Salvation on Sand Mountain (8 page)

“I get a lot of stares,” he added, and then he put his big hand on my shoulder and drew me toward him confidentially. “I have received visitations by angels,” he said. “One of them was seven feet tall. It was a frightening experience.”

I said I bet it was.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “One night I was fasting and praying on the mountain, and I was taken out in the spirit. The Lord appeared to me in layers of light.” His grip tightened on my shoulder. “He spoke a twelve-hour message to me on one word:
polluted.”

“Polluted?”

“Yes. Polluted. Now, you think about that for a minute. A twelve-hour message.”

I thought about it for a minute, and then decided Brother Charles was out of his mind.

 

 

 

In time, I’d find out he wasn’t, despite the fact that he kept four copperheads in a terrarium on his kitchen counter between the Mr. Coffee and the microwave. He said God moved on him one night to handle a big timber rattler right there in the kitchen. His wife, Aline, showed me a photo of him doing it. Aline was thirteen years younger than Charles, childlike and frankly beautiful, a Holiness mystic from Race
Track Road who worked the night shift weaving bandage gauze. “I had just got up, getting ready to go to work,” she said, “and my camera was just laying there.” She pointed at the photo. “You see how the Holy Ghost moved on him?”

In the photo, Charles is standing in the kitchen in his white T-shirt and jeans. He has a rattlesnake in one hand, and he appears to be shouting at it as though it were a sensible and rebellious thing. “There’s serpents, and then there’s
fiery
serpents,” Charles said. “That one was a fiery serpent.”

Another time, Charles said he wanted to take up a serpent real bad, but he didn’t have one on hand. The Holy Ghost told him, “You don’t have a snake, but you’ve got a heater.” So Charles ran to the wood-burning stove in the living room and laid his hands on it. “Baby, that thing was hot,” he said. But his hands, when he finally took them off the stove, weren’t a bit burned. Instead, they were as cold as a block of ice, he said.

Aline reminded him that he
did
get a blister from a skillet once, but Charles said, “God wasn’t in that. That was in myself. That’s why I got burned.”

“You were just thinking about that corn bread,” Aline added with a knowing smile.

Long before I was a guest in their home, I’d seen the McGlocklins at services at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following in Scottsboro. We became friends, and then something more than friends, but that is a long and complicated
story that began, I think, on the afternoon of my first brush-arbor meeting on top of Sand Mountain, when Aline was taken out in the spirit, and I accompanied her on tambourine.

 

 

I had never even heard of a brush arbor until J.L. Dyal built one in a field behind his house near the Sand Mountain town of Section in the summer of 1992. Brother Carl had invited me to the services, and J.L. had drawn a map. “You take a left at the Sand Mountain Dragway sign,” he said. “We’ll get started just before sundown.”

I was pleased the handlers had felt comfortable enough to include me. It meant the work was going well. The relationship between journalist and subject is often an unspoken conspiracy. The handlers wanted to show me something, and I was ready to be shown. It seemed to me that the conviction of Glenn Summerford was not the end of their story, but simply the beginning of another chapter. I was interested in what would happen to them now that Glenn was in prison and The Church of Jesus with Signs Following had split. But I had a personal agenda too. I was enjoying the passion and abandon of their worship. Vicki didn’t seem to mind. She encouraged me to go. So I told Brother Carl and J.L. I’d be there for the brush-arbor services, although I couldn’t visualize what they were talking about. “Brush arbor” seemed a contradictory term. The word
arbor
suggested civilized restraint. The word
brush
didn’t.

I did know that outdoor revivals had once been commonplace in the rural South. The most famous occurred in 1801, when thousands of renegade Presbyterians, in their rebellion against stiff-necked Calvinism, gathered in a field near Cane Ridge, Kentucky, for a week-long camp meeting. They were soon joined by Methodists and Baptists, until their combined ranks swelled to more than twenty-five thousand, a crowd many times greater than the population of the largest town in Kentucky at the time. Something inexplicable and portentous happened to many of the worshipers in that field near Cane Ridge. Overcome by the Holy Spirit, they began to shriek, bark, and jerk. Some fell to the ground as though struck dead. “Though so awful to behold,” wrote one witness, “I do not remember that any one of the thousands ... ever sustained an injury in body.”

