Salvation on Sand Mountain (10 page)

The Scotch-Irish were encouraged by the more sedate Quakers to seek land on the western frontier, and after the coldness and clamor of the cities, the new immigrants, with names like Rutherford, Graham, Armstrong, and Bankhead, must have ached for familiar terrain, places like the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, or the Sequatchie and Grasshopper Valleys of Tennessee: long, sheltered valleys between hills with rocky outcroppings, settings that might remind them of the starkly beautiful border regions they had left behind in southern Scotland and northern England. The climate here would be temperate, the water plentiful, and once the trees had been cleared, the land might roll beneath their feet as it had in the shadows of the Cheviot Hills. But to get to
these interior valleys, the immigrants had to cross the mountains, a journey with dangers we are unable to fully appreciate now.

Fortunately, these were a people accustomed to privation and sudden violence. Fischer says their heritage as border dwellers had turned them into tight-knit warrior clans that feuded endlessly over matters of real or perceived violations of honor. In their homeland, leadership had been bestowed on those with the strength and cunning to enforce it. Other forms of authority were rejected, whether from the local landowner, the state, or the church, so that even minor theological disputes became occasions for war. A particularly bloody rebellion was waged by an anticlerical Presbyterian sect called Cameronians, after their leader, Richard Cameron. Unable to defeat the Cameronians in battle, the British authorities eventually made use of their temperaments by enlisting them in the army to fight against Roman Catholics in the Scottish Highlands.

Not surprisingly, says Fischer, the culture that arose in the Appalachian mountains resurrected the character of that life along the border between Scotland and England. The Scotch-Irish had brought few material possessions with them, but they did bring their feuds, their language, and their love of music, strong drink, and sexual adventure. They also brought their fear of outsiders and their hostility toward clerics and
established religions. Their own brand of Anglicanism or Presbyterianism would have seemed peculiar in the population centers of the Atlantic seaboard, but it was appropriate for life on the frontier. They sometimes called themselves People of the New Light, to distance themselves from the formalities and rigidity of Calvinism. The established churches emphasized good works or election as the means of salvation. But the New Lights celebrated what they called “free grace” and often worshiped outdoors under the stars, a practice that would culminate in the phenomenon of Cane Ridge.

The rigors of mountain life came to suit the Scotch-Irish, and instead of coming out of the mountains into the fertile valleys, many of the new settlers stayed, eking out a subsistence from the thin soil of the highland slopes. They grew their own produce and slaughtered their own livestock. They built their own cabins and furniture. They wove their own clothes, made their own whiskey. They were poor but selfsufficient. And although most, by the beginning of the twentieth century, had been lured into the coal fields, the mill towns of the Piedmont, or the industrial cities of the Midwest, many never found their way out of the mountains, or found their way out too late to apprehend the culture that had grown up in the promised land around them. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, these descendants of fierce Scotch-Irish immigrants awoke from their sojourn in
the mountains to face the bitter reality of an industrialized and secularized society. Their sense of purposeful labor was eroded in the mines and factories. Their formerly close-knit families fractured. And they confronted a largely urban culture that appeared to have lost its concept of the sacred. The hill people had awoken to discover that the new Eden they’d inherited was doomed — mechanized and despoiled beyond recognition — and that they were lost in the very heart of it.

 

 

All along the highways through Tennessee and southwest Virginia, the signs were everywhere: Crazy Joe’s Fireworks, Jack Daniel’s whiskey, drag racing, turkey shoots, and barbecue. The South they suggested was straight out of the movies — idiosyncratic, lazy, restless, and self-absorbed. And that was what Jim and Melissa and I talked about on the drive, the discrepancy between the South of the popular imagination and the one we lived and worked in every day. But once the road narrowed and entered the mountains, the signs disappeared, replaced by mine tipples, mantrips, and long lines of train cars filled with coal that steamed in the rain. The last motels and hospital were at Grundy, Virginia, a mining town on the lip of a winding river between mountains so steep and irrational, they must have blocked most of the sun most of the day. It is difficult to imagine how children can grow up in such a place without carrying narrowed horizons into the rest of their lives.

