by Lisa Alther
As I approach the church circle, I study the four redbrick churches with their white spires. Apart from my wedding day, I haven’t been inside a church since I left for college. My grandmother was right to worry that once I left here, I’d never look back. But in order not to, I’ve performed an autolobotomy, renouncing religion, Republicans, and the Vietnam War. I help distraught women find abortions. My favorite members of my consciousness-raising group are lesbians, a category I didn’t even know existed when I lived here. I’ve attended several of their gatherings, one a costume party at which I dressed as the Virgin Mary in a blue nightgown with a halo made from a foil-wrapped coat hanger. Their indifference to convention is refreshing.
But relics from my past keep surfacing like the bloated corpses of drowned swimmers. For instance, I always sit with my back to a wall because my mother used to tell us that Wild Bill Hickock was shot dead on the one day he played poker with his back to an open door. You can flee the forces that have formed you and join the Witness Protection Program in a foreign land. But like Mafia hit men, they just keep on coming, tracking you down despite your cleverest disguises.
As I drive up Watauga Street past the manor houses of the Yankee factory executives, I reflect that at least my parents still live in the house my grandparents built. Yet they’ve moved on, too. My father’s nearing retirement. He’s built a tennis court in the backyard and bought a ski chalet in North Carolina. After a lifetime of fourteen-hour workdays he takes time off now to ski, golf, and play tennis. He and my mother make annual ski trips to Colorado with my sister Jane.
Jane has turned into a striking young woman with her olive skin, dark auburn hair, and pale gray eyes that shift to blue or green depending on what she’s wearing. She skis on the ski patrol and plays number 1 on the D-B tennis team. She’s also first in her class academically, and she has a wacky sense of humor. On weekends she works as a dancing mushroom at the Land of Oz theme park on nearby Beech Mountain. It’s as though she’s an only child and the rest of us are Joseph’s wicked older siblings in The Coat of Many Colors. I warn her never to sit with her back to a doorway.
Leaving Sara with my mother, I drive down to a building sided with asphalt shingles that sits in a forest clearing outside Newport, Tennessee. A sign over the door reads “Holiness Church of God in Jesus Name.” Men in green or khaki work clothes and women in housedresses are climbing out of battered pickup trucks. A few men carry small cages such as travelers use for their cats. One carries a guitar case.
The preacher, Listón, who drives a truck for a canning factory, has a pocked face, gelled hair, and long sideburns. He greets me warmly and ushers me inside to a seat on a wooden bench. The church members glance at me with shy smiles.
Once the service starts, Listón asks me to say a few words. I stand up and mumble something lame about appreciating their letting me share in their worship service.
A dozen women and girls in long dresses come forward. The guitarist starts playing, and they begin to sing, shaking tambourines and clashing cymbals —
Its God here on the platform.
Its God back by the door.
Its God in the amen corner,
And it’s God all over the floor….
Liston’s sermon is quiet at first, with lots of Bible quotes, including the one from Mark 16:17-18 on which snake handling is based: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up Serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”
Gradually his voice grows louder and louder, faster and faster, until he’s in the full harangue mode that resembles tobacco auctioneering. I’ve heard this style of preaching all my life — on the country radio station where John used to be a disc jockey and at the preaching missions every winter in the civic auditorium. But this is the first time I’ve understood that the actual words are irrelevant. The power comes from the pounding rhythm, every line punctuated by a loud HAH!
And it is powerful. It’s the origin of the phrase “preaching up a storm.” Possibly the driving beat synchronizes the audience’s brain waves so that they cease to be individuals and become a mob. But snake handlers call the state of grace they believe they achieve from it an “anointing.” One has described feeling as though warm oil were being poured over his head.
Once the atmosphere in the small room is as combustible as gunpowder, a half dozen men take the snakes from their cages — copperheads, rattlers, and cottonmouths. Others swig from a Coke bottle alleged to contain strychnine. (In 1973, Liston’s brother and another preacher died from drinking strychnine during a service.)
