Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia

“After a few minutes, Brother Carl put the snakes back into the box. The service went on for another half hour. He and Uncle Ully anointed Glenn Summerford’s mother with oil, and she testified that it felt like electricity running up and down her arms. Sister Bobbie Sue led us in another round of songs. Aunt Daisy spoke in tongues. But it was the image of that newly shed copperhead that I couldn’t shake as I stepped into the dark night outside the church. Why had I been drawn to it? What did it mean? The air was frigid. It had been a late, cold spring, and by morning the branches of the flowering peach would be encased in ice.”

After his first experience of a snake-handling service, Covington cannot understand his fascination with one of the snakes he has just seen Brother Carl handle. He questions the allure for him, and not yet knowing his family’s personal history with the land and religion, these questions are perfectly reasonable. In this passage, he is also describing some of these figures for the first time and getting to know their temperaments and personalities, such as Aunt Daisy, which readers will come to know as key members of the congregation.

“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.”

While Scottsboro, Alabama, is now a thriving commercial town with a courthouse and clean streets, its reputation precedes it as the home of the Scottsboro Boys—a case in which nine black men were convicted of sexually assaulting two white women, later overturned by the Supreme Court—and the Scottsboro of Glenn Summerford and his church, converted from a filling station after the handlers and their families came down from the hills after World War II.

“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.”

This passage explains the phenomenon of “cultural anomie” (26), in which the hill people initially came down for work but were met with prejudice and were actually shunned for their strange religious practices. In turn, they also were equally aware of the hedonistic lifestyle in towns like Scottsboro that they felt susceptible toward and referred to as a temptation to “back up on the Lord” (27). As a result, they hid themselves away in relative isolation, gravitating toward places that might be considered the wrong side of the railroad tracks.

“Her hand was mostly numb, but she could still feel it a little, a gentle anointing, both warm and cold, like something she’d receive in church, and she realizes she’s been trying to get herself clean from one thing or another for as long as she can remember. Maybe this time, it’ll be for good.”

Covington switches from the first-person point of view to third person, focusing his attention on a sharply-drawn character study of what he imagines Darlene’s physical and mental attitudes would have been during the hours after her trauma. At this point in the dramatization, Glenn has already forced her to endure two separate snake bites and a fruitless drive in which he promises to bring her to the hospital, but essentially just kidnaps her and drives her around aimlessly in an attempt to prevent her from receiving help. She calls for help and sneaks out of the house, stumbling her way to meet an ambulance at her neighbor’s home. Here, she appreciates the simple act of the ambulance attendant washing her hand.

“[T]hen I asked him if he’d ever drunk strychnine in church. ‘I’ve drank it different times,’ he said. ‘What about Darlene?’ ‘When she was really living right, she drank it,’ he said. When she was really living right, she drank poison. What a peculiar idea, the journalist in me thought. But who was I to judge?”

Covington asks Glenn Summerford if he had poisoned himself with strychnine, a popular drink in the snake-handling community. There was an issue in their church of members “backsliding” (40), or going against their teachings in some way, such as excessive drinking, attempted suicide, or adultery. Mainstream society in America would be more familiar with using the highly toxic poison as a pesticide used for killing vermin in the form of birds and rodents.

“But Aline’s voice reacted with renewed desperation, ‘Akiii, akiii, akiii,’ and so I let the tambourine have its own way, now louder and faster, until it almost burst into a song, and then softer and more slowly, until it resembled the buzzing of a rattlesnake in a serpent box.”

When Covington went to the opening of the brush arbor on Sand Mountain, he first listened to Carl preach and Charles testify before participating in the musical portion of the service on tambourine. At this time, Charles’s wife, Aline, took up the Spirit. Everyone else became quiet, but Covington was compelled to accompany her cries with his musical instrument. At first, he was unaware of what he was doing but tried to remain unembarrassed after his realization. He describes the intimacy of the experience as “unnerving” (80) and does a good job of making the reader feel uncomfortable as well. Other church-goers found the experience joyous, and Covington says it was from that moment that they began referring to him as Brother Dennis.

“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.”

When the ancestors of the modern hill people and snakehandlers of the Appalachian Mountains first arrived amongst the Quakers in colonial America, they felt discriminated against for their beliefs and their poverty, as well as their quarrelsome and noisy temperament. The Quakers encouraged them to pioneer to the western frontier, and many ended up in border regions such as the Shenandoah Valley, resembling their homelands in Southern Scotland and Northern Ireland. However, to get there, one had to cross the Appalachian Mountains—and as a result, many stayed in the hills and mountains themselves, re-creating a culture and a way of life they would have enjoyed in the “warrior clans” (92) of their homelands.

“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.”

Covington describes his trip with Melissa and Jim to Jolo as harrowing, full of hairpin turns, a 10-hour day of driving to get there, and getting lost on the final stretch—as it’s difficult to find someone who knows where to find a “snake-handling church,” even in Virginia. Doyle, a tattooed man they asked at a gas station, gave directions but cautioned them against going; soon after, they were able to find the church.

“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.’”

