by Gina nahai
By the time she was ten years old, she was defying Rose in every aspect of life and refusing to abide by Holiness rules. She sat outside the train car all day, her bare feet caked in mud, her long hair matted and dirty and wild, and did little more to help her mother than bake the pan of corn bread she and Rose ate in the morning with molasses, or fry potatoes in lard and serve them for dinner. The rest of the time she daydreamed about things and places Rose had never heard of and could not imagine wanting to see, or looked for an excuse to walk to the company store.
“This child is heading straight for the devil,” Little Sam Jenkins warned Rose every time he saw Clare. He said this with a spark in his eyes, barely able to look away from Clare as he spoke to her mother, blushing all the way to his ears every time the child walked past him. “You’d better bring her to church and pray that the Spirit takes a hold of her.”
When Clare did show up at church, however, Sam found himself anxious and distracted and so desperate to be near the child, he got bitten by every snake he picked up.
Still married to Esther Parker, he had stayed on the road and spread his reputation farther into the mountains. He held a revival in Indiana that lasted thirteen days and created hundreds of converts, conducted a service at the Tabernacle in Tennessee that drew in local law enforcement officials and even the press. Encouraged, basking in the attention and the notoriety, he became more careless with the snakes, bolder with his promises of faith healing and miracles. Not content with handling a single snake at a time, he brought them into the church by the dozen, threw them on the ground and walked on them barefoot as he preached, or grabbed two or three in each hand and waved them about until they either died or bit him.
He was bitten often, but he always refused medical attention, always carried on with the service in spite of the pain and the swelling in his face and limbs. In Owl Hollow he promised a group of reporters from local and state newspapers that he would walk the waters of the Tennessee River the next morning “so that unbelievers may believe.” The press reported this, as they reported most of his other actions by now, and the next day reporters gathered at the spot where Sam had said he would perform his miracle. He showed up late, and said he was not going to oblige: “I said I would walk the river if the Spirit be upon me,” he explained, “and today, the Spirit is not.”
He moved to Soddy, Tennessee, and preached with N. P. Mulkey, then to Harrison, and later to Dividing Ridge. In 1917 he applied to the Church of God for an evangelist’s certificate. On the application which someone filled out for him, he said he had no education, and that his worldly belongings amounted to a shirt with fifty patches and a debt totaling twenty-five dollars.
All this time Esther stayed with him and kept having his children. Sam liked fathering them well enough, but he did not enjoy having them around and kept pushing Esther to leave them in an orphanage so she and he could travel together more freely. She refused, and Sam became angry and started to drink, accusing Esther of standing between him and God, ignoring her and the children, and vanishing for long spells only to return repentant and tell his wife to pack up, and get back on the road.
They lived in the woods, in a parsonage, in the churches where Sam preached and where his whole family camped in a corner separated from the worship area by a quilt draped over a rope. Sam was holding revivals all the way up and down the Tennessee River Valley, homeless and ragged and malnourished but gaining momentum and notoriety, and Esther would have stayed with him, would even have traveled with him for the rest of her life except that Sam started to sell liquor again and decided he wanted a divorce.
One wife and eight children, he told Esther, was too much weight for a man destined to do God’s work.
She took the children to Chattanooga where she found a job at a hosiery mill. For years they would not hear from him. Then, one day, Sam would appear unannounced: he had managed to borrow a car, he said, and he wanted to take his children for a ride.
He drove the kids around for a few hours, left immediately after, and did not return for twenty years.
He told anyone who asked about his family that he had left his wife and children in good hands—with his son, Charles, who, Sam insisted, was old enough to earn a substantial amount of money and responsible enough to care for his mother and younger siblings. Charles was nine years old.
Little Sam began moonshining with a black man, and in March of 1923 was caught by the sheriff. He was fined one hundred dollars plus court costs and sentenced to four months in jail. He was sent to work detail in Silverdale, Tennessee, but the confines of prison did not appeal to him, and so he escaped.
For a while, he hid out in the mountains above his sister’s farm in Ooltewah. Law officers combed the area looking for him, but Sam stayed one step ahead of the sheriff, and soon ended up in Corbin Glow. Twelve years after he had first walked into her train car, he called on Rose Watkins again and asked for shelter against the oppressive forces of the law.
She took him in immediately because she believed wholeheartedly in Sam’s good intentions, and because she would do anything to spite the men and institutions that had taken away her first husband. She washed Sam’s clothes and made him food and let him sleep in the warmest, driest part of the train car, and she prayed, too, that he would stay for good, that he would take her on the road to preach as he had done with Esther. Three days later, Sam proposed.
Then, of course, all the trouble started.