But Grundy was an oasis compared with the country between it and Jolo. Jim had taken the wheel on that stretch, and I was able to see the landscape for what it was. The topography was like a crumpled sheet of tin. And in that driving rain, at night, the road without guardrails seemed to be a metaphor for our condition. We were barreling down a rain-slick mountain after ten hours solid on the road, and the safe haven at the end of our journey was a place where strangers would be picking up rattlesnakes and drinking strychnine out of mason jars. We wondered if we’d lost our minds. Despite the fact that all three of us love danger, this was a little much. Plus, we were lost. When we finally came out of the mountains, we stopped at the first frame meeting house with a crowd. It sounded Holiness from the outside, all light and hubbub and an amplified nasal voice, but when I got out of the van to investigate, I discovered that it was simply a Friday night auction and Bingo game. I asked a table of players near the open door if they knew where I could find a snake-handling church.

“A
what?”
asked a woman in a United Mine Workers sweatshirt. The others at her table glanced up in alarm, and I got back in the van.

Farther on down the road, we found a man at a gas station who had heard of the church and could give us general directions. His name, Doyle, was stitched on his shirt pocket, and his forearm sported a tattoo of a sea monster. “Before
you cross the bridge, take a right,” he told us. “You’ll see it up the road a ways. I wouldn’t get near those snakes if I were you.”

Doyle’s directions were so vague that we missed the church on the first pass, but saw it doubling back, a small frame building perched on the edge of a ravine.

We parked and got out.

It was still drizzling. The door of the church was open. Yellow light poured out onto the parked cars. The sanctuary had paneled walls and ceiling fans. Gravel crunched under our feet as we passed a dark man in a late-model car. He cupped his hand to light a cigarette. Near the front door of the church we could see the rusted remains of a car that lay suspended just over the edge of the ravine in a net of kudzu and sweet gum.

Inside the church, the air smelled of camphor and damp wool. Nobody in the congregation looked back at us, and I didn’t see anyone I recognized right off the bat. There was no sign yet of Charles and Aline. A few other photographers were present, though, so Jim and Melissa found seats near them and got their cameras ready. But just before I sat down, on a pew three away from the front, I saw Carl Porter at the front, far right. I caught Carl’s eye, and when he smiled, his glasses glinted in the overhead lights. Carolyn wasn’t beside him, so I looked around the sanctuary until I saw her near the back. She nodded and waved. Her red hair had been cut
and styled, and she was wearing a high-necked dress trimmed in lace. Carolyn didn’t handle often, but when she did, it was with frightful abandon. At the last homecoming at Carl’s church in Georgia, the snakes had been piled up on the pulpit. Carolyn picked up the entire pile. A rattlesnake struck at her and missed, but it was not so much the close call as Carolyn’s reckless passion that unnerved us. Red hair flying, speaking in tongues, she had lifted up the pile of snakes to eye level and shouted at them until her face turned crimson, and then she had dropped them back onto the pulpit with such force that Carl had to come over and straighten them up.

Jim leaned over the back of the pew in front of me. “Looks like we missed the snakes,” he whispered. He sounded disappointed. Like me, he’d become obsessed with the handlers. (On the way to Jolo, he’d talked about an art installation he wanted to do — a rusted-out car on blocks, with rattlesnakes coming out of its rotted front seat and Brother Carl preaching on the radio.) It’s hard to know what to wish for in a serpent-handling church. You want to see the snakes taken out, but at the same time you don’t. The more the snakes are taken out, the more the odds begin to work against the handlers. As an observer, you are in a moral quandary, responsible in an acute way for the wishes you make.

Four serpent boxes lay askew on a raised platform at the front, where a marionette of a man with thick glasses and the remains of a pompadour was flailing his arms in midsermon.
“People today, they’re hunting for an excuse,” he said. “They want to look around and see what the other fellow’s doing. They say, ‘Well, I’m not doing this,’ and ‘I ain’t gonna do that.’” He marched to one side of the platform in mock disgust. “Honey, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You get the other fellow in your eye, and you’ll both go to hell!” And then he hopped back across the platform on one foot while the congregation amened.

