Salvation on Sand Mountain (15 page)

I felt as though I were closing in on the resolution of a mystery. I wondered what kind of doctrine my great-great-grandfather had been preaching in the precise area where snake handling would spring up less than a generation after his death. My reading in the history of American religion suggested an answer. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had challenged believers, through his doctrine of sanctification, to lead lives that were holy and set apart from sin. After the Civil War, with America’s rapid urban industrialization and secularization, the calls for holiness became more strident
and pervasive within American Methodism. The chief tenet of this Holiness movement was that after “salvation” or “new birth,” there occurred a second act of grace, which believers called the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit.” The result of this baptism, whether immediate or gradual, was moral purification. Later, the phrase also came to mean, for many believers, anyway, an imbuement of power from on high, as evidenced by spiritual gifts. Signs and wonders. Healing, prophecy, casting out devils, and ultimately speaking in tongues. My great-great-grandfather rode on horseback to preach baptism of the Holy Spirit to congregations around Scottsboro and most likely on top of Sand Mountain, where Methodist camp meetings, complete with brush arbors, drew enthusiastic crowds.
My great-great-grandfather had probably preached brush-arbor meetings on top of Sand Mountain.
I have no reason to believe he took up serpents, but I do have reason to believe he was a precursor of those who eventually did. In 1870, when he began his circuit-riding ministry in Alabama, Methodism was in the sway of the Holiness movement. It flourished for the next two decades, and broke out of Methodism only in the years immediately following his death, when the Methodist Church, its ranks swollen by middle-class urbanites, officially distanced itself from the rural and generally lower-class believers in sanctification and spiritual gifts. Out of Methodism came Holiness. Out
of Holiness came Pentecostalism. Out of the Holiness-Pentecostal belief in spiritual signs and gifts came those who took up serpents.

Carl Porter’s father, for instance, had gotten the Holy Ghost in a Methodist church in Alabama. Whether we were blood related or not, the handlers and the Covingtons at least shared the same spiritual ancestry. And about the time I came to this realization, a librarian in the Southern Collection of the Birmingham Public Library handed me a clip file containing, among other pieces, an Associated Press article from 1953, datelined Florence, Alabama:

Snake-handling Covington brothers! But there was more. Two years later, Mansel Covington and his sister, Anna Marie Covington Yost, were bitten by rattlesnakes during a service in Savannah, Tennessee. Both were under suspended sentences for snake handling at the time. Mansel stubbornly refused treatment until the county coroner physically dragged him to a doctor for antivenin injections and then to jail. Anna Marie also refused treatment, and the next morning she died.

There were seven children in this family of Covington snake handlers, three daughters and four sons. All were born in Alabama. The sons are dead now. But Anna Marie’s two sisters are still alive. Edna Covington, eighty, still lives in
Savannah, Tennessee. I tracked her down and visited with her in the living room of the modest brick home to which she had retired after thirty-one years as a registered nurse, most spent at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.

Edna was compact and athletic looking, with shortcropped sandy hair and a clipped accent. She invited me to join her on the floor, where she had been thumbing through a genealogy book in preparation for my visit. I didn’t know whether Edna and I were related, but she looked like a member of our family. She had our sharp chin and deep-set eyes. Her Covingtons, she said, had settled on the north bank of the Tennessee River, at a place called Rogersville, Alabama. My great-grandfather and his family, on the other hand, had settled on the south bank of the Tennessee River, forty miles away, at Valhermosa Springs.

In 1932 Edna’s family followed the natural curve of the Tennessee River up to Savannah, Tennessee, a stone’s throw from Shiloh, where the seeds of the South’s defeat had been sown, and the twentieth century conceived. That’s where Edna’s brothers and one of her sisters took up serpents. Edna never handled any.

“My brothers got into snake handling at outdoor camp meetings,” she said. “They were just fooling around. They didn’t keep busy enough.”

Mansel Covington was the most outspoken of the brothers, she said. He was a big man in later life, but he had been born prematurely. “He was like a little rat,” she said, continuing to flip through the pages of her book. “We’d put him on pillows to handle him. He couldn’t talk till he was seven or eight.” She paused to scan a list of names that may or may not have been her Covingtons. “Mansel and William were both eunuchs,” she said matter-of-factly.

I asked what she meant.

Edna gave me a sharp look. “They had high voices and couldn’t grow beards.”

I wanted to hear more about this.

“They were born without testicles,” she enunciated clearly, as though I were dense, and then lay her book aside.

As a young man, she said, Mansel worked in the freezer department at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. He took hormone shots and began to shave, but he didn’t like his job in the city, so he came back to Savannah and started going to outdoor revivals, where he eventually took up serpents. Edna’s sister Anna Marie married and moved to Akron, Ohio, but she came back to Savannah alone and began going to snake-handling services with her brothers.

