Salvation on Sand Mountain (26 page)

My brief journey among the snake handlers of Southern Appalachia ended fifteen years ago with the publication of the book you hold in your hands, and I have rarely looked back since. I’m not an anthropologist or a scholar of religious studies. I’m just a writer who had a story to tell. And the story, for me, ended exactly where the book itself ends, with the bubbling up of a memory: the way my father used to call me home.

During public readings over the years, though, I’ve been asked to tell in more detail how the book came about and why; and what, on purpose or by accident, I might have left out of it. The best I can do is talk about my own experience with the story — the way I came to it, and the way it pulled me under, only to release me when the time seemed right. I cannot speak for the handlers, though, and I’m sure they have their own stories to tell.

Mine began in the winter of 1992, when I was a college professor and freelance journalist stringing for the
New York Times
. The ideas for articles usually came from Paul Haskins, the assignment editor on the national desk who taught me more about journalism than I will ever be able to say. Sometimes, though, I’d suggest an idea to Paul, and on one particular February morning, while my car was having its oil changed at a Firestone store in Birmingham, I called and read him a list of local news stories, ranked in the order of what I thought might interest him.

The snake-handling preacher’s trial was last on my list because I thought the incident less newsworthy than the others and perhaps a bit too bizarre. I was afraid an article about it might reinforce the stereotype of Southerners and Southern culture, as backwater, laughable. But Paul Haskins saw something there that I didn’t.

“That’s the one we want,” he said. “How fast can you get up to Scottsboro?”

I told him I’d leave as soon as my car came off the rack, and when it did, I headed for Scottsboro in fine spirits: I was a journalist with an assignment in hand. I sat through the two-day trial, talked to the preacher’s wife, and interviewed members of what had been their church. And then the hard part began, the writing of the piece. As usual, I was terrified that I would make a mess of it or miss my deadline, but with Paul’s help, the article came together. I remember filing it the
next night during supper. I had excused myself from the table only long enough to make minor corrections and send the story on its way.

The article had been “put to bed,” but I had trouble sleeping that night. I could not get my mind off the people I’d met at the trial and the way they had spoken, with reverence and wistfulness, about the mystery of taking up serpents in the name of Jesus, under an anointing of the Holy Ghost.

 

 

The next morning, Don Fehr, a brilliant young book editor, happened to read the article over breakfast at a friend’s home in Baltimore. It piqued his interest and tickled his funny bone. He later called and invited me to send him a proposal for a nonfiction book about the South. He said that snake handling could serve as the “lens.” Don was drawn to the subject matter because of his professional interest in religion and spirituality, and because, as a child, he had been bitten by a copperhead on his elementary school’s playground. He was both terrified and fascinated by poisonous snakes.

Don didn’t know me prior to this call, and he hadn’t read anything else I’d written. But he told me that this was the book I was born to write.

The proposal I sent him had everything but the kitchen sink thrown in. In addition to snake handling, I said I’d be writing about stock car racing, moonshine making, alligator wrestling, and Confederate ghosts. But the more snake handling services
I attended, the more convinced I became that this ought to be a book about the people I’d met in the halls of that courthouse in Scottsboro.

What would happen to their church in the aftermath of their preacher’s conviction? Would they continue to take up poisonous serpents, and if so, why? What compelled these otherwise ordinary, thoughtful people to repeatedly risk their lives and call it God’s will? I started to envision a nonfiction novel in the tradition of John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
or Lillian Ross’s
Picture
— a factual account in which real people were the characters and my role, if I appeared at all, would simply be as an observer.

As you know, that’s not how it turned out. Over time, I joined the handlers and became one myself — predictably, in restrospect, since I was so much like them: a poor Southern snake boy with an addiction to danger and a thirst for ecstatic religious experience.

I loved the snake-handling services — the wild, chaotic music; the spontaneity of the testimonies; the poetry of the prophecies and prayers; and the simple, direct sermons infused with the transcendent language of the King James translation of the
Holy Bible
. About that translation, the handlers would often say, “If it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

As recounted in
Salvation
, I testified occasionally and even preached once — a short sermon, to be sure. But I was also
“slain in the spirit” (knocked to the floor by a preacher’s touch). I experienced a healing, spoke in tongues, and thought, on one occasion anyway, that I could interpret when someone else was doing the same. These moments do not appear in the book for the simple reason that I could not honestly report them as fact.

For believers, faith itself may be “the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1). But for a journalist, belief is not enough. It’s one thing to describe what it feels like to pick up a rattlesnake, for example. It’s quite another to attribute these sensations to the will of a higher power.

I was taken in by the handlers, but not bamboozled. I was taken in in its truest sense, as if I were homeless and they had given me sanctuary from the World. They fed me with the Word and clothed me in the Spirit, and I began to think of them as genuine Christian mystics out of a heritage so revolutionary, deep, and otherworldly that the established church had no alternative but to deny it.