The MOMENT HER mother married Sam, Clare determined she was going to seduce him. Twelve years old and aware of her own beauty, she cut her hemline first to her ankles, then to midcalf, and finally up to her knees. She went to the company store at Lynch and convinced the clerk to give her nail polish and lipstick, smuggled them home, and put them on when she knew Sam would be around. It didn’t matter that Sam pretended to look away, or that Rose beat her and made her wipe her face and nails with lye: Clare could still see the tremor in the old man’s hands and the desire in his eyes, and she knew she would succeed. An old Kentucky mine boss gave her a pair of silk stockings, and she put them on even though they were too big and sagged around her ankles. A Russian mineworker bought her a pair of high-heeled shoes with an entire month’s salary—money he had planned to send home to his wife and children—and Clare showed them to Sam, asked him if he would help her put them on, if he wanted to see what she looked like walking in them with her short skirt. She even went for a ride with a man she didn’t know, sat in the new Ford he said he had bought for $299 that year, and made him drive to the site of a Holiness meeting where she knew she would find her mother and Sam. Less than a year into the marriage, Rose Watkins realized she was about to lose both her daughter and her new husband to the devil and asked Sam to leave.
He took off in 1925, came back twice more, and finally divorced Rose in 1926. By then the die had been cast, and Clare’s fate had been sealed: she had learned that she could corrupt God’s most devoted servant, tempt a body that had withstood the attack of venomous snakes and the force of raw poison, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she conquered Little Sam Jenkins.
He WENT TO Ohio and began preaching at the Salvation Army around the time of the Scopes trial. Twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher John Scopes had been arrested in Tennessee for violating a law that forbade the teaching of evolution. A hundred reporters covered the trial, and the attention of the entire country focused on the goings on between defense attorney Clarence Darrow and prosecutor William Jennings Bryan. Scopes was convicted by a jury that had read the Bible but not On the Origin of Species.
Little Sam Jenkins followed news of the trial and realized he was no longer the focus of attention in the South. Having lain low following his escape from prison, he became bold and started to hold revivals again.
In Ohio he met a young girl from a German Lutheran family. Her name was Helen Kiessling. She was twenty-two years old, and Sam was in his mid-forties. She had fair skin, curly brown hair that she parted on the side so
that it covered half of her face and gave her the look of a silent-film star. She wore satin dresses that left her arms and ankles bare, sat with her legs folded to one side and showed off her high heels. She told Sam that her family owned a hundred-acre, well-managed farm in Cleveland, that they believed in working hard and worshiping even harder. She said she suffered from a mysterious illness that made her faint every once in a while without warning or apparent reason. She said the illness was the result of a curse placed on her by a Gypsy woman while Helen was still in her mother’s womb, that the curse had made her vulnerable to fainting spells and other kinds of witchcraft, that her parents had tried everything to find a cure but had failed.
Little Sam Jenkins took Helen for a walk and told her he had cured many a young woman with witchcraft illness. He put his hand on her forehead and recited a prayer, told her she must allow the Holy Spirit into her body and feel it dislodge the curse. Then he laid her down and put his hand under her skirt, ran his fingers the length of her thighs and imagined her white flesh, told her that, in order for her to receive the miracle cure, she and her family would have to abandon all their Lutheran beliefs and become Pentecostals.
They were married in March 1927, in Alliance, Ohio. They moved to Washingtonville, where Sam found a job in a coal mine and continued to preach. He drank, too, had two more children, and kept looking out the corners of his eyes at young girls and middle-aged women.
At the height of the Great Depression, in 1932, Little Sam Jenkins moved his new family to Malvern, decided he was tired of feeding them, and went on the road to preach alone. Helen turned to her parents for money. She wrote to her mother that Sam was an evil man with secret perversions, that away from church members and other believers he neither prayed nor spoke the name of God nor showed any interest in the fate of his fellow man. She said he enjoyed the notoriety and attention that his preaching brought—that he handled snakes, touched live wires, drank battery fluid and strychnine only to get himself into the papers. His adventures, she said, had gotten his name into every local and regional paper and even the New York Times. He had been invited to speak on the radio, forced local legislators to pass laws governing the conduct of adult members of the community in pursuit of their religious beliefs. Laws were passed against snake handling but hardly enforced. Sheriff’s deputies were sent to meetings to restrain Jenkins, and came back either entertained by him or converted to his cause. The moment a service was over and the audience had gone home, Helen said, Little Sam shed his faith like a bad fever.
“Yet you cannot deny, my dear,” Helen’s mother wrote back, “that the man is immune to the forces of nature and to the harm he inflicts upon his body.”
They moved to Toledo, Pineville, Pennington Gap, Saint Charles. All through the Great Depression Little Sam Jenkins preached to the hungry and the unemployed, and he gathered a flock larger than that of any other preacher in the mountains. With his small stature and large ears, his passion and his knack for words, he sought God’s most forgotten subjects and gave them a message of hope and redemption that no other man or prophet dared deliver.
