Salvation on Sand Mountain (4 page)

Residents would prefer to talk about Scottsboro’s present — its composed and photogenic town square; its famous First Monday Trade Days, one of the oldest craft shows and flea markets in the South; and the new Bellefonte nuclear power plant, which is drawing physicists, engineers, and other professional people to the area. Scottsboro, residents say, has a lot to offer these new immigrants. The fishing is great in the sloughs of Lake Guntersville, the town’s strip boasts a Chinese restaurant and a trendy sports bar, and golf and sailing are de rigueur at Goose Pond Colony, a 360-acre resort and recreation complex just south of the city limits.

But to even the casual observer, there’s a third Scottsboro, a town quite different from the one fixed in history or the one portrayed in the contemporary chamber of commerce brochures. Its emblem could have been that converted store
and filling station out on Woods Cove Road, the one with the miniature steeple and the sign out front that read “The Church of Jesus with Signs Following.”

This was the Scottsboro of Rev. Glenn Summerford and his flock, many of whose families had come down from the mountains after World War II and had been trying to eke out a living and a sense of dignity ever since. Some had come from Tater Knob to the north of town or Poorhouse Mountain to the west. But most had come from Sand Mountain to the east, an enormous plateau twenty-five miles across and seventy-five miles long, one of the southernmost reaches of the Appalachians and an island of possibility in the midst of a Southern culture in crisis.

In northeastern Alabama, as in much of the rest of the South, progress since World War II has been double-edged: it has meant higher wages, better health, and less isolation from the rest of the world, but it has also meant the loss of a traditional way of life. The hill people had prided themselves on their independence and self-sufficiency. They grew what they ate, bartered for what they couldn’t grow, and did without those conveniences they couldn’t fashion out of the materials at hand. But contact with the dominant culture in the cities and towns began to change all that. The new highways, increased personal income, and better communication led to rising expectations and a migration away from areas
like rural northeastern Alabama toward the magnets of Nashville, Chattanooga, and Birmingham. Families were torn apart and separated from the land. Language and habits of mind began to be lost, as were old arts like divining water, snaking logs, and killing hogs. People stopped saying “I’ll swan” for “I’ll swear,” as their ancestors had done in North Britain for centuries. And the dead were no longer laid out with platters of salt on their stomachs, a ritual once meant to evoke the immortality of the soul.

Today, Sand Mountain’s crossroad towns boast new libraries and civic centers, but the countryside itself is littered with burned-out house trailers, automobile graveyards, collapsed chicken farms, and those ubiquitous totems of cultural anomie — tanning beds and late-night video stores. Marijuana is a major cash crop on the mountain. Illegal cockfighting appears to be a favorite pastime. “Sand Mountain is a law unto itself,” says one federal drug enforcement official. The lure of the secular and worldly in a region once characterized as the Bible Belt has left a residue of rootlessness, anxiety, and lawlessness.

Enter the snake handlers, spiritual nomads from the high country that surrounded Scottsboro, from isolated pockets on Sand Mountain and the hollows along South Sauty Creek. They were refugees from a culture on the ropes. They spoke in tongues, anointed one another with oil in order to be healed, and when instructed by the Holy Ghost, drank poison,
held fire, and took up poisonous snakes. For them, Scottsboro itself was the wicked, wider world, a place where one might be tempted to “back up on the Lord.” They’d taken the risk, though, out of economic desperation. They had been drawn to Scottsboro by the promise of jobs in the mills that made clothes, carpets, rugs, and tires. Some of them had found work. All of them had found prejudice.

“They call us ‘Old Jesus Onlys,’ ‘freaks,’ and ‘Holy Rollers,”’ said Sister Bobbie Sue Thompson, one of Glenn Summerford’s most ardent supporters at his trial. But she’d learned to live with the ridicule. It was part of the price, she said, that believers paid for being what the Bible calls “a separated people” who were
“in
the world, but not
of
the world.”