The preacher’s name was Bob Elkins. A former mine superintendent, he was the official pastor of the church, which was called the Church of the Lord Jesus, but I would later find out that his wife, Sister Barbara Elkins, held true power. Sister Barbara was reportedly the last person still alive who had handled with George Went Hensley, the man legend said was the first to get the notion to take up a serpent, near Sale Creek, Tennessee, around 1910. At the time of our visit, Sister Barbara was seventy-six and so ill she couldn’t attend the Friday night service. But she would be there on Saturday, as I would find out when I felt the sting of her reprimand.

As Brother Elkins brought his sermon to a close, Charles and Aline McGlocklin finally walked in. Brother Elkins pushed his glasses up onto his nose to get a good look at the couple, and then he continued preaching. Aline was wearing a satiny blue dress, and both she and Charles were spangled with droplets of rain. They sat next to Sister Carolyn.

When Brother Elkins had finished, Charles took to the
platform with his guitar. I assumed that Brother Carl, the visiting evangelist for this year’s homecoming, had invited Charles to sing and preach a little. Sermons at snake-handling churches are short but numerous. Nobody ever uses notes, preferring to let the Spirit move. Charles was a master of this kind of improvisation, but that night was his first visit to Jolo, and he seemed nervous. The West Virginia crowd was a hard-looking lot, stricter in dress and behavior than congregations farther South. Hand-printed signs on the wall behind the pulpit forbade such things as short hair on women, long hair or beards or mustaches on men, short sleeves on either sex, and gossip, talebearing, lying, backbiting, and bad language from the pulpit. The West Virginians had been in this thing a long time, and they’d been hurt. The year before, one of their members, Ray Johnson, had died after being bit by a rattlesnake during a service at the church. His son-in-law, Jeffrey Hagerman, a new member, had been bitten four times. Barbara Elkins’s own daughter, Columbia, had died of snakebite at the church in 1961, and Barbara’s son, Dewey Chafin — a handsome, disabled coal miner with broad shoulders and white hair — had been bitten 116 times.

Charles had been bitten only once, and that was when he saw a rattlesnake crossing the road in Alabama and picked it up to impress some fellows he worked with. “They were sinner men,” Aline confided. Charles maintained that the bite didn’t even hurt him. The dilemma was clear: Charles hadn’t
been hurt, and now he was fixing to preach to a bunch of strangers, at their own homecoming, who had been hurt, and hurt bad.

“The Bible says the Holy Ghost will lead you, teach you, and guide you,” he said. “I didn’t even have a map to show me this place.” Despite his smile, he was greeted with silence. “I know we drove about five hundred miles to get here,” he continued.

Still, nobody said anything. Charles strummed a chord on his guitar and looked out over the congregation as if waiting for the right words to come. He had, after all, seen angels and been taken out in the spirit for long messages from the Lord. “You know, there’s a lot of church forms and a lot of church buildings, but there ain’t but one church,” he said, and that seemed to start the crowd warming to him. They knew what would follow. “There ain’t but one God,” Charles said. “One church.”

“One God, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one father and God of all who is above all, and over all, and in you all!”

“And it’s time the people that’s in the real church of the living God, the one that Jesus gave Peter the keys to the kingdom to in the sixteenth chapter of the book of Matthew, it’s time that God’s people let the world know God’s the same yesterday, today, and forever!”

Amen. Thank God.

“Amen,” he said back to them in relief. “That’s already been worth the trip.”

He had hit them with the Holiness precepts: one God, one spirit, the alpha and omega, unchanging. He did not say it then, but everyone understood what rightly followed: God had but one name, Jesus. For the church at Jolo, no matter how it differed otherwise from the churches in Alabama and Georgia, was a Jesus Name church. Instead of baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, they baptized in the name of Jesus. To them, Jesus was the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Trinitarians called them “Jesus Onlys.” They called Trinitarians “three-God people.”