My experience with Holiness people was limited to attending their church services with Mama occasionally. She believed in the Holiness way. Dad, however, believed in the Southern Baptist Church. I was never allowed to go to a snake-handling service, so my knowledge is limited to what other people told me about it.
My mother’s brother, my Uncle Dewey, was a Holiness preacher. He was the kindest, most loving person to everyone he met. I thought he was a saint.
The Holiness people I knew rejected the existing social order as being corrupt and beyond redemption. Their moral code was rigid and ascetic. Dancing, movies, tobacco, alcoholic beverages, patent medicines, and drugs were strictly forbidden. The women did not cut their hair, use cosmetics, dress immodestly or extravagantly, or wear jewelry. Some of them did not drink coffee, tea, or soft drinks, and did not chew gum. They believed in the witness of the spirit within and felt a person should show by outward signs—be witness to—his or her religious beliefs. They always said you could tell good Holiness people by the way they dressed and by the way they abstained from things. But hypocrites can be found everywhere, as this Holiness mountain preacher knew: “They is a false religion that can handle snakes. They is a false religion that can pray for the sick. They is a false religion that can speak in tongues. What I’m a-saying is that there’s a counterfeit for everything that God’s got. . . . If you didn’t have the spirit of God, you’d think it was the Lord shouting. . . . The next day, they’ll fight, cuss, and chew tobacco, smoke cigarettes, drink liquor, steal anything. And that’s the way you’d extinguish [sic] the difference between a Christian and a devil-possessed person.” As one Holiness woman testified in a church service: “To confirm the word means to practice anything you preach or teach. That is what we’re doing. . . . This is to let people know what can be done through the anointing of God. Most people come to see the serpents taken up. But when you get them there, you can preach the word of God to them.”
Mama once told me the story of what happened to a man named Jim Helton. He and his wife, Edna Mae, were acquaintances of my parents. Jim’s nickname was “Butter Eye.”
“Did you hear about Jim Butter Eye?” Mama asked me one day when I was home for a visit. “Well, Edna Mae is just tore up something awful about it. She said she had a warning about it one night the week before it happened. She was out bringing in the cows, and why she seed an old black ram on its knees up at the top of the pasture. She said hit was on its knees a-prayin’. Said she went up to see what was wrong, but it jumped up and run away. She said it was just a-moaning and a-going on, like someone a-prayin’ to the Lord. She knowed then it was a sign that something bad was going to happen.
“Well, Sunday night Jim went off to Blue Hole to a church meeting. Edna Mae didn’t go. She never goes to any snake meetings. She’s a good Holiness woman and loves the Lord, but she don’t believe in handling snakes any more than I do. Well, she said, they brought Jim home late that night. A big rattler bit him. Edna Mae said that man did suffer awful. Why, she said he’d get up and kneel by his bed and moan and go on just exactly like that old black ram did. She called the ram to mind when she seed how Jim was actin’. She knowed this was the sign coming true.
“Jim died on Monday, and they buried him a-Wednesday. Edna Mae is just awful tore up.”
“Mama, I’m awful glad you never did get in with that snake-handling bunch,” I said.
“I never believed in it. I know they have scripture that says that about taking up serpents and things like that. But they’s another scripture that says you shall not tempt the Lord. Poor old Edna Mae. Her children all grown and gone off and left her, and now her old man is dead.”
Later that weekend I was talking with Old Widow Cane, who belonged to a branch of the Holiness Church that practices the handling of snakes. She was testifying (witnessing) to her faith to me on a street corner in Pineville. I asked why she believed people had to handle snakes to prove their religion.
“My religion, I’ve got to see it, praise God,” she said. “I’ve got to feel it, too, praise the sweet name of Jesus. God, he gives us the word and then the evidence, and we must act on it in faith if we’re ever gonna get anywhere in this world and the next one too, praise Jesus. God, why he can lock the jaws of them snakes; he can draw the burn out of the hottest fire. We have Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Old Book to witness to that, praise God. What’s good enough for them is good enough for us saints today.”
The people of the Holiness Church call each other saints. They interpret Mark 16:17, 18 and Isaiah 43:2 literally. Some of them drink poison, some of them handle snakes and fire.
“I seed that man, Raymond Hayes, handle fire one time,” Grandpa told me. “He got one of them there blowtorches and held it right up close to his forehead and it never singed a hair, not nary one.”
“I recollect one time me and Otis and Ed Brock was out, foolin’ around, you know,” Dad said, “and we took a notion to drop in and observe one of them snake-meetin’s. They’s already shoutin’ all over the place time we got there. We kept one eye on them and the other on the place where we thought the box of snakes would be. One old man—he put me in mind of Old Man Andrew Brock—he got happy. Now it was wintertime and the heating stove was red-hot in places. That old man run up and just hugged that stove like it was his old woman. And he didn’t even scorch a stitch of his clothes or burn a red place on his skin. Now what about a man doin’ that and not even getting burned?”
