Salvation on Sand Mountain Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acclaim for Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain

  ALSO BY DENNIS COVINGTON

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 - FOLLOWING SIGNS

  Chapter 2 - THE TRIAL

  Chapter 3 - SHEEP WITHOUT A SHEPHERD

  Chapter 4 - UNDER THE BRUSH ARBOR

  Chapter 5 - JOLO

  Chapter 6 - ROOTS

  Chapter 7 - SNAKES

  Chapter 8 - SALVATION ON SAND MOUNTAIN

  Chapter 9 - WAR STORIES

  Chapter 10 - THE WIDER CIRCLE:

  Chapter 11 - THE WEDDING

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  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.”

  — USA Today

  “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

  Lizard

  Lasso the Moon

  Cleaving

  Redneck Riviera

  In memory of

  SAM S. COVINGTON

  my father

  Acknowledgments

  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

  Prologue

  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.

  Spirit trees?

  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.

  Birmingham

  Summer

  1993

  1

  FOLLOWING SIGNS

  One night in East Tennessee, a snake-handling preacher came up to us and said, “You boys got any snakes in that car?”

  We told him we didn’t.

  “What? You mean to tell me you don’t have any rattlesnakes in your car?”

  “No, sir.”

  His eyes widened. “What’s the matter with you boys?” he said. “Are you crazy?”

  The first time I went to a snake-handling service, nobody even took a snake out. This was in Scottsboro, Alabama, in March of 1992, at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following. I’d come to the church at the invitation of one of the members I’d met while covering the trial of their preacher, Rev. Glenn Summerford, who had been convicted and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison for attempting to murder his wife with rattlesnakes.

  The church was on a narrow blacktop called Woods Cove Road, not far from the Jackson County Hospital. I remember it was a cool evening. The sky was the color of apricots, and the moon had just risen, a thin, silver crescent. There weren’t any stars out yet.

  After I crossed a set of railroad tracks past the hospital, I could see the lights of the church in the distance, but as I drew nearer I started to wonder if this were really a church at all. It was, in fact, a converted gas station and country store, with a fiberboard façade and a miniature steeple. The hand-painted sign spelled the preacher’s first name in three different ways: Glenn, Glen, and Glyn. A half dozen cars were parked out front, and even with the windows of my own car rolled up, I could feel the beat of the music.

  That music was like nothing I’d ever heard before, a cross between Salvation Army and acid rock: tambourines, an electric guitar, drums, cymbals, and voices that careened from one note to the next as though the singers were being sawn in half. “I shall not be ... I shall not be moved. I shall not be ... I shall not be moved. Just like a tree that’s planted by the wa-a-ter, oh ... I shall not be moved!”

  There are moments when you stand on the brink of a new experience and understand that you have no choice about it. Either you walk into the experience or you turn away from it, but you know that no matter what you choose, you will have altered your life in a permanent way. Either way, there will be consequences.

  I walked on in.

  A dozen or so men and women were clapping hands and stomping feet. They had the angular, hand-me-down look of Appalachian hill people, and some of them were familiar to me from the trial. I recognized the bald head and wispy, white beard of Uncle Ully Lynn, whom I’d talked to in the witness room during a recess. He seemed to be dressed in the same faded overalls, and his pale blue eyes were as serene and mysterious as they had been at the trial.

  “What’s it like to take up a serpent?” I had asked him then.

  “It’s hard to explain,” Uncle Ully had said. “You’re in a prayerful state. You can’t have your mind on other things. The Spirit tells you what to do.”

  “But why do some people get bit?”

  He thought about it a minute. “In that situation,” he said, “somebody must have misjudged the Spirit.”

  In his youth, the story went, Uncle Ully had been one of the biggest gospel singers on Sand Mountain, but I didn’t know that then. I also didn’t know that within a year he’d be dead, eaten from the inside out by a gangrenous infection that had nothing to do with snakes. At the time of his death, Uncle Ully was still receiving royalties for the songs he’d written for his relative, Loretta Lynn, but that story, too, was one I wouldn’t hear till he was gone. All I knew on that first night was that Uncle Ully was a snake handler who seemed to have been a good enough judge of the Spirit to stay alive when others hadn’t.

  Beyond Uncle Ully’s bobbing bald head, I could make out Sister Bobbie Sue Thompson, the woman who had first invited me to the service. She smiled and motioned for me to join her at the front of the church, where she appeared to be leading the singing. At her side stood a woman in a snakeskin-print shirt. I didn’t know the words to the songs, but that didn’t seem to matter. We sang mostly choruses — “I Saw the Light,” “Wading through Deep Water,” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The guitar player, a redheaded gnome of a man named Cecil, played surprisingly well. Standing beside him, I was able to get a good look at the church.

  Before Glenn Summerford’s trial, attendance at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following had reportedly neared a hundred people on any of the three nights during the week when services were held. How all those people fit into the tiny sanctuary was a mystery. The church didn’t have more than a dozen pews, and its linoleum floor buckled like a cresting wave. The white walls were bare except for portraits of Jesus and a faded tapestry of the Last Supper. An electric heater glowed in the middle of the room. There were bathrooms off a hall in back.

  When the singing wound down, a short, wiry man with a mustache and slicked-back hair headed for the pulpit. He was carrying a Bible in one hand and a flat wooden serpent box in the other. He wore a dark, western-style shirt, jeans, and a Jesus belt buckle. The portrait of Jesus on the buckle was not one of those conventional ones in which the Lord appears to be a mild-mannered aesthete with shampooed hair. This man’s Jesus was more like the wild-eyed Jewish carpenter who had chased the money changers from the temple.

  “I ain’t no preacher,” the man said apologetically. His bottom front teeth were missing. I’d later find out his name was J.L. “I ain’t no assistant preacher either,” he said. “I’m just trying to keep the church open.”

  “Amen,” Sister Bobbie Sue said.

  J.L. gingerly set the snake box on the altar, and there was an awkward silence as he laid his Bible on the pulpit and slowly thumbed through it
. His fingers were square and his nails dark — workman’s hands. He was a welder with a bad heart who dreamed of artificially inseminating his own cattle, I later learned.

  “Help him, Jesus,” Sister Bobbie Sue said.

  “The text is gonna be John 3:16,” J.L. finally said. He read haltingly, one finger in the book, his dark eyebrows knit. An odd thing about the place occurred to me even then. When it’s absolutely still and quiet in a church like The Church of Jesus with Signs Following, even then there’s an impression of movement, as though a light were swinging from a chain, but there wasn’t any such light that night. It was an illusion, I thought. Something there that wasn’t.

  “For God so loved the world,” J.L. read, “that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

  “Amen,” said Sister Bobbie Sue.

  “Bless His sweet name,” said the woman in the snakeskin shirt.

  J.L. looked up, considering his next words. “God so loved the world,” he said. And then: “Let us pray.”

  It had to have been the shortest sermon in history. But nobody seemed to mind. They all came to the front, the women in their ankle-length dresses with the lace collars and tiny flowered prints, the men in their jeans, overalls, or polyester slacks. They knelt at the makeshift altar and started praying out loud, each a different prayer. J.L.’s voice rose above the others for a measure or so. “O Lord, be with us now, and in thy mercy hold and keep us, and O Dear God, bless this our little church, amen, and keep it for your own....”