by Gina nahai
Adam’s father, Little Sam Jenkins, was a preacher who had loved God’s children but felt he was not “cut out” to take care of his own. Over his lifetime he would take four wives and father more than a dozen children, and he would abandon them all, fighting and moonshining and preaching as he went along, living in poverty and homelessness but imbued with the spirit of Christ and the desire, above all, to spread the Word and through it, conquer the devil. For sixty years he had preached that marriage was holy and divorce a sin, that second marriages were not recognized by the Lord because they rendered a person “double-married.” For sixty years he had cried at the miracle of the child Christ and played with the children of his congregants, telling the parents that children were blessed, that they should be cherished and nurtured and regarded as God’s gift to the family. Yet he had left his own offspring without a second thought, and he had even denied paternity where he could.
Little Sam Jenkins was not a liar or a hypocrite. He believed in what he preached, believed in it with fervor and innocence— why else would he have taken up poisonous serpents, plunged his arms and face into burning furnaces, even promised to walk on water before hundreds of believers, all in the name of the Lord? Unlike some preachers of his time, he had no interest in worldly goods, demanded no compensation for his hard work, sought no earthly comfort, even in old age. Like most of them, he had trouble living by the laws he preached.
He had trouble, too, looking away from a pretty woman with bare legs and red-painted toenails, especially one determined to prove to him the futility of man’s resolve before the lure of the devil, and that’s why he had found himself in 1935 between the thighs of young Clare Watkins at the end of a ten-day-long revival in the coal town of Lynch, Kentucky, inside the very tent where, for over a week, he had talked in tongues and danced to the music of cymbals and guitars and wrestled with forty-pound snakes daring them to bite him. Little Sam had been bitten twice during the revival—once on the left temple and once on the wrist, but the snakes and their poison had not managed to stop or even slow him down: he had taken the bites and continued preaching without so much as a frown, refusing to stop and wipe the blood that trickled down his forehead and onto his cheek, or to pull out the teeth that the second snake, a six-foot-long copperhead with a sand-colored coat, had left in his wrist. He had continued to preach even as his head had swelled to the size of a watermelon and turned black as his shoes. Later he had temporarily lost use of his wrist.
“The Lord shall take care of me,” he had told the church members, refusing medical care on grounds it would prove his faith in God was weak.
Then the revival had ended and all the Holiness members had driven away in their trucks and she had come up to him— Clare whom he had known all her life, and whose mother he had been married to for a brief and unmemorable time.
Clare’s mother, Rose Watkins, had been one of Little Sam’s strictest converts, handling snakes and talking in tongues and moving with the Spirit until she fainted and fell unconscious to the floor in every church gathering she went to. Her first husband, Cecil Watkins, had worked the coal mines of eastern Kentucky for twenty-five years before he was sent to the Kentucky State Penitentiary and hanged for killing a mine boss. In his absence Rose had devoted herself to the task of raising her children in the ways of the Lord—washing coal miners’ clothes for twenty-five cents a load and reciting from the Bible, which she could not read but had memorized almost entirely from preachers’ sermons. She had married Little Sam Jenkins less out of love than from a sense of awe and a deep faith in his holiness, and she would have considered her life a success, would even have forgiven Sam his quick departure and subsequent remarriage, except for the shame her daughter brought on her.
Clare, it was obvious, had inherited none of her mother’s piety or propensity for self-denial, and she never missed an opportunity to allow Rose a glimpse into her base and ungodly soul. As a child she was always defying Rose—refusing to go to church and asking to go to school instead, threatening to run away from home and join her father in the “Castle” at Frankfurt, where he had long since been executed. She was twelve years old when Rose married Sam Jenkins, and she had gone to work on the preacher immediately—touching her stepfather with her hands in places she knew a man should not be touched, rubbing herself against him when she spoke and exhaling her sweet, soft scent into his lungs, later parading before him in those short skirts she made for herself over her mother’s objections, and those silk stockings she obtained by tormenting the clerk at the company store in Lynch. In response Little Sam Jenkins bit his lip and preached piety in every meeting he held, but he never managed to look away from Clare, never stopped thinking about her even after he had left Rose and married an epileptic beauty with a small fortune and a Gypsy’s curse, and maybe it was the force of his prayers late at night when he was alone with his God and not ashamed of baring his soul that had sent Clare to him when he was fifty-one years old and she was twenty-four.
At the end of the day, tempting death, praying to the Lord, or digging your face in between a young woman’s breasts were all about achieving ecstasy.
And so that day in Lynch, Little Sam had watched as Clare had sauntered toward him in her short dress and her bare legs, her skin emitting a smell of danger, her lips pink and fleshy and moist with temptation, smiling as if to say this-is-your-moment-recognize-it-and-enjoy. Later he had stood still as she wrapped her right leg around his left thigh, opened the front of her shirt and placed his hands on her breasts, and at that point it was all he could do to keep himself from uttering the name of the Lord before he surrendered to a lifelong temptation with all the force and fury aroused in him by the snakes.
That was the beginning, and also the end.
