by Gina nahai
ROSE let Sam inside the train car that day and lent him a pair of overalls and a work shirt she had just washed for a Slovenian worker at the mine. She fried the last of her biscuits in pig lard and gave them to Sam, knowing this meant she and Clare would have no dinner, and she did not even ask him what he was doing out on the road and why he had a snake wrapped around his neck.
He sat quietly by the fire, his bare feet pale and bony and scarred, his ears red and inflamed from exposure to cold and now the warmth of the fire. He ate without raising his eyes at Rose, but he did, of his own volition, take the snake from his neck and put it outside. The smell of the biscuits awakened Clare, and she went to him with her caramel-candy eyes and her cherry-red lips, wearing a knitted top but no pants—God’s tiny angel seeking out his newest prophet. She saw the plate of biscuits in Sam’s hand and reached into it to eat. Rose admonished the child but Sam interfered—-letting Clare dip her tiny fingers into the lard grease and lick them dry—and then he picked her up and sat her on his lap with her bottom still bare and told her she could eat as much as she wanted.
He watched with a smile as she stuffed the biscuits into her mouth and chewed slowly, her eyes fixed on his face, her bare knees resting on his thighs. He told Rose that children were the Lord’s gift to mankind, proof of his glory, extensions of his love. Clare tired of eating and reached out to touch Sam’s ears, and he let her. She stood up on his lap, climbed on his shoulder and sat with her legs hanging over his chest, and he walked around with her until she laughed. The rain stopped, and night spread into the hollow. Little Sam Jenkins told Rose about his experience with the Holy Ghost and his purpose in handling snakes and the miracle of being anointed.
“When you are anointed,” he said, “colors look different; people look different; you can see into the future; you can lay hands on the sick and heal them. You can even raise the dead.”
Rose believed him.
He said anyone could handle a snake in a state of anointment. He recited I Peter 1:7: “That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.”
Rose let Sam spend the night at her home, then kept him for two more days. He ate her food and played with her child and did not mention the wife and children he had left in the cabin up the road, but it would not have mattered to Rose if he did because she had already brought faith in him and would not have judged him by rules that applied to ordinary men. On Sunday, she took him to the coal camp to preach.
Filthy and polluted and overrun by flies and the rancid smell of surface privies, the coal camp in Corbin Glow was no better or worse around 1912 than countless others in the southern Appalachians. A row of single-family cabins fronted a line of communal housing for single men—mostly imported labor from Russia and Eastern Europe. The cabins were finished on the outside with weatherboard nailed directly to the frame with no sheathing. They were old and unpainted, surrounded by mounds of garbage and streams of sewage decomposing in the open air. The outhouses were situated along a creek, leaving human and animal waste exposed, spreading dirt and disease into the wells and water supplies. The entire camp was covered with a layer of coal dust, which mixed with smoke from the burning “bone pile” and settled into every house, onto people’s clothes and beds and dishes, into their hair and over their skin and under their nails.
The miners were overworked and malnourished and depressed. Their marriages often ended in divorce; their children died in infancy. To soothe their pain many of the men turned to the taverns that had recently sprung up in the camp—dancing and gambling and even cavorting with prostitutes brought in by mine bosses to entertain the unmarried foreigners but who obliged one and all, spreading venereal disease to nearly a third of the adult male population. Murder rates had jumped astronomically in Corbin Glow and in all of Harlan County, and moonshining was everyone’s favorite pastime.
Little Sam Jenkins marched past the miners’ cabins that day with a sure step, so small and insignificant-looking with his big head and cauliflower ears, that no one bothered to look at him twice or even notice his Bible or the lard can in which he carried his rattlesnake. Outside the foreign workers’ dormitory, he found a tree stump and climbed on. The moment someone looked in his direction, he started to preach.
He spoke of a day when the belly of the earth would burst open, and fire and blood and smoke would pour out to claim sinners. He said the Lord was watching over the earth and keeping a roster on whom he would save on that day, and whom he would surrender to the burning flames. He said that unless they came into the Lord at that very moment, confessed to their sins and abandoned their unholy ways, everyone in the camp was going to burn in hell for eternity. Ten minutes into the sermon, he had attracted a crowd.
He said he had been a sinner man who was now anointed with the Holy Ghost, that he had worked hard to chase away doubt and fear and temptation from his soul and that, in return, he had been rewarded with the greatest of all gifts: the power to resist evil, to remain invulnerable before God’s fallen angel. He spoke of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, telling the story from Daniel, of how they had been cast into fire: “And the princes, governors, and captains, and the king’s counselors, being gathered together, saw these men, upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was a hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them.”
Like them, Sam said, any believer man, woman, or child with enough faith would be immune to death and harm.
In response to his assertions, a few mine workers laughed and threw stones at him. The company boss came out of his cabin and ordered Sam to leave. Two prostitutes walked through the crowd flaunting their wares. Sam pointed them out as examples of sin and said they must recast their lives in the ways of Holiness—“not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold.”
One of the women laughed and asked if he was going to show her the way of Holiness.
