in Kingston, but that such injuries could strengthen one’s faith.

  “I’ve been hurt before, many times, Brother Dennis,” Charles says. “Let me tell you, the bite of the serpent is nothing compared to the bite of your fellow man.”

  It’s sad, in a way. I wish I could assure the Porters and the McGlocklins and all the others that we can be friends as long as we like, but that I won’t be taking up serpents anymore. I refuse to be a witness to suicide, particularly my own. I have two daughters to raise, and a vocation in the world.

  When we got into the van that night for the long ride home, Melissa said, “I’ve got all the shots I need.” That was all that was said for a long while, until after we’d stopped in Rome for ice cream. Then it all began to tumble out. Vicki said she’d felt sad and hurt during the service. Melissa ran her fingers through her wild blond hair and said it had all seemed painfully familiar to her, but still, she was baffled by Carl’s words. He had always been so gentle. It had been worse on her than on us, of course. Melissa had taken the brunt of Carl’s wrath, and because her method as a photographer was to merge with her subjects, Carl’s sermon had been a personal blow.

  In ways, though, it had to have happened the way it did. Melissa and Jim had often taken turns behind the camera. If Jim, rather than Melissa, had been there to photograph the wedding, Brother Carl might not have had a focal point for his message. We might have been spared the night’s discomfort, but we wouldn’t have known how the story would end. And stories have to end. Endings are the most important part of stories. They grow inevitably from the stories themselves. The ending of a story only seems inevitable, though, after it’s over and you’re looking back, as I am now. And in retrospect, I can tell you the dispute after the wedding was not about snakes, or about the role of women in the church. It was about the nature of God.

  The highway from Rome crossed the mountains twice, once as it entered Alabama and then again fifty miles north of Birmingham. Those last miles into the city were lonely and dark, but gradually the traffic along the interstate picked up. First there were the tractor-trailer rigs, and then the vans with children asleep in the back. And soon we were being led back into the city by a river of light, through suburbs and neighborhoods that became increasingly familiar until I realized the elevated highway was taking us above East Lake, the old neighborhood where I had grown up not knowing who my people were. It’s late afternoon at the lake. The turtles are moving closer to shore. The surface of the water is undisturbed, an expanse of smooth, gray slate. Most of the children in my neighborhood are called home for supper by their mothers. They open the back doors, wipe their hands on their aprons and yell, “Willie!” or “Joe!” or “Ray!” Either that or they use a bell, bolted to the doorframe and loud enough to start the dogs barking in backyards all along the street. But I was always called home by my father, and he didn’t do it in the customary way. He walked down the alley all the way to the lake. If I was close, I could hear his shoes on the gravel before he came into sight. If I was far, I would see him across the surface of the water, emerging out of shadows and into the gray light. He would stand with his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker while he looked for me. This is how he got me to come home. He always came to the place where I was before he called my name.

  Afterword

  My brief journey among the snake handlers of Southern Appalachia ended fifteen years ago with the publication of the book you hold in your hands, and I have rarely looked back since. I’m not an anthropologist or a scholar of religious studies. I’m just a writer who had a story to tell. And the story, for me, ended exactly where the book itself ends, with the bubbling up of a memory: the way my father used to call me home.

  During public readings over the years, though, I’ve been asked to tell in more detail how the book came about and why; and what, on purpose or by accident, I might have left out of it. The best I can do is talk about my own experience with the story — the way I came to it, and the way it pulled me under, only to release me when the time seemed right. I cannot speak for the handlers, though, and I’m sure they have their own stories to tell.

  Mine began in the winter of 1992, when I was a college professor and freelance journalist stringing for the New York Times. The ideas for articles usually came from Paul Haskins, the assignment editor on the national desk who taught me more about journalism than I will ever be able to say. Sometimes, though, I’d suggest an idea to Paul, and on one particular February morning, while my car was having its oil changed at a Firestone store in Birmingham, I called and read him a list of local news stories, ranked in the order of what I thought might interest him.

  The snake-handling preacher’s trial was last on my list because I thought the incident less newsworthy than the others and perhaps a bit too bizarre. I was afraid an article about it might reinforce the stereotype of Southerners and Southern culture, as backwater, laughable. But Paul Haskins saw something there that I didn’t.

  “That’s the one we want,” he said. “How fast can you get up to Scottsboro?”

  I told him I’d leave as soon as my car came off the rack, and when it did, I headed for Scottsboro in fine spirits: I was a journalist with an assignment in hand. I sat through the two-day trial, talked to the preacher’s wife, and interviewed members of what had been their church. And then the hard part began, the writing of the piece. As usual, I was terrified that I would make a mess of it or miss my deadline, but with Paul’s help, the article came together. I remember filing it the next night during supper. I had excused myself from the table only long enough to make minor corrections and send the story on its way.

  The article had been “put to bed,” but I had trouble sleeping that night. I could not get my mind off the people I’d met at the trial and the way they had spoken, with reverence and wistfulness, about the mystery of taking up serpents in the name of Jesus, under an anointing of the Holy Ghost.

  The next morning, Don Fehr, a brilliant young book editor, happened to read the article over breakfast at a friend’s home in Baltimore. It piqued his interest and tickled his funny bone. He later called and invited me to send him a proposal for a nonfiction book about the South. He said that snake handling could serve as the “lens.” Don was drawn to the subject matter because of his professional interest in religion and spirituality, and because, as a child, he had been bitten by a copperhead on his
elementary school’s playground. He was both terrified and fascinated by poisonous snakes.

  Don didn’t know me prior to this call, and he hadn’t read anything else I’d written. But he told me that this was the book I was born to write.

  The proposal I sent him had everything but the kitchen sink thrown in. In addition to snake handling, I said I’d be writing about stock car racing, moonshine making, alligator wrestling, and Confederate ghosts. But the more snake handling services I attended, the more convinced I became that this ought to be a book about the people I’d met in the halls of that courthouse in Scottsboro.

  What would happen to their church in the aftermath of their preacher’s conviction? Would they continue to take up poisonous serpents, and if so, why? What compelled these otherwise ordinary, thoughtful people to repeatedly risk their lives and call it God’s will? I started to envision a nonfiction novel in the tradition of John Hersey’s Hiroshima or Lillian Ross’s Picture — a factual account in which real people were the characters and my role, if I appeared at all, would simply be as an observer.

  As you know, that’s not how it turned out. Over time, I joined the handlers and became one myself — predictably, in restrospect, since I was so much like them: a poor Southern snake boy with an addiction to danger and a thirst for ecstatic religious experience.

  I loved the snake-handling services — the wild, chaotic music; the spontaneity of the testimonies; the poetry of the prophecies and prayers; and the simple, direct sermons infused with the transcendent language of the King James translation of the Holy Bible. About that translation, the handlers would often say, “If it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

  As recounted in Salvation, I testified occasionally and even preached once — a short sermon, to be sure. But I was also “slain in the spirit” (knocked to the floor by a preacher’s touch). I experienced a healing, spoke in tongues, and thought, on one occasion anyway, that I could interpret when someone else was doing the same. These moments do not appear in the book for the simple reason that I could not honestly report them as fact.