Salvation on Sand Mountain

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Acclaim for Dennis Covington’s
Salvation on Sand Mountain

“Mesmerizing ... With care that approaches reverence, Covington makes the story of their struggle not only fascinating but almost comprehensible. And if that’s not a miracle, nothing is.”

—
Newsweek

 

 

“
Salvation on Sand Mountain
will jar you to the bone. It will make you wonder about things you never thought to wonder about and meet people you never dreamed existed. Dennis Covington is either the bravest or the craziest journalist I know.”

— Fannie Flagg, author of
Fried Green Tomatoes at the
Whistle Stop Café

 

“A captivating glimpse of an exotic religious sect.”

—
Publishers Weekly

 

“This book is far more than it appears to be. It does the impossible: It breathes. And it will take your breath — if you have a heart and soul.”

— Clyde Edgerton

 

“A moving, true story.”

 

“Salvation on Sand Mountain
is a scary and brilliant book, beautifully written. Covington has a perfect ear for dialogue. He understands and articulates the strong appeal of this noholds-barred, all-for-nothing, hard old faith in a surprising and memorable narrative.”

— Lee Smith

ALSO BY DENNIS COVINGTON

In memory of
SAM S. COVINGTON
my father

Special thanks to Don Fehr, my editor, who conceived this project and steered it to completion; to Vicki Covington, who took time away from her own book to help me with mine; and to artists Jim Neel and Melissa Springer, who shared the journey and whose photographs appear herein.

 

 

Thanks also to Rosalie Siegel, Paul Haskins, Bill Leonard, Ashley Covington, Laura Covington, Jeanie and Bunky Wolaver, Kat and Jack Marsh, Edna Covington, Cathy Jennings, Maxine Resnick, Judy Katz, Joey Kennedy, Katye Tipton, Walter and Eva Ruth Sisk, Cheryl Simonetti, William Hull, Tim Kelley, Dale Chambliss, Tom Camp, Danny Covington, and Yvonne Crumpler and the staff of the Southern Collection of the Birmingham Public Library. I am particularly indebted to the work of David Hackett Fischer, Wayne Flynt, Harold Bloom, Thomas Burton, Robert H. Mount, Robert Dunnavant, Jr., and David Kimbrough.

 

 

There are some acknowledgments for which thanks are not enough. May there be showers of blessings upon Carl Porter, my friend and spiritual mentor; and upon Carolyn Porter, Charles and Aline McGlocklin, J.L. Dyal, Elvis Presley Saylor, Cecil and Carolyn Esslinder, Gracie McAllister, Bobbie Sue
Thompson, Bill Pelfrey, Daisy Parker, Dewey Chafin, Billy and Joyce Summerford, Punkin Brown, Allen Williams, Darlene Collins Summerford, and all those others whose faith illuminates these pages.

This descent into himself will, at the same time, be a descent into his region. It will be a descent through the darkness of the familiar into a world where, like the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men as if they were trees, but walking.

FLANNERY O‘CONNOR,
Mystery and Manners

This morning, on my way back from the mailbox, a neighbor asked whether I’d finished the new book. “Not quite,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I hadn’t even begun.

“Well, I just wanted to know if you’d included anything about spirit trees,” she said.

She explained what they were, bare trees in rural yards adorned with colored glass bottles. Then I remembered I’d seen them before. I thought they were only decorative. But my neighbor told me spirit trees had a purpose. If you happen to have evil spirits, you put bottles on the branches of a tree in your yard. The more colorful the glass, the better, I suppose. The evil spirits get trapped in the bottles and won’t do you any harm. This is what Southerners in the country do with evil spirits.

The reason I didn’t know much about spirit trees is that I’m a city boy. I was born, and still live, in Birmingham, an industrial city founded
after
the Civil War. My father, too, was born in Birmingham, in 1912, so he didn’t know much about spirit trees, either. One of twelve children, he worked for the steel company most of his life and eventually died of emphysema.

I came of age reading the great Southern fiction of Faulkner, O‘Connor, Welty, and Warren, but their South was not really a world I knew firsthand. I’d never plowed behind a mule or picked cotton or butchered a hog. And when I’d visit distant cousins in the country, they’d remind me of how little I knew about
real
life. To them, I was a city slicker. I wore pleated trousers instead of overalls.

