by Gina nahai
Growing up, Sam never had a birth certificate or any possessions of his own. Over time, he would claim different places of origin. Sometimes, he said he was born in Virginia, sometimes in Kentucky, sometimes in West Virginia. The date of his birth would also change depending on when he told the story so that later on, trying to put together the pieces of the man’s life, Adam would come up with at best a likely date of the mid-1880s.
Little Sam never grew tall, but he was strong, and his eyes were a clear, light blue. He never learned to read or write; he went to school for three days, he once told his children, was expelled for misbehavior, and never went back. In his youth, he seemed to have inherited his father’s knack for charming women— using them for his own purposes and leaving when they no longer suited him. He certainly showed no signs of having inherited his mother’s religious fervor or the discipline involved in observing God’s laws. Those qualities had gone to his sisters, Jane, a devout Christian, and Bertha, a Church of God preacher.
Little Sam grew up attending church with his mother and sisters three, sometimes four times a week. These were noisy, crowded events full of tears and sweat and the loud, rambling testimonies of church members. They gathered in the early morning and the late evening—coal miners on their Sundays off, wives carrying children and baskets of food they had brought for the postmeeting dinner. The men came in clean overalls, the women in long, simple dresses. They brought guitars and drums and tambourines, arriving early for what was, for most of them, the only social event of their lives. They listened to the preacher recite the Bible—or what he thought was the text of the Bible—from memory. They prayed for the spirit to enter their bodies, and when it did, they rose to their feet, trembling and crying, arms raised above their heads, knees buckling under until they fell sobbing on the ground and had to be revived by the preacher.
In church with his family, Little Sam watched the commotion and heard the sermons, but the Spirit did not move him when he was younger. That would happen years later, when he had a wife and six children he could not feed, two jobs he did not want to work, a home he did not want to live in.
In retrospect it was not surprising, not even unlikely that a moonshining, womanizing outlaw such as Sam Jenkins would become the founder of a branch of Christian worship in America. As with everything else in Appalachia, the mountaineers’ religion had always been different from that of city people.
The first settlers who arrived from Europe had been so suspicious of authority that they had allowed no preachers among them, and would not have accepted any elements from within the established churches of the time. For years they had had no places of worship, no religious teaching of any kind, no education. Then the Methodist evangelists arrived.
The Methodists were circuit riders traveling through the mountains on foot or on horseback. Employed by the Methodist Church for a small stipend, they were illiterate and untrained, and had no prepared sermons. What they did have—because of the difficult circumstances of their own lives, or because they witnessed the settlers’ conditions firsthand—was an ability to identify with the problems of mountain life, a willingness to talk about it as if it mattered to God or his representatives on earth, and a manner of speech that did not intimidate or humiliate their audience. They spoke for hours, preaching in barns and homes or in the open air, aware that they would be judged not by the content of their sermons or the extent of their education, but by the depth of the passion they managed to exhibit.
After the Methodists came the Baptist farmer-preachers. Also illiterate, they were not paid by their church for preaching. Nor did they dress in black garb and white collar like their counterparts in the East: they wore ill-fitting, homespun clothes, traveled in any kind of weather, swam the creeks and rivers, slept in the open air on the side of the road. When they came to a settlement of two or three families in a hollow, they stopped and preached for a meal or a place to sleep, and left again in the morning, only to return in a few weeks or months. Like the Methodists, the preachers saw their own church as too concerned with worldly success, and too ignorant of the suffering of the common man. They did not break away from the base of the Baptist belief as much as expound on its original philosophy, creating so-called “Holiness” churches which were rooted in the eighteenth-century Wesleyan emphasis on experiencing Christian perfection after redemption.
They spoke, therefore, of the importance of self-denial, the significance of dressing simply and foregoing amusements of the flesh. They allowed church members to speak when and where they felt the need. Forever entertainers, they preached with fire, performed miracles, healed the sick, and, of course, raised the dead.
Though officially a member of the Baptist Church, Little Sam was never active, and allowed his membership to expire around the time he was twenty years old. The following year, in Lenoir City, Tennessee, he married the first of his four wives.
Esther Parker was a wholesome-looking woman with a wide nose and an easy, confident smile. She moved with Sam from Lenoir City to a shack at the edge of his sister’s farm in Oolte-wah, near Chattanooga. Sam cut timber or worked at a local mine, digging ore for use in paint. The mine boss liked him because he was short and could crawl into tight spaces, but Sam quickly became bored with his job and quit the mine. For nearly ten years he drank and fought and mostly earned his living as a moonshiner. He disappeared from home for days at a time, came back repentant and promised to do better. Esther, in turn, remained faithful and patient, bearing six children in quick succession, raising them alone in hunger and poverty. Then Sam turned thirty and found God.