When the handlers came down to Scottsboro, they began meeting in houses along Tupelo Pike. Their first church in town burned to the ground. They suspected arson, but charges were never brought. They felt like they’d gotten the message, though. So they moved to other locations, some clandestine, some not. For a while they had a place above Five Points and one down at Mink Creek. When they met above a restaurant called the Chicken Basket, their neighbors complained of the noise. Wherever the handlers relocated, tires got slashed and windows broken, even after they moved to the converted filling station out on Woods Cove Road. But there, the handlers felt they had found a permanent home. It was on a quiet stretch of road beyond the railroad
tracks, its only neighbor an auto repair shop and weedchoked junkyard. The congregation didn’t draw as much hostile attention there as they had in town. And they could turn their electric guitars up as loud as they wanted.

During services at the church, the congregation worshiped in typical Holiness fashion, except for their peculiar embellishments. Glenn Summerford, a small-time hoodlum who had repented and been called to preach, routinely handled poisonous snakes, drank strychnine, and stuck his fingers into live electrical sockets. But what created a sensation in Scottsboro in the fall of 1991 was his arrest on charges that he had used rattlesnakes, that symbol of faith to him and his followers, in an attempt to murder his wife.

 

 

Glenn Summerford’s arrest merited only a brief notice in one of the Birmingham newspapers, but I read about it with interest. I had just started stringing for The New York Times and was on the lookout for out-of-the-way places in the news that might serve as settings for what the national desk called “journal” pieces. I’d never been to Scottsboro, but I’d heard of the Scottsboro Boys. My editor liked the story idea, so I hit the road. I had no idea what lay in store.

Travel was ideal, a bright winter morning, and I was bowled over by the mountains and lakes south of Scottsboro, the wood ducks and Canada geese. Once there, I had no trouble
finding the renovated brick courthouse with its original white cupola intact. Satellite news trucks from Chattanooga and Huntsville were parked outside the courthouse, and print journalists and curiosity seekers unable to get into the courtroom loitered around in the halls, which smelled of stale urine and cigarette smoke.

The trial was in its second day. Jury selection had been completed, opening arguments made, and the state’s star witness, Darlene Summerford, had begun her initial testimony in a second-floor courtroom packed with hard, angular women and men with slicked-back hair and unfortunate teeth. Many of the details of Darlene Summerford’s story fell together over the course of the trial, as well as from conversations I had with her afterward.

 

 

 

The story begins in a ghost town in the shadow of the twin cooling towers of the Bellefonte nuclear power plant, which hasn’t yet gone on-line. It’s a humid evening, the first week of October, with a moon as thin as a woman’s fingernail. The wind has picked up. An empty Coke cup skitters across the rotted porch of the town’s abandoned hotel. The cup is followed by a whirl of curled poplar leaves, which gradually disperse and fall to earth. And then the air is still and silent, except for the singing of the last frogs and the rumble of eighteen-wheelers out on highway 72.

Through the trees on the river side of town, a barge filled with lumber makes its way down the Tennessee River, shedding a cone of light over the water. As the barge enters a bend, the light touches the banks on either side and the overgrown streets of the abandoned town. On the highway on the other side of town, the twin headlights of a car flicker through the trees. One of the headlights is askew, spewing its light into the branches, and the car, a Chevy Chevette with Alabama tags, is going dangerously fast.

“I oughta throw you in the river,” the driver says. He is a powerfully built man with graying hair slicked into a pompadour, and he shifts in his seat as though he were a kind of animal and the car a kind of cage. The woman in the passenger’s seat, Darlene Summerford, is staring straight ahead. She has long, thick auburn hair and the lean, kept look of Southern Appalachian women. Like them she has been used to the bone and is nursing a hurt, in this case a swollen and blackened thumb that she holds in her lap. “I shoulda throwed you in the sinkhole up at Woodville,” the man continues.

“Slow down,” she says. “I’m getting sick again.”

“Good.” He glares at her. “Maybe you’re finally starting to die.”

“You wish, don’t you.”

“I could wish for worse.”

“So you could go visit your whore every day,” she spits.

“Who’s calling who a whore?” he says.

“I’m too sick to argue,” she says. “You said you’d take me to the hospital if I went to Paint Rock with you.”

“That was yesterday I said that.”

“I know. And now it’s today. We been to Paint Rock, we been to the liquor store, we been to the video store, but I haven’t seen no hospital yet.”

“And you’re not going to see one if I can help it.”

