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Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington
captainfez's review against another edition
5.0
Ever since I’d first heard of its existence, I’ve wanted to read Salvation on Sand Mountain. This is, of course, largely because Younger Me was pretty obsessed with the outré nature of its subject – churches whose adherents practised snake handling – which I admit is a pretty rubbernecking approach to something.
I finally – some 20-something years later – managed to read the book and discovered that while there was plenty of snaketacular narrative to go around, the book is more rewarding that my youthful self, labelling of it as churchy hicks with scales could ever have imagined.
Of course, there is plenty of oddness. I mean…
For me, this is a book I’m glad to read now, rather than when it first crossed my radar. It’s so much more than just hicksploitation: it’s a eulogy for a particular kind of life, and a meditation on the pain of faith.
It’s wonderful, even if you don’t drink the strychnine.
I finally – some 20-something years later – managed to read the book and discovered that while there was plenty of snaketacular narrative to go around, the book is more rewarding that my youthful self, labelling of it as churchy hicks with scales could ever have imagined.
Of course, there is plenty of oddness. I mean…
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.If you don’t want to read the book after that introduction, there has to be something deeply wrong with you. Another sample?
She started suspecting things weren’t right between her and Glenn when he broke her mother’s jaw with a vase at a family dinner and when he hit a brother-in-law over the head with a pair of vise grips shortly after that.Covington’s writing is taut, rarely florid, conveying the essential strangeness of the world he’s documenting by shying away from hyperbole. It’s the talk of someone who’s from the country: shying away from embellishment. Stating it simply, and keeping something in reserve, allowing the occasional dazzling moment to shine forth.
When the snake slowly moved in and out of Brother Carl’s fingers, bits of shed skin fell to the floor. The snake appeared to be in the process of reinventing itself, forging a new self out of the old.What’s in reserve is Covington’s personal connection to all this, which is revealed as the pages turn. His background is shared with his subjects: he has religion, and he’s suffered in the way many of the adherents in the book have. Addiction and hard times inform his story, and his growing absorption into the word of snake handlers and strychnine drinking sees the book’s focus creep from documentary to autobiography: through his coverage of the church, the author journeys into himself, and faces more than one reckoning. It's the journey from the observer to the observed.
“The Bible says Jesus won’t come again until the gospel’s been published in every nation,” he said. “So you just go ahead and write that book. As long as you tell the truth, it’ll be edifying to the body of Christ. It’ll be like you’re spreading the gospel, won’t it?” I nodded. But I wondered if Brother Carl knew then about the inevitable treachery that stood between journalist and subject. I wondered if he was ready for the dance that would have to take place between him and me.Where other authors may have wanted to glamourise or exaggerate happenings for effect, there’s a sense here that Covington desires to keep things scraped clean: to present things as they happened, including the occasional touch of something that may be the Holy Spirit.
Sister Barbara Elkins, the ailing matriarch, had shown up with a fruit jar of strychnine solution. She had mixed it herself. “She mixes it strong,” Jeff Hagerman said to me. “If you get scared or get your mind off God, you start to feel it.”The writing drew me forward through the book – and it’s definitely a book you can knock over in one session, once you get on a roll – on its journey from standard-issue coverage of court proceedings to a personal crisis. Always, there’s something which makes you want to read more. Covington’s narrative takes personal details which may have appeared self-indulgent in other hands and traces them to snakes and poison, to church and tongues, to a South in decline and a people forgotten.
But even as the hairs on my arm started to stand on end, the voice turned into something else, a sound that had pleasure in it as well as torment. Ecstasy, I would learn later, is excruciating, but I did not know that then.Of course, the danger of the setting is present, all the way through the book. There’s a good amount of historical information in here – enough to give you a sense of setting, but not enough to turn the read into a slog.
To date, at least seventy-one people have been killed by poisonous snakes during religious services in the United States, including the man said to have started the whole thing, George Went Hensley, who died vomiting blood in a shed in North Florida in 1955.But as well as this care to explain how these traditions have formed as they have, there’s an overwhelming sense of respect in the text for the procedures and practitioners both: there’s no cynical detachment. There’s observation, and a form of love – love which makes some of the book’s more dramatic moments particularly painful to ride along with.