In the version of the story he would later recount to his followers, he was traveling near Owl Holler, twelve miles south of Cleveland, Tennessee. The year was 1908, or 1911, or 1914—and all Sam had for worldly possessions was a patched-up white shirt and a pair of trousers Esther had sewn for him years earlier. He came upon a gathering of local people who had built a church and set a date to dedicate it. It was a Church of God belonging to the Pentecostal Holiness Church headquartered in Cleveland, Tennessee. Little Sam went in to rest his legs, and stayed, hoping to eat after the sermon.
The preacher that day spoke of the role of the Holy Ghost within Pentecostal Holiness. True believers, he said, experienced faith in three stages: Regeneration, Sanctification, and the Baptism of the Holy Ghost. During regeneration, believers experienced salvation from sin. During Sanctification, they set themselves on the course of a strictly moral, self-denying, ascetic lifestyle. Conducted properly and with true faith, this would prepare the believers for the final stage, when they would have an experience similar to that of the followers of Christ as recorded in Acts of the Apostles 2:4: “They were filled with the spirit of the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
The preacher went on to claim that the Holy Ghost gave man the power to conquer evil. To prove this he quoted from the Gospel of Mark the words of Jesus to his disciples immediately prior to his ascension: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”
Little Sam left the church moved by the preacher’s conviction and intrigued by the meaning of the words in Mark. Back at home in Ooltewah, he felt the urge to pray but decided he should be closer to God when he did so. One morning he climbed atop White Oak Mountain, to a spot called Rainbow Rock, and beckoned the Lord.
“Give me a sign,” he asked. “Tell me what to do.”
There, before him, straight out of the Pentecostal preacher’s sermon, was a rattlesnake.
“They shall take up serpents...” the preacher had said, “it shall not hurt them.”
Little Sam stared at the snake—the diamond-shaped blotches edged with yellow that covered its body, the tail already lifted in warning, the mouth open with fangs ready to strike. He
realized that the snake resembled the devil himself— that its forked tongue, its seven feet of crawling, poisonous being instilled the same fear in man as did God’s fallen angel. To conquer the devil—to conquer his own fears—he decided, he must conquer the snake.
He reached down and picked up the beast with both hands. Fear coursed through his blood, into his heart and head, and down to his hands which turned ice-cold and began to shake. In his grip the snake bent and struggled, raised its head, and brought its mouth an inch away from Sam’s face to show him its erect fangs. Its rattle sounded louder than before, and its weight seemed to increase with every passing moment, but Little Sam held fast and did not let go.
The snake fought harder. To overcome his own fear, and to drown out the sound of the rattle, Sam began to repeat the passage from Mark, then to hum any prayers he remembered from his childhood. Soon he found himself uttering sounds that were meaningless but powerful, and he realized he must be speaking in tongues. The terror in his throat gave way to a sense of empowerment. The snake began to tire of fighting, and Sam felt the cool rush of ecstasy in his veins.
He descended the mountain with the diamondback still in hand and went into Grasshopper Valley below. The Grasshopper Church of God was a ramshackle barn where a congregation of a dozen men and women sat praying out loud and singing hymns. Sam traversed the length of the church, still talking in tongues, and placed himself before the congregants to show them the snake.
“Look,” he hollered. “This is the spirit of the devil, and it has no power over me.”
He saw the stunned look on the church members’ faces, felt their fear reverberate throughout the room. He realized they were bewildered and repelled, wondering if he were mad, if they should escape him or go closer for another look. More than anything, he saw that they were mesmerized, and felt a sense of complete and undivided control.
“Look!” he said. “I asked the Lord to give me a sign of his presence and he sent me this beast and said I must conquer it with my faith.”
The congregation remained frozen.
Sam opened his fists and stretched his arms out to his sides— Jesus on the cross—then stood still as the snake crawled out of his hands, onto his right arm, and toward his head and face. Trembling, he remained before his audience as the snake curled around his arm, then advanced toward his shoulder. Sweat dripped from his scalp onto the back of his ears and down into his collar. His breath was short and choppy—little bursts of air sucked into his lungs at great intervals and made a dry, raspy sound. The snake climbed up the back of his neck, on top of his head, and coiled itself around his forehead like a crown. Sam felt his knees jerk back and forth and saw large patches of darkness all around him, but he did not move and did not stop staring down the church members.
If it bit him he would probably die.
“This snake is not going to bite me,” he told the church.
“It won’t bite me because I have the Holy Ghost within me and I am anointed with the Spirit, and I know the Lord meant it when he said that deadly things cannot hurt a man with real faith.”
He looked into the eyes of each and every one of the congregants. He had them all, he knew, and he liked this, but not more than he liked the sense of being unafraid, for once feeling in control, protected by a greater hand, invulnerable.
“Sinners and nonbelievers, stand back!” he shouted.
He remembered a passage from John that his mother had been fond of.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
A woman stood up, stretched her arms as if to embrace him, and yelled, “Amen!”
Encouraged, Sam took two steps closer to the row of seated congregants and continued to speak. He preached of the fear of the Devil and the love of the Lord, of his own sinful past, of his life of fighting and drinking and hard work. The snake crawled down the side of his face, over his neck and into his shirt collar, wrapping itself around his torso. Little Sam felt his heart race even faster, and kept talking.
