Salvation on Sand Mountain (2 page)

T
he first time I went to a snake-handling service, nobody even took a snake out. This was in Scottsboro, Alabama, in March of 1992, at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following. I’d come to the church at the invitation of one of the members I’d met while covering the trial of their preacher, Rev. Glenn Summerford, who had been convicted and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison for attempting to murder his wife with rattlesnakes.

The church was on a narrow blacktop called Woods Cove Road, not far from the Jackson County Hospital. I remember it was a cool evening. The sky was the color of apricots, and the moon had just risen, a thin, silver crescent. There weren’t any stars out yet.

After I crossed a set of railroad tracks past the hospital, I could see the lights of the church in the distance, but as I
drew nearer I started to wonder if this were really a church at all. It was, in fact, a converted gas station and country store, with a fiberboard façade and a miniature steeple. The hand-painted sign spelled the preacher’s first name in three different ways: Glenn, Glen, and Glyn. A half dozen cars were parked out front, and even with the windows of my own car rolled up, I could feel the beat of the music.

That music was like nothing I’d ever heard before, a cross between Salvation Army and acid rock: tambourines, an electric guitar, drums, cymbals, and voices that careened from one note to the next as though the singers were being sawn in half.
“I shall not be ... I shall not be moved. I shall not be ... I shall not be moved. Just like a tree that’s planted by the wa-a-ter, oh ... I shall not be moved!”

There are moments when you stand on the brink of a new experience and understand that you have no choice about it. Either you walk into the experience or you turn away from it, but you know that no matter what you choose, you will have altered your life in a permanent way. Either way, there will be consequences.

I walked on in.

A dozen or so men and women were clapping hands and stomping feet. They had the angular, hand-me-down look of Appalachian hill people, and some of them were familiar to me from the trial. I recognized the bald head and wispy,
white beard of Uncle Ully Lynn, whom I’d talked to in the witness room during a recess. He seemed to be dressed in the same faded overalls, and his pale blue eyes were as serene and mysterious as they had been at the trial.

“What’s it like to take up a serpent?” I had asked him then.

“It’s hard to explain,” Uncle Ully had said. “You’re in a prayerful state. You can’t have your mind on other things. The Spirit tells you what to do.”

“But why do some people get bit?”

He thought about it a minute. “In that situation,” he said, “somebody must have misjudged the Spirit.”

In his youth, the story went, Uncle Ully had been one of the biggest gospel singers on Sand Mountain, but I didn’t know that then. I also didn’t know that within a year he’d be dead, eaten from the inside out by a gangrenous infection that had nothing to do with snakes. At the time of his death, Uncle Ully was still receiving royalties for the songs he’d written for his relative, Loretta Lynn, but that story, too, was one I wouldn’t hear till he was gone. All I knew on that first night was that Uncle Ully was a snake handler who seemed to have been a good enough judge of the Spirit to stay alive when others hadn’t.

Beyond Uncle Ully’s bobbing bald head, I could make out Sister Bobbie Sue Thompson, the woman who had first
invited me to the service. She smiled and motioned for me to join her at the front of the church, where she appeared to be leading the singing. At her side stood a woman in a snakeskin-print shirt. I didn’t know the words to the songs, but that didn’t seem to matter. We sang mostly choruses — “I Saw the Light,” “Wading through Deep Water,” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The guitar player, a redheaded gnome of a man named Cecil, played surprisingly well. Standing beside him, I was able to get a good look at the church.

Before Glenn Summerford’s trial, attendance at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following had reportedly neared a hundred people on any of the three nights during the week when services were held. How all those people fit into the tiny sanctuary was a mystery. The church didn’t have more than a dozen pews, and its linoleum floor buckled like a cresting wave. The white walls were bare except for portraits of Jesus and a faded tapestry of the Last Supper. An electric heater glowed in the middle of the room. There were bathrooms off a hall in back.