Little Sam had taken from Clare the strength and vigor a man can feel only from fornicating with young flesh, and he had given her the sweet triumph of knowing she could corrupt God’s most fervent prophet and he thought he was done—free and able once again to do the work of the Lord—but the Lord worked in mysterious ways and the Lord had not planned for Sam to be through with Clare just so soon, and that is why he saw her again, many months later at the McGhee Church of God in Knoxville, and this time she had a baby in her arms.
She turned up just as he was about to start a sermon, looking pale and drawn and not at all in the mood to tempt anyone, and the expression on her face told him she meant trouble. Little Sam counted on his fingers the months since he had held the revival in Lynch, and he counted, too, the number of children he already had and could not feed, and immediately he decided to focus his sermon on women who indulge in sins of the flesh. For two and a half hours he had walked the church talking about the fires of hell waiting to engulf those who created temptation in this world, and every time he had uttered the words Jeiebel or temptress devil he had paused right by Clare so that everyone in the meeting could surmise without a shadow of a doubt that the target of his speech was the young woman with the short hair and the baby in her arms.
Through it all Clare had remained frozen in her seat, too stunned to react even as the church members sang and danced and handled snakes around her, and afterward she had picked up her baby and gone on her way without daring to approach Jenkins who was still reciting passages from the Bible on the subject of fallen women.
But she had come back, the next day and the day after, and every time he saw her he noticed that she was angrier—that she insisted on showing the baby to the believers, telling them his name was Adam, that Jenkins was his father. Little Sam had ignored her at first, then screamed that she should stop frequenting his church and spreading lies. The more he tried to shake Clare off, the more fiercely she clung to him.
She found him in every backwoods meeting he set up, followed him on foot or in a borrowed truck across fourteen states and into countless church meetings. It was clear she wanted him to acknowledge her and her child. What wasn’t so clear was why she hoped he would own up, and what she expected to get f
rom him.
She couldn’t have wanted marriage, because he was already married and a rotten husband twice over. And she couldn’t have wanted Sam’s name, because he was wanted by the law and by creditors in more than one state. And she couldn’t have been in love with him—what with his short stature and his cauliflower ears and a face and body that were scarred and ravaged from too many fights, a lifetime of sleeping in the wild, and, at that time, over three hundred snakebites.
Maybe, church members thought, she was motivated by revenge. Maybe she wanted Jenkins to restore to her the good name she had forsaken. Whatever her motives, however, Clare should have realized she was fighting a losing battle and given up long before she actually did: Little Sam may or may not have been the child’s father as Clare insisted. He may or may not have fornicated with his second wife’s daughter and refused to confess his sin. All that was irrelevant to Clare’s predicament, because everyone who had ever heard of the girl knew of her loose morals and her reckless ways, and so they were not about to be swayed by pity or a sense of jusuce, to stand with her and challenge their preacher’s truth.
She was, in many ways, living proof of what the Bible said and what Sam Jenkins professed: that the ways of sin lead to annihilation, that living outside of the Lord means embracing the devil himself, that the seeds planted by the mother will be reaped by her children. In Clare’s case those seeds were damned and crooked as far back as anyone’s memory could stretch.
Her FAMILY had been part of the group of whites who had settled the Appalachian Mountains in the mid-1800s. The oldest mountain range in North America, the Appalachians were named after the Appalachee Indians, and extended 1500 miles—from the Gaspe Peninsula in the Canadian Province of Quebec, to Birmingham, Alabama, in the South of the United States. Across the eastern part of Tennessee, through Kentucky, and onto the border of Virginia, they were called Cumberland Mountains, or Cumberland Plateau. Four hundred and thirty-five million years old, they were rich with minerals, especially coal, and they rose three thousand feet above sea level. But the soil that covered them was thin and rocky, and the streams that ran through them carved a maze of narrow, steep-sided valleys and created a rugged, unforgiving terrain.
The original white settlers of the Appalachian mountains had come from Ireland, Scotland, and northern England in the mid eighteenth century. Some among them were Protestants who had left Europe voluntarily, in search of religious freedom, adventure, or—since most of them were poor—wealth. Many did not survive the ocean crossing to the shores of America. Those who did, brought with them a love of privacy, a sense of being different, a dislike for organized religion and centralized government.
The more cautious of these settlers stayed in New England, where the climate and the soil resembled that of their native countries. Others—the more rebellious, the ones who did not fit in with the Quakers’ neat appearance and sedate manners— traveled farther. In the West, they had heard, were valleys with temperate climate and rich earth. To reach the valleys, however, they first had to cross the Appalachian Mountains.
Many died in the crossing. Others stopped halfway, gave in to the mountains, and settled among the creeks and hollows, where life was hard and the climate was treacherous. They were the first of Appalachia’s white settlers, but not its last.