For the first time since they got in the car, Darlene looks over at her husband. Even after everything he’s done, she’s still shocked at the way he has deceived her into helping him set up his alibi. A preacher with the unlikely name of Glendel Buford Summerford, he goes by Glenn, but not even she is sure whether his first name’s got one
n
or two. Married as long as they’ve been, long enough to have a thirteen-year-old son, you’d think she would know that for sure, but it’s just one of many things about him she’s never figured out. She still thinks of his face as familiar, despite the web-like intricacies of light over it now, handiwork of the venom in her brain. She’s already been bit by one of his rattlesnakes, and she knows if she were to look too closely at the threads of light, she’d see living things marching along them, convoys of geometric insects multiplying right before her eyes, so she doesn’t let her eyes focus on anything but the gap in Glenn’s
teeth, which even though she hates him, is a reminder that she at least knows who he is.

This isn’t the first time she’s been bit. The first time was when she fell in love with him. And then there was that time when she thought the Holy Ghost was moving on her, but she must have read the Spirit wrong, because the rattler got her on the chest, just below her collarbone, right during a chorus of “I Saw the Light.” But last night was different; last night was the first time the handling wasn’t her idea, the first time it wasn’t in church. It was in the shed behind their house on Barbee Lane. That’s where Glenn kept the snakes, all seventeen of them, in a series of wooden cages and two old aquariums tied together with baling wire. Glenn had been in a drunken, jealous rage for days. He’d accused her of cheating on him. He’d knocked her around, pulled her hair. Finally, he had put a gun to her head and forced her to stick her hand into one of the cages, and then later, after the diamondback rattlesnake had bit her and she’d stumbled on the way back to the house and fallen to the ground, he unzipped his fly and pissed on her. That was how bad it had got. He’d made her get bit by a snake and then pissed on her, and now he was driving ninety to nothing down highway 72, threatening to throw her into a sinkhole or into the river. He was drunker than Cooter Brown. “You’ve
got
to die,” he’d been telling her. Good Lord, how’d things get this way? She had tried all
day to think things through. It is the first time Glenn has ever
seriously
tried to kill her. And as he slows to make the turn off the highway and away from Scottsboro proper and the Jackson County hospital, it occurs to her that he will succeed on his first try.

The lights of the car flash against the Sisks’ house, and Darlene wishes that Walter and Eva Ruth would look out their window and see her and know how terribly wrong things are. She knows they love her. They always have something kind to say to her when she goes to the door to pay the twenty-five-dollar rent, which Mr. Sisk turns over to Mr. Tipton, the lawyer who owns the property. She imagines the way Eva Ruth’s face will collapse when she learns that Darlene Summerford has died at her husband’s hands. The car passes the Cunningham place and the Chambless place and then bumps up Barbee Lane through fields of dried soybeans and morning glories that seem to spring up, purple and pink, in the headlights. Glenn slows enough to negotiate the drainage ditch between the posts of the electric fence, past the pony shed and the dog pen, and when he finally brings the car to a stop next to the familiar house with the tin roof and brown asphalt siding, Darlene shudders with the understanding that she is home.

She wants to stay in the car, but Glenn motions her out of the car and toward the house. Inside, he makes her sit at the
kitchen table and places a pen and a loose-leaf binder in front of her. Then he puts the gun to her head and tells her to write down exactly what he’s fixing to say. The room is spinning. She can hardly see the page, but he nudges the barrel of the pistol against her ear, and she starts to write when he starts to speak. It takes her a minute to figure out what he’s doing. Then it hits her. He’s making her write a suicide note to their son, Marty, who’s been staying with one of Glenn’s daughters since the latest fight began: “Marty, I love you. Do what Daddy says. Daddy was asleep. I tried to fix things but it didn’t work out. Daddy’s asleep. He don’t know what I’m doing. I went out and got snake bit. Glenn is asleep. I don’t want no help.” She begs him to let her stop writing. She’s going to throw up. She leans away from the table, but nothing comes up now but bile. He makes her keep on writing. He’s so drunk he has trouble stringing the words together, and he keeps repeating himself. “Daddy was asleep. Daddy’s asleep. Glenn is asleep.” She writes it all.