“If the power be upon me,” he said.
A mine worker asked if he needed help getting the power.
“Only from the Lord,” Sam responded, then bent over and opened his snake box.
Noticing the snake for the first time, the crowd gasped, but Sam did not flinch. He reached into the box, let out a hellish scream, and yanked the snake out in a single move. It charged with lightning speed, bit him on the tongue while Sam was in midscream.
Rose felt as if she was going to faint, and the rest of the audience went into a mad frenzy but Little Sam Jenkins held on to the snake with trembling hands. He kept his tongue protruding from his mouth—the snake’s fangs having broken in his flesh— and now blood was dripping from around the fangs and his tongue was becoming inflamed and turning black. He tried to swallow, but the tongue was too enlarged to fit back into his mouth, and he felt he was going to gag on the blood and saliva in his mouth. His knees were shaking from the effect of the poison and he saw black spots everywhere and he knew he would pass out at any moment.
He looked at the miners’ pale faces, their incredulous eyes, and with his tongue barely moving and hardly able to articulate words, he muttered: “That ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.”
The ENCOUNTER WITH Sam changed Rose’s life.
It wasn’t as if she had not known God before, but in Jenkins she found a conviction she had never thought possible—to bet one’s life on the strength of one’s faith and be willing to lose— and after that none of her earthly suffering mattered anymore. She stayed in Corbin Glow and never bothered to think of moving again, lived in the train car and covered the opening in the roof with a piece of canvas dipped in tar to provide protection against the rain. Sometimes the wind would blow the canvas off the roof, or rain and snow would pile on it enough to bring it down with their weight, but none of this bothered Rose anymore because she had her eyes
set on a warmer, more comfortable place. One night a week and three times on the weekend— Saturday night, Sunday morning and evening—she took Clare and went off to pray with Little Sam.
She became much stricter in her ways, careful not to allow any corrupting influence on her own or her daughter’s life. She spoke with fervor of miracles she witnessed at every church gathering, recited the Bible every chance she got, handled snakes as often as Jenkins introduced them into his sermon. She grew Clare’s hair and never cut it, dressed herself and her daughter in feed sacks that she no longer painted or bleached, so as to avoid even a trace of vanity. For punishment, she made Clare kneel on corn kernels until she bled. For entertainment, she took her to visit other Holy Rollers in their homes and cabins up and down the mountain.
And so she was there, in Wallins Creek, one sweltering summer day, when John Sherman, the evangelist from Path Fork, Kentucky, walked in from the wild and raised little Jean Stanton from the dead.
Little Jean Stanton was three years old and had died in her sleep early the previous night. Taking advantage of the cooler morning hours, her parents had washed and dressed her corpse, then laid her out on a flat board across a sewing table in their home. Fearing that the heat would spoil the corpse and force a quick burial, they had gone next door, to a church meeting where Rose and others had been handling snakes, and asked the congregation to come and pray for their child’s soul.
Inside the Stanton house the windows and mirrors were covered with black fabric, and clocks had been stopped at the hour of the child’s passing. Little Jean lay in the middle of the room, dressed in a long white gown, her hair long to the floor, her skin pale and dry and already starting to flake. Copper pennies had been placed on her eyelids to hold them shut, her hands had been folded on her chest as if in prayer, and she was every bit as dead, Rose would later remark, as the sewing table she lay on.
Forming a circle around the child, the Holy Rollers had knelt in prayer and had not stopped, in spite of the heat and the humidity which made breathing difficult and induced no less than eleven fainting spells among the congregants, until late at night when John Sherman walked in.
He had been awakened that morning by the heat, he said, and immediately felt the Spirit move on him. Falling to his knees in prayer, he had asked the Lord what he must do, and the Lord had told him he had a mission to fulfill in Wallins Creek. So he had walked there, fourteen miles in the direction the spirit had urged him, and the moment he had seen the Stanton house with the front door open and the smell of a rotting corpse wafting from it, he knew he must go in and pray for the child.
By then, of course, twenty-five hours had passed since Jean’s death, and her body was ice-cold. John Sherman asked Mr. Stanton if he might pray for his daughter. Then he got on his knees, took the girl’s hand in his own, and fell into prayer so deep that nothing and no one could distract him. By the first light of morning, at the hour when the night creatures fall silent and ghosts turn pale again, little Jean Stanton opened her eyes and sat up on the board. Then she descended onto the floor like an angel come to life by the will of God, and started to walk.
For all of her belief in the cause of Holiness, however, Rose never managed to instill the faith in her own offspring.
Away from her, in the coal camps, her sons became drinkers and fighters and followers of the devil and his agents on earth. Harvey died in a mine explosion in 1920. The other two boys joined the United Mine Workers of America and helped Mary “Mother” Jones organize 1200 workers in a strike against the coal companies of southern Colorado. It was a brave and valiant effort, uniting workers who, among them, spoke twenty-four different languages—all of whom were imported from abroad to help supplement the American labor force. They drove their wagons through snow and sleet, down treacherous canyons, and into tent colonies set up by UMWA where they hoped to press their demands for safer working conditions and better facilities at the coal camps. The largest tent colony was in Ludlow. When the strike dragged on, the coal companies sent in a militia that opened gunfire on the strikers. They did not stop shooting for twelve hours.