Charles McGlocklin had been nervous to preach in front of the congregation at Jolo because of West Virginia’s reputation of being a strict state for snake-holders, both in dress code and behavior. As a well-prepared and longstanding preacher, he was accepted and allowed to perform in front of them once he focused on the concept of “one church” and “one God.” This went against the popular Christian belief idea of three gods in one, and he established himself within this distinction.

“It occurred to me then that seeing a handler in the ecstasy of an anointing is not like seeing religious ecstasy at all. The expression seems to have more to do with Eros than with God, in the same way that sex often seems to have more to do with death than with pleasure […] In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender.”

At this point in the service in Jolo, the mood is very upbeat, almost euphoric, with church members dancing down the aisle, “seized by the rhythm of the music” (98). Brother Timmy appears, dancing and stomping with Gracie McAllister before veering away to pick up a canebrake rattlesnake in both hands. He would not know it yet, but tempted by the mysterious energy in the room, that night would be the first time Covington felt the need to testify.

“With one of his massive hands, Charles held the snakes in a row by their tails, and smoothed them out with his other, as though he were straightening a rack of ties. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. The rattlesnakes seemed to have turned to rubber or gauze.”

Covington confesses:“I’d never been able to stay away from the center of storms” (100). Both Carl and Charles were handling snakes, which at some point meant Charles had all of them in his hands and was standing directly next to Covington. Rattlesnakes were passed dynamically between the church members for upwards of 20 minutes as Covington watched, including a moment where Carl put the snakes on top of his head. Covington describes the scene as becoming “so wild and fast” (100) he didn’t always know where all the snakes were, and he didn’t care; the photographers were on the floor trying to get their best shots. And just as quickly as the hurricane descended, as Covington called it, “the lunatic music stopped” (101). Covington compares the adrenaline rush to a moment he experienced under fire in El Salvador.

“‘We’re not a hateful people, we’re not a haughty people, but these reporters, if they want to make their money, can make it back there and not up here where they endanger people’s lives.’”

On the second night of the service in Jolo, Bob Elkins’s wife, Barbara, made it to the church. Known as the matriarch and a powerful member of her community, she was given respect when she approached the pulpit after her husband and several visiting pastors had taken to the pulpit. She took the opportunity to denounce the reporters in attendance, focusing in on Covington in particular and the line she felt he had crossed by testifying the night before: “She was looking straight at me, but I held her gaze. Her eyes were flat, reptilian” (108). Carl absolved him afterward, apologizing for not coming to his defense and recognizing what kind of position Barbara had put him in, and Covington understood and was able to move on from it.

“When I stepped outside later for some fresh air, I could see the mountains clearly, great black silhouettes against the sharp-edged sky. The sight of them stirred something like homesickness in me. But if it was homesickness, it was for a place I’d never been.”

Covington steps outside for some air after Barbara’s proclamation, and finds himself swept up in the beauty of the harsh landscape. But these thoughts of homesickness are not ordinary; they are beautifully drawn and engrain themselves in the reader’s mind. Again, it is this kind of thinking that makes the reader wonder whether Covington has fully explored his own connections to the communities and locations of the hill people. In fact, Covington spends the rest of his time outside thinking about the border dwellers, until his mind is clear, and he can go back into the church.

“The rattlesnake was so big Charles could hardly get a hand around it. He would later tell me that the Lord spoke to him in that moment and asked him, ‘Who do you love more, me or your wife?’ Charles said the answer was God, and so he decided to go ahead and give her the snake.”

Inside of the church, Aline McGlocklin stands in front of the congregation making her “akiii, akiii” sound, waiting for Charles to hand her a four-foot black timber rattlesnake. It is rolling dangerously, and Charles has to pass it to her through Brother Carl Porter. Covington feels an urge to step in and protect Aline, but recalls that he is “only an observer” (110).Covington senses the opposite connotation here from the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

“The sight of my daughter, so clearly a Covington, so clearly at home in the chaos of a snake-handling service, made me quicken. Were we actually kin to these people?”

What really led Covington to take a closer look at his father’s ancestry binder was something that happened during an all-night snake-handling service at the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Georgia, Carl Porter’s church, where Covington had brought his wife, Vicki, and daughters Laura and Ashley to their first service. Seven-year-old Ashley was “transfixed” (114); while she did not generally enjoy loud noise or gesticulation, she thoroughly enjoyed the music and the snakes. Covington began to entertain the idea of cell memory and his own investigation of family history with the church.

“The past didn’t matter. The only history we knew was who we’d fought against in World War II. All we cared about was the present. And all our parents seemed to care about was the future. […] Our parents were preparing us to do better than they had, as they had done better than their parents, but beyond that we had no idea who we were. All we knew was that wherever we came from, we didn’t want to go back there.”