“I’ve been hurt before, many times, Brother Dennis,” Charles says. “Let me tell you, the bite of the serpent is nothing compared to the bite of your fellow man.”This edition featured an afterword covering the way the book came to be. It’s a useful update, and telling because, despite his connection to the subjects, Covington has chosen to not look back. This chapter has him, years later, explaining how the book took the form it ultimately did, and it’s illuminating.
For me, this is a book I’m glad to read now, rather than when it first crossed my radar. It’s so much more than just hicksploitation: it’s a eulogy for a particular kind of life, and a meditation on the pain of faith.
It’s wonderful, even if you don’t drink the strychnine.
bookishpriest's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
This is a well-written, interesting, and accessible book. It offers a glimpse through Covington's eyes into a culture entirely foreign to me, but which prompted fruitful and interesting reflection on my own religious practices and how I react, rather than respond, to the practices of others. This would make for excellent casual reading for anyone interested and could be used as a book study to prompt discussion about how we engage with and perceive other cultural groups and religious practices. Highly recommended.
For a much longer review and discussion, visit https://www.bookishpriest.com/post/salvation-on-sand-mountain
jroberts3456's review
4.0
A fascinating look a snake handling and the power it can hold on the some people. A great read.
ariel_bloomer's review
5.0
This was a quick and compelling read. Part journalism and part memoir, Salvation on Sand Mountain traces the authors journey into an extended web of snake handlers in Appalachia. His personal growth is as intriguing as this distinct hill culture is fascinating. Covington's treatment of snake-handling churches is filled with the empathy and understanding gained from years of personal investment, a viewpoint one could not gain from objective anthropological observation. A required text for my course "Interpreting Religious Worlds," the book stands as a reminder that unique and extreme religious perspectives exist in our own backyards.
wpayne's review against another edition
2.0
Salvation on Sand Mountain is the fascinating personal account of a journalist who was caught up in the world of snake handling and Southern folk spirituality. The book is remarkable for its suspended judgment, and thus offers a truly unique perspective on an oft-maligned religious movement. Covington refuses to rationalize or pathologize the behaviors of the people in the churches he visits, an admirable decision. However, this book still disturbs my inner social scientist because of how Covington alternates between the dispassionate character of a reporter and the engaged, uncritical character of a participant. He uses real names in the book, which would make it seem more like a memoir, but he also does extensive background research and uses anthropological techniques to analyze his subjects. This combination seems inappropriate given the socially stigmatized position of most of the subjects of this book.
cookingwithelsa's review
5.0
I read this book before I went to do mission work in Appalachia. I really, really wanted to go to a snake handling church but there were none in the area I was -- which was sad. This books is wonderfully well written.
ericwelch's review
4.0
What was originally intended to be a meditation on the trial of a Holiness pastor, Glenn Summerford, who was convicted of using snakes to kill his wife morphed into a rather bizarre memoir that follows the spiritual development (?) or devolution of an erstwhile Methodist to snake-handling Holiness followers in Scottsboro (yes, *that* Scottsboro**) Alabama. He traces his ancestors back to earlier generations of snake-handlers assuming in a rather Lamarckian fantasy that their fascination with holy rolling is genetic. He's clearly fascinated by his (and his daughter's) intense physical reaction to the music. A risk-taker himself, having been a journalist in war-torn Central America, where he had been under fire several times, one cannot help but wonder if putting oneself in danger doesn't have an exceptional appeal to some people.
His original idea was to write a book about these people. The result of is a very interesting cultural essay filled with delightful little tidbits of irrationality:
"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. But this nonsense -- in the literal sense -- is no different from the recent Pope Benedict's resurrection of the Office of the Exorcist. (http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/436016/20130216/pope-benedict-exorcism-catholic-church-satan-father.htm)
His discussion of the origins of snake handling reinforces what I have learned elsewhere, i.e. that it represents a rejection and fear of encroaching industrialization with its concomitant societal upheaval.
"Snake handling, for instance, didn’t originate back in the hills somewhere. [A debatable point, I believe.] 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....Enter the snake handlers, spiritual nomads from the high country that surrounded Scottsboro, from isolated pockets on Sand Mountain and the hollows along South Sauty Creek. They were refugees from a culture on the ropes. They spoke in tongues, anointed one another with oil in order to be healed, and when instructed by the Holy Ghost, drank poison, held fire, and took up poisonous snakes. For them, Scottsboro itself was the wicked, wider world, a place where one might be tempted to “back up on the Lord.” They’d taken the risk, though, out of economic desperation. They had been drawn to Scottsboro by the promise of jobs in the mills that made clothes, carpets, rugs, and tires. Some of them had found work. All of them had found prejudice."