Cane Ridge set the stage for the dramatic events at a mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, when the Holy Ghost descended in power on a multiracial congregation led by a one-eyed black preacher named William Seymour, and the great American spiritual phenomenon of the twentieth century, Pentecostalism, began in a fury of tongue speaking and prophesying and healing.

Cane Ridge had been the prototype of revivalism on a grand scale. The crowd at J.L.’s brush arbor was somewhat smaller — thirteen of us altogether, plus a gaggle of curious
onlookers who hid behind Brother Carl Porter’s Dodge Dakota pickup. But the facilities at J.L.’s were top-notch. Traditional brush arbors had been small and temporary, primitive shelters usually built at harvest time from whatever materials might be at hand. Willow branches were especially prized because of their flexibility. Thick vines added strength. The idea was to give field hands a place to worship so they wouldn’t have to leave the premises before all the crops were in. But J.L. had constructed his brush arbor out of sturdy twoby-fours over which he had stretched sheets of clear plastic so that services could be held even in a downpour. The vines and brush piled on top of the plastic appeared to be decorative rather than functional, yielding the impression of a brush arbor without all its inconveniences. J.L.’s father-in-law, Dozier Edmonds, had helped string electricity to the structure and had installed a length of track lighting. The place was perfect, except for one thing. There weren’t any snakes.

“I thought you were going to bring them,” said Brother Carl to Brother Charles.

“I thought Brother Willie was going to bring them,” Charles replied. He was getting his guitar out of the car, an instrument the Lord, he said, had taught him to play.

“Brother Willie got serpent bit last night,” Carl reminded him.

“I know, but he said he was going to be here today.”

“Maybe I need to check on him after the service,” Carl said. “It was a copperhead,” he confided to me. “Over in Georgia. Bit him on the thumb, but it didn’t hurt him bad.”

“Well, we don’t
have
to have serpents to worship the Lord,” Charles finally said. He put his boot up on a pine bench that would serve as the altar and began strumming the guitar. When everyone had gathered around, he started to sing.
“He’s God in Alabama. He’s God in Tennessee. He’s God in North Carolina. He’s God all over me. Oh, God is God ... and Jesus is his name....”

The service had begun at five o‘clock to avoid the midafternoon heat. The light was low and golden over the field, and Charles’s voice rose above it like a vapor, unamplified, snatched away by the breeze. Aline was there; Brother Carl and the old prophetess, Aunt Daisy; J.L. and his wife, Dorothea; one of their daughters-in-law and her baby; and Dorothea’s father, Dozier, and her mother, Burma, who had a twin sister named Erma. Both Burma and Erma, sixty-eight, attended snake-handling services, usually in identical dresses, but only Burma actually handled.

I’d also brought photographers Jim Neel and Melissa Springer with me, and they moved quietly around the edges of the arbor as the service picked up steam. The choice of photographers had been simple. Jim was one of my oldest friends. In addition to being a sculptor and painter, he’d worked with me as a combat photographer in Central America during the
1980s. Melissa, whose work I’d first noticed when it was censored by police at an outdoor exhibit in Birmingham, had been documenting the lives of men and women clinging to the underbelly of the American dream — female impersonators, dancers with AIDS, women inmates in the HIV isolation unit at Alabama’s Julia Tutwiler prison. When I told her about the snake handlers, she said she had to meet them, but unlike most people who say they want to, she kept calling and insisting that we set a time. She and Jim were an interesting study in contrasts: He was moody, private, and intense; Melissa was warm, expansive, and maternal. But both were obsessed with their work, easy to travel with, and open to possibilities.

Melissa had worn an ankle-length dress this time. At her first service in Scottsboro, she’d gotten the message when Aunt Daisy prophesied against the wearing of pants by women. Outsiders are bound to get preached at a little in Holiness churches. But the same Holiness preachers who draw attention to unorthodox details of behavior or dress inevitably hugged us after the service and invited us back.

Some preachers didn’t take the Holiness prescriptions about dress quite as seriously as others. Charles McGlocklin’s theory was simple: “You’ve got to catch the fish before you clean them.”