Upon returning to Birmingham, Covington brought out his father’s book of ancestry. However, the green binder was generally full of current members of the family, whereas historical facts were harder to come by. Here, he recalls his childhood perspective, in which he was only focused on the present and his parents on the future. Covington’s mother and sister grew up in a rural town south of Birmingham, where her father was a hired gun during mining strikes. Her mother died of emphysema despite never smoking, and Charles’s grandfather died of the syphilis he’d contracted by riding the rails. On his father’s side, things had been better, although his father was born on a ridgetop west of Sand Mountain in Alabama. The last thing any of them wanted to do was dwell in, or even acknowledge, their past. In this way, it seems there was a shame in having come from the hills.

“Most of the time, we’d forget the Italians even lived there, until it rained and the whole neighborhood smelled of cauliflower.”

For the first time, Covington recalls a fully developed memory from his own childhood in which he physically interacts with snakes. He mentions catching common water snakes as a boy in an open sewer in Birmingham known as Village Creek, using minnows as bait—which he’d captured with traps). The snakes he caught were located on a field owned by a group of Italians.

“I’ve been bitten by common water snakes. It’s nothing, a humiliation more than a pain. But I know how snakes work, the physics of the bite. It’s not something to take lightly, even among the nonpoisonous snakes. You can never predict what a snake will do.”

Baby water snakes could be found on a sandbar with rocks beneath the Eightieth Street bridge, but they didn’t do well in captivity. Near Covington’s house was East Lake, where he hunted for frogs and turtles—and also snakes—nearly every day after school. The lake held a different kind of water snake that they referred to as “queen snakes” (161), which could only be caught with “a snake noose attached to a broom handle” (162) and not by minnow traps or sticks and shovels. From them, Covington learned patience and acceptance of defeat.

“‘They say we’ve gone crazy!’ Brother Carl shouted above the chaos. He was pacing in front of the pulpit, the enormous rattlesnake balanced now across his shoulder. ‘Well they’re right!’ he cried. ‘I’ve gone crazy! I’ve gone Bible crazy!’”

In the spring, Glenn Summerford’s cousins Billy and Jimmy started a new church on Sand Mountain, the Old Rock House Holiness Church, where Charles McGlocklin chose not to worship because of what he knew of them and their reputations. Charles did not tell Covington what to do, he just warned him about the brothers on Sand Mountain, asking him to be careful. Jim and Covington drove up for the church’s homecoming at Carl’s request, six months after its opening. Carl really wanted Covington to handle a snake during this service, but Covington was resistant, choosing to stand at the back of the church as the service became more chaotic. Covington witnessed something new: that night, Carl walked barefoot on a rattlesnake. Covington says one does not ever get used to the sound and chaos of a snake-handling Holiness service, but it does immerse you in a kind of “spiritual jazz” (167), and in this way you become attuned to it.

“‘It’s love, that’s all it is,’ he said. ‘You love the Lord, you loved the Word, you love your brother and sister. You’re in one mind, one accord, you’re all combined together. The Bible says we’re each a part of the body, and when it all comes together… Hey!’ He whistled through his teeth.”

After Covington participates in his first snake holding, he asks J.L. Dyal what the experience was like for him that night, and this is what J.L. has to say in response. J.L. puts the question back to Covington, who finds it difficult to answer. He speculates that while he loves Carl, sometimes he feels the man must be crazy and intent of killing himself and the rest them. Half the time he believes, but the other half he thinks nothing can be real and we must all be part of a dream inside of a God’s mind.

“‘If you’re gonna do that, you might as well take me to the doctor. that’s not faith, boys. If I die, I’m just a dead man.’”

The most memorable thing about fatal bites in the snake-handling community is generally what the victim says before they pass. Here, Covington recounts Charlie Hall’s final words. The story of Lloyd Hill and Charlie Hall goes that Lloyd died in Georgia after receiving a bite in Charlie’s church. Charlie was tried for murder under anti-snake-handling laws and was acquitted but later died of a snake bite himself in Alabama. No one knows what Lloyd’s last words were, but as for Charlie, the word goes that he remained stoic to the end, refusing fans and ice, as recounted above.

“Joyce leaned forward confidentially. ‘That demon had been in him so long, it called itself David,’ she said. ‘I’d never seen one like that, that had a name.’”

Punkin Brown and Allen Williams went into the Tennessee mountains during a “real black holler” (187) to cast demons out of a young woman who was hearing voices and had become a danger to herself. He hair had fallen out, even though she was not sick, and was growing back in white despite her being only in her 20s. The men tried to pray for her but whenever they felt it working, the other people in the room found a way to “kill it out” (188). Many people had their own stories about demonic possession, including Billy and Joyce Summerford. Covington asked the Summerfords if they had ever cast out demons themselves, and Billy said they had seen it happen—and he had done it once himself.

“Knowing where you come from is one thing, but it’s suicide to stay there.”

After Covington bombs his first and only attempt at preaching, he decides it is time for him to move on from the snake-handling church altogether. Covington attributes similar advice to a writing teacher of his and to Carl Porter, who had “released [him] back to the wider world” (236). At the height of his journey, Covington could see himself “preaching out of [his] car with a Bible, a trunkload of rattlesnakes, and a megaphone” (236). He had imagined leading the life of a snake handler and all of its gravity. However, now Covington explains it would never be the same with them again; he had found them, but he knew he could never be one of them.