When Anna Marie got bit and died at the end of a twoweek revival in 1956, Edna was working the night shift at the VA Hospital in Louisville. She didn’t see any reason to
rush back to Savannah, since Anna Marie was already dead, but her brother George, the one with the harelip, insisted that she leave work right then and drive all night to get back. George said he and his brothers were going to raise Anna Marie from the dead through prayer, and since Edna was a nurse, he wanted her to be there to check her sister’s vital signs.

“There was a big full moon that night,” Edna said.

I left Edna’s house in Savannah, Tennessee, with that image in my head, of a woman driving all night under a full moon so that she could check her dead sister’s vital signs while their brothers attempted to pray her back to life. I still didn’t know whether Edna’s family and mine were related. All I knew was that we had settled on opposite banks of the same river. Edna’s band of Covingtons went one way, toward Shiloh, and wound up handling snakes. Our band kept coming south, first to Summit, and finally, in 1907, to Birmingham, where my father would be born and I would be born and my daughters would be born. Borderers. Hill people. New Lights.

When I told Carl Porter that I might have run across some handlers in my family tree, he seemed amused, but not surprised. “Who knows but that God sent you up here to write about Glenn’s trial so you could find out that very thing?” he said.

Brother Carl had come from a family of Alabama sharecroppers. He knew even less about his ancestors than I knew about mine. Unlike me, though, Carl seemed to have an intuitive grasp of the sort of people they were, and he had accepted it as the natural order of things. I was a city boy still trying to make sense of the notes in my father’s green binder. My journey with the snake handlers had become not so much a linear progression through time as a falling through levels of platitude toward some hard understanding of who I was. I did not know where or when I would arrive at my destination. All I knew for certain was that snakes would be waiting for me there.

A
few months after the New Year’s Eve watch service, I was in Atlanta on a magazine assignment, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to drive up to Kingston and visit with Brother Carl. He’d recently bricked the outside of his house across the highway from The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he seemed happy to see me.

By now, I believe Brother Carl thought of himself as a spiritual mentor to me. In some ways, he was. He had taught me about snake handling from the inside out. He’d also encouraged me to read the entire New Testament straight through, something I’d never done before. The previous summer, I had even considered asking him to baptize me in the Tennessee River, but I finally decided to be baptized in my home church in Birmingham instead. Getting baptized by a
snake-handling preacher is one thing; explaining it to family and friends is another.

When we sat down at his kitchen table for coffee, he got his Bible out and began steering me through some of his favorite passages of scripture. He had on a blue dress shirt and striped tie. On the kitchen counter lay his western-style hat with the quail feathers stuck in the band. Carl loved to feast on the Word. That’s what he called it, feasting, as though the Bible were a banquet set for him.

“The Bible says you’re gonna suffer for your faith,” he said in his soft Georgia accent, which differed only in degree from my own. “Look what happened to Stephen. I’d rather die of snakebite than get stoned to death. And what about Peter? Didn’t they crucify him upside down on a cross? I’d rather die of snakebite.”

He glanced over the top of his glasses to gauge my reaction. It sounded like a toss-up to me.

Carl reminded me that he’d been bitten plenty of times by poisonous snakes. The bites had hurt bad, and he didn’t want to get bit again. But he said he intended to keep on doing the will of the Lord. He’d served four months in jail back in the mid-1970s for disturbing public worship and for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon — snakes. All he’d done was take a few rattlesnakes into another man’s church. “We were invited,” he said. A few years later, the lure of the
world proved too much for him. He left preaching for seven years. Carl spent much of those years on the road, driving big rigs to the West Coast and doing drugs and chasing women. His cousin, Gene Sherbert, kept the church going in his absence, while Carolyn waited for him to return to his senses and start taking up serpents again.

Now that he’d been back in the fold for almost seventeen years, Carl wasn’t about to back up on the Lord. “I’ve been high on dope, whiskey,” he said. “It’s like nothing compared to the Spirit.” He’d even handled cobras and coral snakes, he said. In my estimation, that was taking the idea of repentance too far.

At a quarter to seven, Carl said we’d better get on over to the church. When he got up from the table, he looked distracted and grave, like any other Southern preacher with a sermon on his mind. He thoughtfully put on his coat and picked up his Bible and looked around the place to see if he’d forgotten anything. The kitchen adjoined a large and comfortable living room with paneled walls, bookshelves filled with photos of his children and grandchildren, and a big TV and VCR. Nothing at all out of the ordinary.

Then Carl opened the door to the laundry room. Inside were three serpent boxes and two aquariums, containing a total of ten rattlesnakes, eight copperheads, and a cottonmouth moccasin. Carl opened the lid of a bright blue box
with five timber rattlers in it. Three of them stuck their heads out. “Get on back in there,” he said as he tapped each of them gently on the nose with his finger.

It had been almost a year since I’d covered Glenn Summerford’s trial, and I’d gotten to know the handlers well enough by then not to be too surprised when Carl tapped those rattlesnakes on the head. It was kind of a sweet gesture, I thought. I helped him load the snakes into the trunk of his car.