When the singing wound down, a short, wiry man with a mustache and slicked-back hair headed for the pulpit. He was carrying a Bible in one hand and a flat wooden serpent box in the other. He wore a dark, western-style shirt, jeans, and a Jesus belt buckle. The portrait of Jesus on the buckle was not one of those conventional ones in which the Lord appears to
be a mild-mannered aesthete with shampooed hair. This man’s Jesus was more like the wild-eyed Jewish carpenter who had chased the money changers from the temple.

“I ain’t no preacher,” the man said apologetically. His bottom front teeth were missing. I’d later find out his name was J.L. “I ain’t no assistant preacher either,” he said. “I’m just trying to keep the church open.”

“Amen,” Sister Bobbie Sue said.

J.L. gingerly set the snake box on the altar, and there was an awkward silence as he laid his Bible on the pulpit and slowly thumbed through it. His fingers were square and his nails dark — workman’s hands. He was a welder with a bad heart who dreamed of artificially inseminating his own cattle, I later learned.

“Help him, Jesus,” Sister Bobbie Sue said.

“The text is gonna be John 3:16,” J.L. finally said. He read haltingly, one finger in the book, his dark eyebrows knit. An odd thing about the place occurred to me even then. When it’s absolutely still and quiet in a church like The Church of Jesus with Signs Following, even then there’s an impression of movement, as though a light were swinging from a chain, but there wasn’t any such light that night. It was an illusion, I thought. Something there that wasn’t.

“For God so loved the world,”
J.L.
read, “that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

“Amen,” said Sister Bobbie Sue.

“Bless His sweet name,” said the woman in the snakeskin shirt.

J.L. looked up, considering his next words. “God so loved the world,” he said. And then: “Let us pray.”

It had to have been the shortest sermon in history. But nobody seemed to mind. They all came to the front, the women in their ankle-length dresses with the lace collars and tiny flowered prints, the men in their jeans, overalls, or polyester slacks. They knelt at the makeshift altar and started praying out loud, each a different prayer. J.L.’s voice rose above the others for a measure or so. “O Lord, be with us now, and in thy mercy hold and keep us, and O Dear God, bless this our little church, amen, and keep it for your own....”

Then another voice rose up to meet his, entered into fellowship with it, and fell away, each voice on a separate strand of meaning but weaving with the others into a kind of song, rising and falling, gathering and dispersing, and high above it all like a descant ran the voice of Glenn Summerford’s mother, Aunt Annie Mance. She was praying for her son, in prison for ninety-nine years for a crime she said he couldn’t have committed, and her voice joined in a duet with another woman’s plea for her own lost children, living in the city, in sin, and just beneath the women were
Uncle Ully’s raspy, grasshopper voice and Sister Bobbie Sue’s bluesy one. And underneath all the human voices was the incessant rattle of the serpent in the wooden box.

No one called for the prayer to end. The voices simply fell into a shared rhythm that gradually tapered off, subsiding in volume and in pitch. The sounds of the rattlesnake remained constant while the voices disassembled themselves, but finally even the snake went silent, and the prayer concluded with amens that fell on top of one another like the half-sighed endings of a round.

I stepped outside after my first service at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following and wondered where the time had gone. It was nearly ten o‘clock. That crescent of moon had disappeared behind Sand Mountain. The stars, bright as ice, had popped out.

Some of the men were gathered in the parking lot. They were talking about how it used to be before Glenn’s arrest, when the church was filled with families from all over Jackson County. “They’ll be back,” said Cecil, the guitar player, and he patted me on the arm. “You come back, too.”

 

 

I grew up in a Methodist church, but ours must have been an odd kind of Methodism. We were a small congregation in East Lake, an urban residential neighborhood of Birmingham, and occasionally we’d get a preacher from what we thought
of as the sticks, from a place like East Gadsden, a small mill town at the foot of the Appalachians, or Arab, pronounced A-rab, on the top of Brindley Mountain.