The men mill around up front, stroking their pet serpents and shouting incoherent praises to the Lord. Some snakes stiffen and sway like dancing cobras. Eyes glazed over, the men wander around displaying their erect snakes to the enthralled or terrified congregation, some of whom pray out loud or speak in tongues or “shout” (a high-pitched scream accompanied by a lashing, jerking movement of the upper body).
Several men lend their snakes to another man, who ends up with an entire writhing handful that resembles the severed head of Medusa. The newly snakeless jump up and down on stiff legs, arms to their sides. Or they raise both hands to the ceiling with delighted smiles, as though soliciting blessings.
By subduing these snakes, which represent the serpent in Eden, these believers are proving that God will protect those who master evil. (Some seventy-seven of the estimated two to five thousand members of this faith have died from snakebites. Though most of the bitten refuse treatment, my father has tended a few in the emergency room and reports that it’s an awful death. Like suicide bombers or kamikaze pilots, this cult may prove self-limiting.)
With a start I realize that if Listón calls me forward, I may go. I’m appalled to realize that my sense of politesse is so exaggerated that I’d even juggle a rattlesnake so as not to appear rude to these overwrought Christians, most of whom look like hardworking farmers, truck drivers, factory workers, and housewives. This is probably the most stimulation they’ve experienced all week. The famous mountain feuds over who left the gate open so the hogs got out may have entertained their forebears similarly.
Even more stimulating, snake handling is illegal in Tennessee. The state, while upholding religious freedoms, affirmed in court its right “to guard against the unnecessary creation of widows and orphans.”
Afterward I bid Listón farewell and climb into my car. One of tonight’s snake handlers will soon be sentenced to six years in prison for assault after flinging a rattlesnake at someone during a service. In Alabama, another preacher will be sent to prison for life for banging his cage with a stick to upset the snakes and then forcing his wife’s hand inside it. Although bitten twice, she survived and reported him to the sheriff.
As I drive back toward Kingsport, I contrast this mayhem to a typical service at St. Paul’s Episcopal. There, men in pinstriped suits and women in mink coats intone the General Confession from the prayer book: “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickednesses, which we from time to time most grievously have committed by thought, word, and deed against Thy divine majesty, provoking most justly Thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings. The remembrance of them is grievous unto us. The burden of them is intolerable.”
I admire the sedate cadences of the elegant language. But I recall a Vermont friend’s referring to Episcopalians as God’s Frozen People. When the choice is between meltdown or glaciation, is it any wonder that I’ve left town?
I head out to the cabin on our farm so I can wake up early and plan my Melungeon trip. I get out of the car to open the gate. After driving through it, I get out again to close the gate.
As I return to the car, a huge white shape emerges from the dark, like Moby Dick appearing to Captain Ahab. This apparition races me to the car, but I get there first and slam the door in its face, which upon
close inspection turns out to belong to a slavering bull named Caesar. I wave to him with a middle finger.
I let myself into the cabin at the bottom of the hill. It was built around 1820 by a saddle maker named Everett Mahoney on land stolen from the Cherokee. Mahoney was the son of an Irishman who came to Philadelphia from Dublin as an indentured servant in 1773. Much of our area was settled by former indentured servants and their children, who streamed south from Pennsylvania and west from the Virginia Tidewater once they served their terms. Mahoney built this cabin from squared chestnut logs and paneled it inside with planks of black walnut.
I dump my gear in the front bedroom and climb into my father’s boyhood bedstead, completely exhausted. It’s not every day that I consider cuddling Christian copperheads or get chased by a homicidal bull. As I doze off, I make a mental note for my article that the impulse behind both snake handling and bullfighting is probably the same — to combat rural boredom by tormenting lethal creatures.
The next morning I phone Len, the son of Caesar’s owner. Younger than I, he wears his hair hanging loose to his shoulders. He sometimes rides an ATV up the valley to check on the cows, leaping around the hills on it like a mountain goat on speed. Despite his mountain-man persona, no one could be nicer or more helpful. Except perhaps his parents, Paul and Wanda, who are probably the kindest and hardest-working people I’ve ever known.