The author finds himself drawn to the emotional excess of the handler "services" and his description of becoming part of the experience, handling a huge timber rattler, is, for him, quite exotic and unsettling. But his rational side also admits to being drawn to danger. He describes the experience this way: "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. The similarity is more than coincidence, I thought. In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully come upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face reads exactly the opposite — as though someone, or something, were being violently taken away from her. The paradox of Christianity, one of many of which Jesus speaks, is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves, and perhaps that’s why photos of the handlers so often seem to be portraits of loss."
One is tempted to look for a rational reason why the snakes don't bite more often, but the fact remains they bite all the time and deaths from snakebite are disproportionately large compared to those in the general population. Handling is clearly stressful for the snakes who rarely live out a season whereas they can survive for several decades in the wild. Often the snakes will die while being handled. They are certainly untameable and contrary to popular opinion one does not attain a certain immunity to snake venom after multiple bites. To the contrary, one is more likely to develop an allergic sensitivity.
My rational side recoils from the unfathomable need of these people to lose themselves in what is clearly something very precious and moving. Having read three different accounts of snake handling (not to mention strychnine-drinking), I remain baffled but fascinated.
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottsboro_Boys
His original idea was to write a book about these people. The result of is a very interesting cultural essay filled with delightful little tidbits of irrationality:
"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. But this nonsense -- in the literal sense -- is no different from the recent Pope Benedict's resurrection of the Office of the Exorcist. (http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/436016/20130216/pope-benedict-exorcism-catholic-church-satan-father.htm)
His discussion of the origins of snake handling reinforces what I have learned elsewhere, i.e. that it represents a rejection and fear of encroaching industrialization with its concomitant societal upheaval.
"Snake handling, for instance, didn’t originate back in the hills somewhere. [A debatable point, I believe.] 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....Enter the snake handlers, spiritual nomads from the high country that surrounded Scottsboro, from isolated pockets on Sand Mountain and the hollows along South Sauty Creek. They were refugees from a culture on the ropes. They spoke in tongues, anointed one another with oil in order to be healed, and when instructed by the Holy Ghost, drank poison, held fire, and took up poisonous snakes. For them, Scottsboro itself was the wicked, wider world, a place where one might be tempted to “back up on the Lord.” They’d taken the risk, though, out of economic desperation. They had been drawn to Scottsboro by the promise of jobs in the mills that made clothes, carpets, rugs, and tires. Some of them had found work. All of them had found prejudice."
The author finds himself drawn to the emotional excess of the handler "services" and his description of becoming part of the experience, handling a huge timber rattler, is, for him, quite exotic and unsettling. But his rational side also admits to being drawn to danger. He describes the experience this way: "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. The similarity is more than coincidence, I thought. In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully come upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face reads exactly the opposite — as though someone, or something, were being violently taken away from her. The paradox of Christianity, one of many of which Jesus speaks, is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves, and perhaps that’s why photos of the handlers so often seem to be portraits of loss."
One is tempted to look for a rational reason why the snakes don't bite more often, but the fact remains they bite all the time and deaths from snakebite are disproportionately large compared to those in the general population. Handling is clearly stressful for the snakes who rarely live out a season whereas they can survive for several decades in the wild. Often the snakes will die while being handled. They are certainly untameable and contrary to popular opinion one does not attain a certain immunity to snake venom after multiple bites. To the contrary, one is more likely to develop an allergic sensitivity.
My rational side recoils from the unfathomable need of these people to lose themselves in what is clearly something very precious and moving. Having read three different accounts of snake handling (not to mention strychnine-drinking), I remain baffled but fascinated.
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottsboro_Boys
xtinamariet's review
5.0
A really, really fascinating book, narrating truthfully what both what it's like to be caught up in the Spirit and struggle with the imperfect people of the church. I loved the way this journalistic assignment led to holy experiences in a way that challenged my reserved, intellectual faith.
iceangel9's review
4.0
When a snake handling preacher comes to trial for trying to murder his wife, Covington heads South to cover the trial. He becomes intrigued by the religion of snake handling and finds himself drawn into their lives and religion as he researches their faith. A fascinating look at this religious sect, told in a fair yet in-depth way.