These preachers sometimes seemed a little out of place in our quiet, sober neighborhood, where the families of grocers and plumbers and office workers tried to secure a hold on middle-class respectability. The preachers would attempt to liven up the services by shouting till they were hoarse. Sometimes they resorted to bolder tactics. In the middle of a sermon, for instance, Brother Jack Dillard, my favorite, would suddenly be so overcome by the Spirit, he would run down to the piano and start banging away on it. He could not, in fact, play the piano, but that didn’t seem to matter.

Brother Dillard believed in obeying the Spirit, and he encouraged those grocers and tradesmen to do the same, although I don’t recall ever seeing any of them follow his example. Of course, all of us teenagers got saved in that church during Brother Dillard’s tenure, some of us multiple times. The record was held by a girl named Frances Fuller, who never passed up an opportunity to rush to the altar. She occasionally had a seizure halfway there, and someone would have to run to the kitchen to find a spoon to put in her mouth. The choir would continue to sing “All to Jesus I Surrender,” and I remember my father’s grip would tighten on the back of the pew in front of him until they got Frances up on her feet and back in her seat again.

What we really worried about, though, was Brother Dillard’s heart. Years later, it would kill him. We worried because he always worked himself into such a sweat when he preached that he would have to take out his handkerchief and mop his forehead, cheeks, and neck. This was such a familiar habit that it didn’t distract us one bit from his sermon, not even the Sunday when, instead of pulling his handkerchief out, he retrieved his pocket comb by mistake and began combing his hair while he shouted, “When we were yet sinners, He died for us!”

Those days were filled with desperate innocence and with a spiritual light that I would later miss. We were a naive little church, always prey to a good sob story — the missionary we sponsored in what was then Southern Rhodesia, for instance. Years later we discovered he actually owned a fairly sizable rubber plantation, on which local villagers worked for next to nothing. The young men lived in barracks on the plantation, and the owner would have informal Bible study with them sometimes at night. For this, he was called a missionary, and we would send him a good portion of our foreign missions budget every month.

And then there was Dr. Doctorin. Dr. Doctorin came to us in 1958, at a time when the newspapers were filled with stories about Lebanon’s civil war, and with photographs of U.S. Marines wading ashore in Beirut. There was a lot of concern both for our soldiers and for the poor Lebanese. We
considered ourselves fortunate when Dr. Doctorin showed up at our church one Sunday night to conduct an impromptu revival. The timing could not have been better. Dr. Doctorin said that he had just come from Beirut. We took up a huge love offering for him. I remember that he wept when we brought him the overflowing collection plates.

It was the last time we ever saw Dr. Doctorin, and it was not until many years later that I began to wonder if he really had been a doctor, and if his name could really have been Dr. Doctorin, and if he were really from Beirut.

We weren’t always right in our assessment of people and their intentions, but we had a simple, childlike faith, something Jesus said he approved of. And if my experience in that church did nothing else for me, it accustomed me to strange outpourings of the Spirit and gave me a tender regard for con artists and voices in the wilderness, no matter how odd or suspicious their message might be. I believe it also put me in touch with a rough-cut and reckless side of myself that I otherwise might never have recognized, locked way back somewhere in cell memory, a cultural legacy I would have otherwise known nothing about. You see, growing up in East Lake, where people were trying so hard to escape their humble pasts, I had come of age not knowing much about my family history. As far as we were concerned, the Covingtons went back only two generations, to our grandparents.
My grandfather on my mother’s side had been a railroad detective and had died of syphilis. My father’s father had also ridden the trains, as a postal clerk. Later, I would discover that Covingtons had not always lived in Birmingham, but that at some point we, too, had come down from the mountains, and that those wild-eyed, perspiring preachers of my childhood were kin to me in a way I could never have expected or fully appreciated. In retrospect, I believe that my religious education had pointed me all along toward some ultimate rendezvous with people who took up serpents.

 

 

 

 

Even without the snakes, my first trip to a snake-handling church had been exhilarating and unsettling. I drove back to Birmingham that night in a heightened and confused state, as though the pupils of my spiritual eyes had been dilated. The sensation was uncomfortable but not entirely unpleasant. Whatever this was about, I wanted to experience more. And of course I
had
to see what they did with the snakes.