As a child, I used to watch them harvest tobacco in the field beside our pond. They cut each leaf from its stalk. Holding a stem in both hands, they’d impale it on a metal spike fitted over the end of a wooden pole. Once a pole was packed with leaves, it was pitched like a tepee with the leaves spread out around it to dry in the sun. Then the poles were hung in the rafters of our barn to cure. One time Wanda ran her spike through her hand. But she just wrapped it in a rag and kept on working.
Whenever one of my brothers expressed interest in dropping out of school, my father would send him to work tobacco with Wanda and Paul so he could experience his future without a formal education. After a few days, he’d be thrilled to limp back to class.
“Len,” I say when he answers his phone, “Caesar nearly gored me last night when I came in.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says, “we was having trouble with him, so we put him in your field.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“If he bothers you, just shoot him with your shotgun.”
“I don’t own a shotgun,” I reply through gritted teeth.
“Well, get you one, then.”
“I don’t want a shotgun.”
“Well, just reach down like you was gonna pick up a rock to throw at him, and he’ll back off right quick.”
“Len, get that bull out of our yard!”
“Okay, no problem,” he says amiably.
I sit down on the porch and gaze out at the pond, where migrating mallards are paddling around on a rest break. A hunched blue heron stands in the shallows, still as a statue, waiting for some hapless minnow to pass by. Bluebirds and cardinals flit in and out of the bushes behind him.
Beyond the pond stretches the valley. It’s narrow and flat with steep hills on either side. Clusters of black-and-white Holsteins are grazing all along it. At the turn of the twentieth century, a doctor named Home lived in this cabin and reportedly hosted horse races down that valley.
The silence is soon broken by a racket of grunting and snorting. Len has evidently returned Caesar to his harem. He’s now standing at the electric fence that separates the dairy cows from the beef cattle. Opposite him looms the Black Angus bull, whose herd of cows and heifers is grazing behind him, oblivious to his heroics on their behalf. The two bulls snort at each other and paw the ground, as though they’ve been watching too many documentaries on Pamplona.
They take a break so that each can mount one of his long-suffering cows and show the other what he’s got. Then the bulls swagger back to the fence and resume their bellowing.
Len and his father know each of these three hundred cows by name. When I was growing up, we split a cow with them every year for meat. I remember the year we ate the cow named Lisa. So do my therapists.
I try my best to ignore all this testosterone and think instead about my Melungeon article. A few miles away, just down the road from Erwin (the town that lynched the elephant), lies an archaeological site called Plum Grove. The first time I tried to visit it, the forest ranger, worried I might loot the unguarded site for artifacts, refused to tell me where it was. I reminded him that it was located in a national forest and I was a taxpayer. He reluctantly drew me a map to the field, which sits in a wide valley alongside the Nolichucky River.
Plum Grove has been carbon-dated to the mid-1400s. Some researchers believe it to be the ruins of a Yuchi town named Guasili, through which Hernando de Soto marched in 1540. The Guasilians gave the Spaniards baskets of puppies to roast for dinner. The soldiers enjoyed Guasili so much that after they left, they called out “House of Guasili” for good luck when rolling dice.
The Yuchi, called the Chisca by the Spaniards, are thought to descend from the Woodland period mound builders who occupied the Southeast from around 1000 B.C. to A.D. 800. The Yuchi called themselves Tsoyaha, “children of the sun.” Other tribes and various Europeans called them the Tongora, Oustack, Tahogalewi, Hogoheegee, Rickahokan, and Hogologe.
Some Spanish soldiers under Sergeant Hernando Moyano fought a battle with the Yuchi in 1566 at their town called Maniateque near present-day Saltville, Virginia. The Spaniards claimed to have burned fifty houses and killed a thousand people. Soon afterward they attacked a second town called Guapere on the upper Watauga River, where they killed fifteen hundred Yuchi by burning down the huts in which they were cowering.