The first fiction I wrote, though, had rural settings. My first published short story was called, curiously enough, “Salvation on Sand Mountain.”

Fact is, twenty-five years ago I’d never even been on Sand Mountain, but I was drawing my material out of a rich Southern literature, the texture of which I’d never experienced myself. In time, the settings and people of my fiction began to resemble more and more those of the world I knew most intimately, the City. I started writing about urban couples, with or without children, and the minor perplexities they faced. The fiction seemed more honest to me, but something
was missing. The stories might as well have been set in Portland or Des Moines. I started to wonder if I was still a Southern writer. I started to wonder if there was still a South at all.

In a 1990
Time
essay, Hodding Carter III tells us there’s not. “The South as South,” he writes, “a living, ever regenerating mythic land of distinctive personality, is no more.” But I wish Mr. Carter could have heard evangelist Bob Stanley’s sermon at a snake-handling church in Kingston, Georgia, this past June: “Spread the word! We’re coming off the farm! We’re coming down from the mountains! We’re starting just a trickle, but soon we’ll be a branch. And the branches will run together to form a little river, and the little rivers will come together to form a great and mighty river, and we’ll be swelling and rushing together toward the sea!”

I’d been hanging around the snake handlers long enough by then to know that Brother Bob Stanley was talking about a South that resided in the blood, a region of the heart. Listen up. The peculiarity of Southern experience didn’t end when the boll weevil ate up the cotton crop. We didn’t cease to be a separate country when Burger King came to Meridian. We’re as peculiar a people now as we ever were, and the fact that our culture is under assault has forced us to become even more peculiar than we were before. Snake handling, for instance, didn’t originate back in the hills somewhere. It
started when people came
down
from the hills to discover they were surrounded by a hostile and spiritually dead culture. All along their border with the modern world — in places like Newport, Tennessee, and Sand Mountain, Alabama — they recoiled. They threw up defenses. When their own resources failed, they called down the Holy Ghost. They put their hands through fire. They drank poison. They took up serpents.

They still do. The South hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it’s become more Southern in a last-ditch effort to save itself. And the South that survives will last longer than the one that preceded it. It’ll be harder and more durable than what came before. Why? It’s been through the fire. And I’m not just talking about the civil rights movement, although certainly that’s a place we could start. I’m talking about the long, slow-burning fire, the original civil war and the industrialization that it spawned. I’m talking about the colonization of the South by northern entrepreneurs. I’m talking about the migration to the cities, the cholera epidemics, the floods. I’m talking about the wars that Southerners fought disproportionately in this century, the poverty they endured. I’m talking about our fall from Grace. I’m talking about the scorn and ridicule the nation has heaped on poor Southern whites, the only ethnic group in America not permitted to have a history. I’m talking about the City, and I don’t mean Atlanta. I mean Birmingham.

In the country, Southerners put their evil spirits in colored glass bottles hung on trees. But let me tell you what we do with evil spirits in the City. We start with coal that a bunch of our male ancestors died getting out of the ground. We heat it in ovens till it gives off poisonous gases and turns into coke, something harder and blacker than it was to begin with. Then we set that coke on fire. We use it to fuel our furnaces. These furnaces are immense things, bulb shaped and covered with rust. You wouldn’t want one in your neighborhood. We fill the furnace with limestone and iron ore and any evil spirits we find lying around. The iron ore melts in the coke-driven fire. Impurities attach to the limestone and float to the top. What settles to the bottom is pure and incredibly hot. At a precise moment, we open a hole in the bottom of the furnace, and molten iron cascades out, a ribbon of red so bright you can hardly look at it. When I was a kid you could stand on the viaduct above the Sloss furnaces in downtown Birmingham and watch the river of molten iron racing along the ground, incandescent, inexorable, and so unpredictable that a spark from it flew up one night while my father’s friend, Ross Keener, was leaning over the rail of the viaduct, flew up and put out his eye.

That’s the kind of South I’m talking about.