Another group soon arrived, though not voluntarily. These were the indentured servants—white European slaves sold to American plantation owners by the British Parliament for seven-year periods. In search of a cheap labor force, the owners had imported slaves from Africa, to be sure, but when their numbers did not suffice, the growers had looked to Europe. Thieves and cutthroats and harlots who crowded England’s prisons, orphans who lived on her streets, homeless thugs who were routinely rounded up by the police—all the liabilities of the state were placed on ships and sent away to America.
Clare’s grandfather had been imprisoned in England for petty theft. In America he would serve out two years of inden-tureship, then kill his foreman with a blunt hog knife and escape into the mountains. In 1850 he would trek on foot from Pennsylvania all the way to the Kentucky-Virginia-Tennessee border. Harlan County, Kentucky, in the heart of the Cumberland Mountains, was inaccessible enough, he felt, to provide a secure hiding place from the forces of the law that might be looking for him.
The mountains then were covered with huge oak, walnut, hickory, beech, and maple trees. The earth was blessed with large coal reserves that would prove invaluable. But the surface soil was unfavorable for farming, and the climate was unforgiving. The few families who lived in the county did so as squatters, never owning the land they worked hard to cultivate. They built one-room log cabins into the side of a slope near a river or a spring, slept on a dirt floor, cooked on an open fire outdoors. Two or three households occupied a particular cove or hollow, separated from their neighbors and the outside world by the mountains, living on corn and potatoes, growing small patches of tobacco for their own use, raising hogs. They traveled on foot or on horseback along winding creek beds, formed local schools that met two or three months of the year and were taught by nearly illiterate teachers. And they would have lived in this way—content in their difficult freedom, battling climate and soil but not man—except for the coal and timber companies.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s uncle, Warren Delano, was among the first of many speculators. The company he formed, Kentenia Corporation, moved into Harlan County, followed by Kentucky Coal and Iron, and later by other tycoons from the eastern states and Britain. They were cunning and aggressive, corrupt and greedy, and aided in their quest for profit by agents of the local and federal government. Before them the settlers—-who had no idea of the value of the land they were living on, who could not read or write, let alone understand the meaning of contracts or taxes—were powerless.
So the mountain people sold their land to the city folk for twenty-five cents an acre, or one dollar per tree. They signed deeds forfeiting all claims, not only to the surface land, but also to the layers of coal that lay below it. They gave the buyers the right to use “any means” to remove the minerals and coal from the land, including the right to build roads through their fields—a practice that soon destroyed the farms off which the settlers had lived.
Those settlers who refused to sell their land had it taken from them for free: in cahoots with the coal companies, the government levied taxes on the land, waited a year or two, then confiscated the property as penalty for unpaid taxes. Or the settlers were simply starved off the land: mining stripped the hillsides that the families had used as pasture for their farm animals. Roads cut through the farms rendered them untillable. So the last of the mountaineers abandoned their lands and set off in search of a new way of life. City folk, educated men, the government, and the law had betrayed them. The only place left to go was into the coal camps.
CLARE'S FATHER, Cecil Watkins, was born in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky, and worked the mines from the time he was four years old. He had started with his mother, picking “bone”—refuse rock—from the bags of coal that his older brothers carried out of the mine before they were loaded onto the backs of mules and carted off to be sold. By age six he had moved into the mine, carrying water and shoveling coal, and later, working the seams. He worked fourteen-hour days, lying on his side with a potato sack as his cushion, water dripping from the mine roof onto his face and neck. He dug under the seam with a pick until the coal came loose, then knocked it out and shoveled it into the potato sack to carry it out. He went in when the sky was dark and came out long after sunset, never seeing daylight, except on Sunday when the work stopped and he went to church.
At nineteen he met his wife, Rose Cunningham, and married her. He had seen her first at the coal camp near Corbin Glow, in church one Sunday when she sat in the front pew of the women’s section and sang louder and cried harder than anyone else. Her father had died a few years earlier, leaving Rose to take care of her mother and five younger siblings. The family had become
itinerant workers, traveling from one coal camp to another in search of work, until Rose ended up working a mine alongside Cecil.
Women at the time were believed to bring bad luck in the mines—capable of causing explosions, collapse of the mine roof, or serious injury to the male workers. In some parts of the country, they were allowed to work on the surface as pit-brow lasses—hauling, unloading, and sorting coal outside the pit mouth—but in most places they couldn’t go anywhere near the mine. Sometimes, especially in winter when families could not live off the land and when the need for heating fuel was critical, young girls dressed as men and sneaked into the mines, working there long enough to get their families through the season. Other times, as in Rose’s case, greedy mine bosses hired girls over the men’s objections: the girls would work longer for less pay, and they usually fit into holes too narrow for men to crawl through.
For four months that winter, Rose Watkins pulled a sledge across the mine floor next to Cecil. Dressed in denim overalls, she attached the sledge to her chest with a harness and chain, and she stayed stooped the entire day. Her face was lit by a pit lamp attached to her cap—a wick, afloat in lard oil, protruding from the top. She sat alone to eat her lunch, never spoke to any of the men, never paid attention as they growled and complained that she was going to bring death upon them all. Just as the weather began to thaw and her family packed up to move, Cecil approached her and proposed.