One of Rose’s sons burned to death in his tent. The other was smothered in a hand-dug cellar where he was hiding with his wife and daughter.
Yet, looking back on her life, Rose Watkins would insist that it was not her sons’ deaths, but her daughter’s life, that had caused her the greatest sorrow.
Clare Watkins grew up in the train car, surrounded by the blackness of the coal camps and her mother’s fire-and-brimstone mentality, but neither the poverty of her days, nor the isolation of the mountains, nor even the shadow of the Lord hanging over her like a blade could dim her lust for life and for all things unholy. Early on, she went with Rose to all the holiness meetings and listened to her recite the Bible at every chance. She let her hair grow as Rose wished, listened to stories of Hell and damnation, and even helped her mother clean and sweep the church after services, but none of what she witnessed made an impression or bore the fruit it was intended to.
From the moment she could walk, Clare liked nothing more than to go around half-naked, to pick up things shiny and glittering and colorful, and to look at men—preachers among them—in ways that made them blush. It was as if she made a point of being noticed and not forgotten, as if she wanted to be remembered at any cost, as if she enjoyed watching her own reflection in the men’s eyes, enjoyed raising their women’s ire.
When she grew older, she walked with Rose to the mines and back, helping her mother carry the heavy loads of clothes from the miners for washing. Too poor to own shoes, she went around barefoot, her legs blue from the cold in the winter, wet and dirty from creek water in the summer. But she had a way of finding men the moment her mother looked away, climbing onto their laps and pulling at their clothes and their skin until they laughed uncomfortably or squeezed her too hard. When she turned six, she discovered the company school at the coal camp.
She begged Rose to let her go to school, ran off every time they were at the camp and sneaked into the classroom before her mother could stop her. Rose needed the girl to help her with chores, and she did not believe the coal-company school had anything of value to teach her child, but Clare begged and the school’s spinster of a teacher encouraged her, and in the end Rose gave in and let her go.
The teacher said that Clare was the brightest of her students, her best reader, her most clever thinker. She told Rose that being at school kept children out of trouble but still gave them enough time to do their chores, that children who knew how to read might someday get jobs outside of coal camps, bring in real money, help ease the family’s poverty. But Little Sam Jenkins said teachers were not to be trusted and should not be believed, and he said that Claire’s teacher in particular must be a Jezebel because she cut her hair and wore tight clothes and told the children that the earth was round.
“The Bible says there are four angels standing at the four corners of the world,” Jenkins slammed his fist down during a church meeting in Harlan, shortly after Rose had disclosed to him the details of her daughter’s education. “Can someone tell me how the earth could have four corners if it’s round? Those people who claim the earth is round are Satan’s messengers. The devil has put them on this earth to corrupt our children and teach them lies.”
Clare lasted at the school for a season and a half before her mother put her foot down and took her out, but by then the damage had been done because Clare had learned to read, and she was not going to stop.
She read the writing on the flour sacks that made up her clothes, and the words on the lard cans where Rose stored her belongings. She read the inscriptions on the pages torn from old catalogs that miners used to wallpaper their cabins, and the faded words on the sides of the train cars that carried the coal out of the mountains. Most of all, she liked to linger around the company store reading the headlines on the magazines and newspapers, even if she did not understand their meaning. And then, of course, she discovered True Confessions ma
gazine.
In 1917 a camp had been built in Lynch, the largest of its time in Kentucky, and the company store was stacked up with novelties that would send shivers up a Holiness woman’s spine. The worst of these was a magazine full of stories of love and loss—tales of young women tortured by longing for men they could not have, or by dreams of lives they would not live. They were sharecropper girls who married “gentlemen of means” and left their cabins to live in forty-room mansions, spoiled heiresses who fell in love with servant boys and became sick, lay in bed feverish and delirious and died young. Those who did manage to marry their lovers often died at childbirth, or woke up to find their husbands sick and dying of consumption. In between their trials and suffering, however, they managed to curl their hair and wear red lipstick, spend entire afternoons getting fitted for a dress they would wear to a ball, and walk around their homes in silk pajamas and hand-painted slippers.
When she first discovered the magazine, Clare could barely read enough to make sense of a single sentence, much less understand the entire contents of a story. Yet she stood in the store with the pages before her, mesmerized by the lines, aware that they represented a link to another world, a possibility of access to something brighter and more dazzling than she knew. So she taught herself to read, bit by bit and day after day, right there in front of the clerk’s counter where miners and their families came and went and where she took refuge as soon as her mother had turned her head or gotten busy with work. She learned quickly that she could get free bits of candy and bottles of soda if she charmed the store clerk, that miners would buy her ice cream if she smiled at them the right way, that they would stop and play with her hair if she curled it with her fingers and tied it with little bits of rope and ribbon.