I even started praying that I would be anointed to handle serpents myself. And about that time, I forgot I was supposed to be writing a book.

“Step back,” Don Fehr advised me. “You’re too close to your subject.”

The book seemed inconsequential, just another proof of human vanity. And when the first words finally came, they spewed out of me in the angry cry you hear toward the end
of the prologue. It was, I thought, the voice of my people — those Anglo-Irish immigrants who, thinking they were bound for the promised land, had come down from the mountains to discover they were still pilgrims in yet another hostile and unrepentant world.

That prologue was all I had to say for the longest time, until Don came to visit us in Birmingham. He wanted to see the first hundred pages of the book. I told him he’d had a long journey and needed a good night’s sleep. In the morning, over breakfast, I confessed that not only did I not have the first hundred pages; I hadn’t written another word.

I won’t attempt to describe Don’s reaction to that news. I can only say that I had to take him to a snake-handling service in Georgia just to get his mind off killing me.

 

 

With Don safely back in New York, I told Vicki that I didn’t know how to begin the opening chapter.

“Why don’t you start with your first visit to a snake-handling service?” she said.

“I couldn’t do that. Nobody even took a snake out.”

She smiled.

So that became the opening line of chapter one: “The first time I went to a snake-handling service, nobody even took a snake out.”

It was easier after that. We’d just moved from our house in the woods to one on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac in Birmingham,
and Charles and Aline McGlocklin came down from New Hope to bless every room. The writing of the first draft took place over about four months. I worked at night while the rest of the family slept. Our bedrooms were on the second floor. I’d pretend to fall asleep and wait until I was sure Vicki was under. Then I’d tiptoe down the stairs, all the way to the basement, where I’d work in a kind of fever, sometimes until dawn.

The chapters that gave me the hardest time were the ones in the middle. I lost my way a hundred pages in, during a long chapter about a trip I’d taken with the handlers to Chicago for their appearance on a syndicated television talk show. The host had treated them unfairly, I thought, and my rendering of the episode was self-righteous and indignant in tone. Don had been reading the manuscript with little comment, but when he finished the Chicago section, he pulled me back and saved the book. I tore that chapter up.

On numerous other occasions, he steered me out of trouble, caused mainly by my pride and laziness, and pushed me harder to find the exact phrase, the solid sensory detail, or the true ending to a chapter, not just the easiest one. Most importantly, he urged me not to lose my sense of humor, because it served as a tonic to what could have become a pedantic and deadly treatise on an otherwise fascinating subject. Don may have been correct when he said this was the book I was born to write, but it never would have been written without his imprint on nearly every page.

I didn’t intend, for instance, to write about the moment I took up that yellow-phase timber rattler at the Old Rock House Holiness Church on Sand Mountain. Don knew I had done it, and couldn’t understand why I hadn’t included it in the text. I told him the book was about the handlers, not me, but this explanation did not satisfy him.

“Your readers will want to know what it was like,” he said. “You did it. You have to tell them.”

He had a point, so I tried the scene, but in the second person, present tense: “You step forward and take the snake with both hands. Carl releases it to you ...,” and so forth.

“Come on, Dennis,” Don said. “You’re using a literary trick to distance yourself from the experience. You were the one who took up the rattlesnake, so tell it in the first person. What was it like?”

I rewrote the page, trying to get it exactly right, and when I’d finished the scene, I knew that the story would flow inevitably from that moment, like the tune from Cecil Esslinder’s dulcimer, all the way to the end.

And about endings, let me just say this: I disagree with Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t think it’s necessary for a writer to know the end of a story before he even begins. In my opinion, such knowledge is rare, and the writer who owns it must be singular and blessed. For most of us, the ending comes much later, in the natural course of discovery, and I well remember
the night we drove back to Birmingham after the wedding at Brother Carl’s church in Georgia.

Carl had just preached about the role of women in the church. I had delivered a brief message contradicting his, and the young preachers who followed had nearly skewered me to the wall for heresy. So we were in a contemplative mood as we crossed the state line back into Alabama. I was worried about whether I had enough material now to finish the book.

“I just don’t know how the story ends,” I said.

Vicki glanced out the window. “Don’t you think that tonight was the end?”

In this, as in many things, she was right.

All that was missing was the rest of the drive home, into the city and past the old neighborhood where my father still stood at the edge of the lake — in that bright, far country beyond words.

 

 

DENNIS COVINGTON is the author of five books, including the novel
Lizard
and the memoir
Salvation on Sand Mountain,
which was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award. His articles have appeared in the
New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Vogue, Esquire, Redbook, Georgia Review, Oxford American,
and many other periodicals. His most recent book is
Redneck Riviera: Armadillos, Outlaws, and the Demise of an American Dream
. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, he currently makes his home on the high plains of west Texas.