In 1600 the governor of La Florida (as the Spaniards called the entire Southeast), Don Gonzalo Méndez de Canco, interviewed two Indian women named Teresa Martyn and Luisa Menendez. They’d left their village in Yuchi territory to travel to St. Augustine with a Spanish exploring party. These women claimed the Yuchi were “white-skinned, blue-eyed, and red-haired.”
In a 1714 battle with the Cherokee, a thousand residents of another Yuchi village barred themselves in their council house once it was clear they’d be defeated. The young, the old, and the women were strangled by the warriors, who then impaled themselves on arrows or hanged themselves from the rafters with their bowstrings. Some survivors were absorbed by the Cherokee. Others joined the Creek in Georgia or the Seminóle in Florida. Still others formed a fierce slave-catching tribe in South Carolina called the Westo. (I wonder if some might have moved thirty miles northwest to become the Melungeons.)
A similar fate met many southeastern tribes when the Europeans arrived. The tribes moved to new locations under pressure from the westward-pressing settlers or from other dislocated tribes. They had multiple names in the various native and European languages. These names were rarely what they called themselves. And when these names were written down, each recorder transcribed his own phonetic version. For instance, Yuchi was also written as Hughchee, Euchee, and Uge. Reduced in numbers by epidemics, starvation, slavery, alcoholism, and war with Europeans and other tribes, the remnants of weaker tribes merged with stronger ones.
As boys, my father and his friends collected boxes of arrowheads, spearheads, and potsherds from creek banks and burial mounds all around our area. Their collection is now housed in a museum at the University of Tennessee. My father used to lead us kids on similar excursions. When we’d get lost, he’d say, “Don’t worry: I’m just taking you back to the Indians.” I used to fret about whether he was kidding — until I realized that the Indians were no longer there to go back to.
I drive toward Sneedville, said to be the epicenter of Melungeon settlement. Compared to the Rockies or the Alps, the southern Appalachians are foothills. But compared to the Green Mountains of Vermont, they seem wild and rugged. Southward-creeping glaciers ground nearly half a mile off the Green Mountains, rounded their summits, and broadened their valleys. But some
eighty-two peaks in the glacier-free southern Appalachians rise higher than five thousand feet, and the valleys here are deep and narrow. Twilight comes early to these hollows as the sun plunges behind the parapets of rock.
Once you’ve wound up and down these claustrophobic mountains on hairpin switchbacks for several hours, your heart leaps into your throat when you drive out into a broad valley, and you can very well imagine what settlers must have felt after spending weeks trudging through these punishing mountains. Valley land here has always been highly valued because it’s level and easily plowed. Prior to the Tennessee Valley Authority dams, the creeks and rivers flooded most springs, leaving deposits of rich topsoil. Indians built their villages above these waterways because crops grew well in the floodplain and because the rivers provided water, transportation, and fish.
When European settlers arrived, they, too, coveted this rich bottomland. So, in the largest land grab since the Norman Conquest, they simply took it. Or not so simply, because it required many decades of bogus treaties and bloody warfare, culminating in the Trail of Tears. Although American schoolchildren learn that our continent was a vast uninhabited wilderness when Europeans “discovered” it, current estimates place the native population of North America at somewhere between five and twenty million. These people spoke over five hundred languages. The Ohio River Valley alone contained five thousand villages.
“Free person of color” (FPC) was a category applied in the nineteenth century to anyone whose skin wasn’t pale enough to allow him or her to pass for a northern European. This included Middle Easterners, Native Americans, Africans, East Asians, East Indians, Mediterraneans, or any mixture of these.
Of course, many settlers were illiterate and had no record of who their ancestors were. Many hid exotic origins, changing or anglicizing their names, moving to new places, fabricating new ancestors. So in practice, it was darker skin that made you vulnerable to being labeled FPC. Since FPCs weren’t allowed to testify against white people in court, those who were edged off their land had no recourse (short of murder or suicide) but to move to a place no one else wanted, like a swamp or a mountaintop.