He called on the congregants to come forward and take the snake, told them of the ecstasy of feeling the Holy Ghost inside one’s body. He was reciting phrases from the Bible he did not know he knew—childhood memories of his mother screaming passages to her husband as she warned him about committing unholy acts.
“Behold!” he screamed, reciting a passage from Luke. “I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.”
He took the sides of his shirt and tore the front open, revealing the snake lying against his skin. In one swift move he grabbed the snake by the middle, wrenched it off his body, and slammed it to the ground. It hit the floor with a loud whack, contracted, and raised its head as if to attack. Sam pulled it up and slammed it again, and again and again until the beast lay limp and lifeless in his hands.
“That ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ,” he called as he kicked the dead rattlesnake into the middle of the congregation, “the son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.”
His moonshining days were over. He had found God, and he wasn’t letting go.
He WENT HOME and told Esther he was taking her on the road: he had been imbued by the Spirit of Christ, he said, and he wanted to preach the Word and spread the Gospel in the mountains and beyond. He was going to “follow the signs”—to pick up snakes and handle fire and “drink any deadly thing,” all in the service of the Lord and through this he would prove his devotion to Christ and the force of his faith in God.
Esther packed up her children and followed her husband into his new life. Right from the start they were a sight to behold: Esther in her matronly clothes, overweight and heavy-footed, her face always flushed from the effort of walking while carrying one child or another, her breath short and choppy as she tried in vain to keep up with Sam. He walked ahead of her and the children, unconcerned with their state and often unaware of them altogether. He wore a patched white shirt and a pair of black pants that he kept rolled up at the cuffs because he had to cross streams and creeks so often. His shoes, having been soaked to the core so often when he stepped into rivers, were misshapen and discolored, and he wore no socks. He held his Bible in hand or tucked under his arm, and though he could not read a word of it, he often raised it over his head and waved and shook it to make a point.
They walked all day, eating berries or roadkill or anything they managed to beg from strangers they met on the road. They slept in abandoned barns or out in the open. They were dirty and ragged and malnourished, the children sick and scrawny and always crying for food.
Determined to live a life of abstinence and self-denial, Sam had stopped drinking, even promised Esther he would not chase women or fight anymore. If a man lived the good life, he had decided, God would not allow him to be harmed. If he allowed the Holy Ghost into his body, if he was innocent enough, he would not be bitten by snakes.
Esther knew all this, of course, because she had been a believer long before her husband discovered his calling, but she was so pleased with the apparent transformation in his character that she smiled and listened and acted truly interested in Sam’s sermons. At night, after the children were asleep, she read to Sam passages from the Bible which he memorized and recited back, and helped him conceive and interpret the laws of poverty and simplicity. She did not disturb him with complaints about hunger or cold or aching limbs and burning fevers as they pressed ahead into the mountains.
They stopped every time they came to a settlement of a handful of people—a cabin or two, a coal camp, a half-crumbled church along a winding, forgotten road. Esther helped Sam gather an audience for his preaching, then settled down and listened as if for the first time. He was a powerful orator, to be sure, and he seemed truly moved by his own convictions and unafraid of the judgment of others. He spoke to an audience of one or a dozen, picked up sna
kes on his own or before a gathering, and invariably managed to stir up enough emotion in Esther and the others that they ended up speaking in tongues and gyrating to the rhythm of his words until they fell, exhausted and spent, to the ground.
Gradually, through that first year of travel, Little Sam Jenkins began to establish himself as a preacher to know and watch. He aroused enough curiosity for the believers to come see him with his snakes, enough skepticism for nonbelievers to go out of their way to harass him. Then he stepped up to the front of the group and put on a show no one could walk out of, charging at danger instead of backing away from it, making grand statements and impossible demands and challenging everyone else to step forth and test him, test him if they dared because here was a man who had heard the Lord call and who knew what was expected of him and was not afraid to respond.
Young people laughed at him and threw stones at his snakes. His old moonshining friends traveled great distances to catch up with him and heckle him during his sermons. Mine bosses sent their thugs to break up his church meetings and chase him away, and other preachers accused him of committing a sin by tempting fate, and yet, for every skeptic and hostile nonbeliever he left behind, Little Sam Jenkins managed to convert a handful of people to his cause.
One rainy day in Harlan County, Kentucky, he left Esther and the children holed up in an abandoned cabin where the family had camped for the night, and went outside on his own. Earlier that morning he had felt the Holy Ghost anoint him, and so he had hunted a snake and handled it alone. Now he held his Bible in his right hand, the snake wrapped around his neck like a scarf, and he was headed for a coal camp where he planned to conduct a service. Crossing a dirty creek where water ran the color of soot, he came upon a derailed freight car that was split in half. It was early afternoon, and Little Sam was soaked with creek water from the waist down—his shoes torn and wet and useless, his shirt offering little defense against the cold. So he looked through the opening in the side of the train car, saw Rose Watkins, and asked if she might build a fire to help him dry.