His wife, Aline, didn’t wear makeup or cut her hair, but she occasionally allowed herself the luxury of a brightly colored hair ornament. “God looks at the heart, anyway. He
doesn’t look on the outside,” she said. She also drove a white Chevy Beretta with an airbrushed tag that read “Aline loves Charles.” Charles’s pickup had a matching tag, with “Charles loves Aline.” Both sentiments were inscribed in the middle of interlocking hearts, like the brightly colored hearts on Aline’s hair clasp.

Despite the empty chairs and the lack of electric guitars or serpents, the worship at J.L.’s brush arbor followed the same pattern I’d experienced in Scottsboro. Without church walls, it seemed more delicate and temporal, though, and Brother Carl’s sermon echoed the theme. He talked about the flesh as grass, passing in a moment, of earthly life being short and illusory. He talked about the body as “fleshy rags” that he would gladly give up in exchange for a heavenly wardrobe. But at the center of Carl’s sermon was the topic of God’s love, which he seemed to first discover fully even as he talked his way into it.

“It’s got no end,” he said, “no bottom, no ceiling. Paul says nothing can separate us from the love of God through Jesus Christ. And let me tell you, sometimes we find His love in the little things. The fact that we’re here today is a sign God loves us.”
Amen.
“The fact that we got a brain to think with, and a tongue to speak with, and a song to sing. I just want to thank Him for waking me up this morning,” he said. “I want to thank Him for giving me food to eat and a roof over my head. Sometimes we ask Him to work big miracles, but forget
to thank Him for the little ones.”
Amen.
“But he’s a great big God, and He never fails. His grace is sufficient to meet our every need. He’s a good God, isn’t He?” And everybody said amen.

Then Carl invited Brother Charles to give his testimony. In Holiness churches, a testimony is a personal story that reveals God’s power and grace. It’s not meant to exhort or instruct the congregation — that would be preaching — but simply to praise the Lord. In practice, though, the line between testifying and preaching is not so clear-cut.

Brother Carl and Brother Charles hugged, and after a few introductory comments about the beauty of the afternoon and the love he felt from everybody gathered there, Brother Charles began to testify. It was a story, both lurid and familiar, that could only have come from the South.

“Up until I was five years old,” Charles said, “I lived in a tent on the banks of the Tennessee River at Old Whitesburg Bridge. Y‘all know where that’s at. Then my mother got remarried, and we moved to a houseboat at Clouds Cove.”

“My stepdaddy was a drunk.”

“Amen,” said J.L., who knew something about drunks himself.

“My real daddy lived to be eighty,” Charles said. “He died in the Tennessee penitentiary, where he was serving a life sentence for killing his second wife. I was like a lamb
thrown into a den of lions when we moved to Clouds Cove,” Charles said. “In 1948, when I was six, we lived on nothing but parched corn for three weeks, like rats. We slept on grass beds. We didn’t even have a pinch of salt. Now, that’s poor.”

“By the time I was eight, I’d seen two men killed in our house. I was afraid to go to sleep at night.”

“I made it to the eighth grade, but when I was just shy of turning thirteen years old, I got shot in the stomach with a twelve-gauge shotgun. That was the first time I heard the audible voice of God.”

“There I was, holding my insides in my hands. Them things, they really colored up funny, I thought to myself. Then I had the awfullest fear come up on me,” Charles said. He was pacing back and forth by now, a loping, methodical pace, his huge, dog-eared Bible held loosely in one hand like an implement. “I saw a vision of my casket lid closing on me, and the voice out of heaven spoke to me and said, ‘Don’t be afraid,’cause everything’s gonna be all right,‘ and I felt that shield of faith just come down on me!”

“God’s been good to me!”

“He’s been good to me!”

“Doctors told my mother I had maybe fifteen minutes to live. ‘There’s no way he can make it,’ they said. ‘Almost all his liver’s shot out, almost all his stomach.’ I was on the operating table sixteen to eighteen hours. They had to take out several
yards
of intestines. I stayed real bad for forty-two days and nights. I was one hundred twenty pounds when I got shot and eighty-seven when I got out of that hospital. But just look at me now!”