“I’ve studied on it and studied on it,” Grandpa said, “and I can’t figure out how they can do it and not be hurt a-tall. Some of ‘em do get snake bit and some die after they drink strychnine. But they’s others who don’t suffer ary bit from any of it. I don’t understand it.”
Most Holiness members believe in a special anointing of the Spirit; they believe that when they receive this anointing they can speak in tongues, heal the sick, and experience extreme danger and not be harmed. Sometimes unbelievers say they can do these things also, and some do try—to their sorrow.
“You recollect what happened at Arjay last year?” Grandpa asked. “They’s having a snake-meetin’—I believe Shilo Collins was the preacher.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Dad chuckled. “That’s when that ‘sinner-man’ got a little too much from the moonshine jar. He went to that service and said if the saints could handle snakes, he could, too,”
“He did, too,” Grandpa laughed. “He reached out and took a big copperhead from one of the brothers. The snake was quick as lightning, they said. Soon as he took a-holt of it, it bit him on the hand. Did you ever hear what happened to him?”
“He lost his hand,” Dad said. “Delmar Rice worked the same place as he did. Delmar said the man was off from work for ages of time and lost his hand to boot.”
The snake handlers could have told this man that he did not have the anointing, or the faith, to do what he attempted. Even the handlers admit they are afraid of snakes when they are not in the spirit. As one Holiness preacher put it, “When the anointing is on me, I’m not afraid of the serpents. Other times I’d run. I’ve taken up as many as six serpents at one time I’ve not ever been bitten. There’s something there that you know, without a doubt, that it won’t harm you.”
In spite of popular belief, snake handlers do not worship the snake. Snakes are never the objects of worship, but rather they are an element of worship. The believers do not have snakes at every service, either, as some people think. As one preacher put it, “We can have a good time without snakes. Someone asked me if we worshipped the snake. No! We surely do not! The snake represents evil, the Devil. We just show that God, the good, has power over the Devil.”
Those who handle snakes do so for several reasons. They believe they are subduing the devil when they take up serpents. They also believe they are confirming the word of God when they carry out the (implied) injunction in Mark 16: 17, 18.
Scientists tell us that the reason the snakes do not bite more often probably lies
in the way they are taken up and handled. The snakes lose their sense of balance, become disoriented, and are utterly bewildered when they are moved through the air to another pair of hands, or draped or twined around a body. But this does not explain why the snakes do not strike the moment the box containing them is opened.
Time after time, in the books and articles I have read on the subject, there are recorded instances of people at the snake meetings kicking the box during the course of the service. When the time comes to handle the snakes, the box is picked up and shaken vigorously in order to irritate the reptiles before the box is opened. The box is then put down and the lid opened. At this point the snakes should be frightened and apt to strike out at anything that moves. Sometimes people do get bitten when the box is opened but, more often than not, they are not harmed at all.
As mentioned earlier, some scholars believe that snake handling is an aspect of crisis theology. The people I knew in Bell County led a drab existence; they were desperate for something, anything, to break the monotony of their lives. Snake handling did that for them to a certain extent. It brought excitement, danger, and bravery into their lives. For a few moments, each time they handled a snake in front of an audience, they were in the limelight. They proved, at least to themselves, that God was still with them, that he was still protecting them. At those times when the anointing was taken away and they were bitten, they still maintained they were doing God’s will, and that it was the will of God for them to be bitten in order to prove to the world that the snakes were really dangerous.
In more recent years, a large number of women have become snake handlers. I suspect that these women also crave excitement, danger, and attention. They have long been treated as second-class citizens, bound by rules and restrictions that do not apply to the men.
I remember hearing about one particular snake handler when I was a child. His name was Lee Valentine. “That man has suffered about as much as ary man put on this earth,” Dad said. Valentine had been a moonshiner years before, and perhaps his path had crossed Dad’s and Grandpa’s from time to time because they also were moonshiners. People said that eight of Valentine’s ten children had died of various painful diseases. He worked in the mines after he gave up moonshining and was almost killed in a slate fall. It was reported that his body was crushed under the slate and he was given up to die. A Holiness preacher named Willie Simms prayed for him, and he was healed. They said you could hear the bones snapping back into place, and then Valentine got up out of bed, sat down at the table, and ate a hearty meal.
After his accident in the mines, Lee Valentine joined the Holiness Church and became anointed to preach the gospel. Mama and her friends hero-worshipped him. (I never saw him in person, but I have seen pictures of him; he resembled Jim Backus, the actor.)
Time passed, and we heard that Lee Valentine had joined Shilo Collins’s snake-handling church at Blue Hole. Mama and her friends, who did not believe in snake handling, grieved for this man, who had suffered so much and, they felt, had been led astray.
Years later, word came that Lee Valentine had been bitten during a service in either Alabama or Georgia and had died. They brought his body to his old home place near Harlan, Kentucky, for burial.
One notable thing about the snake-handling saints in Bell County was that they did not kill the snake that had caused the death of one of their members. They believed they would receive some kind of special grace if they handled the same snake. At the graveside services for Lee Valentine there was almost a riot when the believers fought to handle the snake that had killed him. The police broke up the gathering and killed the snake. Later Dad said to Grandpa, “Old Man Howard told me that the man who killed that snake had it skinned and a belt made out of its skin. He wears it ever’ day, Old Man Howard said.”
The Holiness faith and the Southern Baptist Church were the only religious services I attended as a child and young adult. They taught that God was a fire-and-brimstone God, and they preached about the wages of sin and other evil things. I could never accept what they preached. If God was like they said he was, I wanted nothing to do with him. Later, the Evangelical United Brethren Missionaries established a church in Stoney Fork; sometime after that, this denomination joined with the Methodists and became United Methodist. I joined this church as an adult.
One of my most heart-breaking experiences happened after I had grown up, when Dad was saved and baptized into the Holiness faith. When Dad joined her church, Mama was thrilled and shouted her praises in the church services as she testified. Dad, as a new convert, became a zealous worker in his church. One day he came to my house and started telling me about the Holiness Church, comparing it with the mission church to which I belonged and urging me to leave my church and join his. I could not be persuaded to renounce my church. Dad pleaded with such fervor that he started crying. This I can never forget.
16
Marriage and Life after That
When the mountains spoke to my soul I knew I
was fated to hear them forever, no matter how
far I wander from home.
My parents took me from school when I was eleven years old and in the seventh grade—I never graduated from seventh grade.
“You are only eleven years old, Sidney, you can’t stop school now,” my teacher, Miss Howard, said.
“I have to, Miss Howard, there’s no one to help Mama.”
“What’s wrong with your mama?”
“Mama has a bad heart. The doctor ordered her to bed. I have to help.”
It became my lot to cook and housekeep for my family. I never got to attend classes again as a child or adolescent. I used to dream at night about being back in school, but that dream never came true. The nearest high school was fifteen miles away, and there were no school buses at that time.
First Marriage
I married shortly after I turned fifteen; there were no other options. I wanted to go back to school, but Dad said no. There was no money for me to be a boarding student at the Red Bird Mission School or the Pine Mountain Settlement School. “You are needed at home to help your mama take care of the young’uns,” he said.
Dad worked as a timber cutter for the Ritter Lumber Company off and on until the first-growth timber had all been cut and shipped out of the area. By then, when the Ritter Company relocated their mill, Dad was in poor health and not able to move his large family anywhere else.
Around that time, when I was fourteen, Wilburn Helton, the brother of my best friend Tilda, came home from World War II. I fell in love with him. He had blond hair and bright blue eyes. In his right cheek he had a dimple, which came out when he smiled. For a day or two Wilburn hung around our house, talking to Dad. After he left one evening, Dad scolded me. “You made me ashamed of you, the way you looked at him!” he said. Later he told Mama, “She’s growing up, Rachel. You’d better keep a sharp eye on her.”
Other young men began to hang around our house, but I was too naïve to think it was because of me. Wilburn left the community to work in another state. Then we got word that he had married and fathered a son. I mourned for the loss of this first love. The last time I saw him was several years after he’d married and divorced. I was by that time married. Some of Wilburn’s relatives lived just below our house on York Branch. Wilburn was visiting with them; two or three came out in the front yard as he was leaving. I watched from my house as they all got into a pickup truck and drove away. That was the last time I saw Wilburn alive. Later the neighbors said he had gone back into the army and was shipped out to Korea. Before the war ended he was killed in action.
Leon Lawson, the man who became my first husband, was in the Navy during World War II. After the war ended, he came back to Stoney Fork and his family, who lived on Birch Lick. I got acquainted with him at the post office, and he came several times to our house. He was a really handsome man, even more so when he smiled. I just wish he had smiled more often. He was quiet and serious, and he often would say cutting words about s
omething or someone of which he did not approve. He had the reputation of being a hard worker and held others to his own high standards. He was also a talented guitar player. Leon and I went to church services a few times together, but mostly he came to the house and we sat on the front porch or in the backyard and courted. When he asked me to marry him, I said yes. I thought if I was ever going to have any life of my own, what else was there except to get married?
I was fifteen years and three months old on February 23, 1947, my wedding day. Leon was twenty-five. It was a gray, cold day—the sky looked hard as slate, and you could see glints of frost in the air.
My parents had to sign permission for me to get married because I was underage. Later I was angry because Mama and Dad had not had more foresight and had not taken better care of me. Why did they let me get married so young? But because most mountain girls married when they were thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old, Mama and Dad didn’t see anything unusual about it. We really didn’t know the Lawson family that well, though, since we lived on York Branch and they lived on Birch Lick. Because our houses were in different valleys, we had little association with the Lawsons.
On my wedding day Leon’s sister Helen and my Uncle Andrew, who had agreed to go as a witness for me, accompanied Leon and me. Because Mama had so many younger children, it never occurred to me that she and Dad would go with us. We rode the bus to Pineville, our county seat. Back then you applied for your marriage license and then immediately went to a justice of the peace and got married. That is precisely what we did. I wore a cotton dress with sprigged flowers and a blue sweater for my wedding. Leon seemed embarrassed.
My Appalachia Page 14