“I am willing to bank my life on this gambit of Faith,” he screamed and they saw that he meant what he said. He was in his late forties already and had lived longer than the average person expected to live in the mountains, and yet he had as much strength as the young children he had abandoned along the way. Time and again he was bitten and refused to stop preaching. His head and face were scarred and disfigured from the effects of snakebite, his body swelled to three times its normal size and turned black as shoe polish, but Little Sam Jenkins kept preaching and traveling for four more years until the day in Lynch when he saw his former stepdaughter coming toward him at the end of a revival, and already he could read the sin gleaming in her eyes.
CLARE HAD LEFT home at sixteen, no longer willing to stand the force of her mother’s anger or be restricted to the tight and narrow roads of Rose’s faith. She was headed north, she said, to Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York. She would find a man who would buy her nice clothes and take her to one of those places she had heard about—where one could sit in a car and watch a movie and even hear the sound. It did not occur to her that she would need money or a job to get her there, and so two weeks after she had left Rose’s train car, Clare ran out of food and the means to travel, and her journey North ran aground.
She moved in with the first man who would keep her, found a host of other friends and admirers willing to spend their week’s salary just to see the promise of a smile dangling off the corners of her red-painted lips, and the more she made the men spend and the more she saw them suffer, the more she became convinced of the power of her looks, and she grew bolder and more reckless, reveling in the attention she received and savoring the passions she aroused, moving through lovers and across coal camps with the confidence and the shortsightedness of one who, true to her youth, is unable to believe in failure, and it was with this same poise and self-assurance that she pursued every preacher and Holiness man she came across, intent on proving to herself and the world that she was not one to be ignored or passed up—that she had powers that transcended faith and fear and that drove men to indulge in the very sin for which they knew they would burn til eternity. Most of all, she pursued Little Sam Jenkins.
She followed him across state lines and into brush arbors and tents, places where he held church meetings and where, often, her mother would be in the congregation. Rose had divorced Little Sam but not his church, and as she grew older and more imbued with the Holy Ghost, she brought ever greater faith in his powers and took on the task of fighting the devil with increasing zeal. She watched Sam marry Helen and abandon her, watched him let his own children starve or run ragged through the mountains, and she even watched him tremble every time Clare walked into his church in her harlot’s clothes and her high heels, the locks of golden brown hair falling in jagged lines across her neck and shoulders. Rose watched all this, but it was not Little Sam Jenkins she blamed for the way his face flushed when he saw Clare: the real culprit, Rose thought, was the woman who tempted him.
In church Rose always led the attack on her own daughter, screaming at her from a distance and raising her voice as she got closer, demanding that she leave the premises and find a creek or a river where she could wash the devil’s paint off her face and that she come back ready to receive the Spirit, but all her efforts were in vain and all her prayers were left unheard, and in the end Clare managed to seduce the old man. She even had the child to prove it.
The MOMENT Clare began to show, her boyfriend kicked her out.
She was twenty-four years old then and already restless in the coal camps, and so she took off eagerly, northbound once again hitching a ride in the cab of a truck, and she even made it as far as Richmond, even worked for a week at a diner wiping floors and tables before her back started to ache and her feet swelled from the weight of the pregnancy and she quit her job, certain there must be a better way to live. Only the way did not make itself evident, and the men who in the past had stepped forth to offer their home and their help every time she was on her own, now stayed away from the sight of her bloated stomach, and Clare found herself alone and stranded.
Six months pregnant, she went back to the derailed train car with the tar-paper roof and the rusted insides, and submitted to her mother’s conditions and lived by Holiness rules, until Adam was born. She had the baby on June 10, 1936, the day of the last public hanging in the state of Kentucky, when twenty thousand people gathered in Owensboro to watch a black man being put to death. A week later she bounded out of the train car, baby in her arms, and announced she was going to find Little Sam Jenkins.
She didn’t know what she wanted from him, but when Sam ignored her the first time and then continued to refuse to own up to having been with her, she became increasingly resolved to assert herself in his church. For three years she kept up with him as he traveled and preached and handled snakes, always moonshining on the side. But
as Adam grew bigger and the roads Sam traveled became longer, Clare began to feel more desperate and less certain of her own mission, and she kept going home to Rose for two- and-three-month spells and letting her care for Adam.
Rose bathed the child in the freezing creek water, which was dirty and polluted and smelling of disease. She dressed him in Holiness clothes, took him to church, and asked the congregants to pray over him to cleanse his soul. She made him sleep with snake boxes under his bed and forced him to watch as she drank strychnine in mid-prayer and vomited blood and poison, and he endured it all in a state of terror and expectation, not knowing truth from fantasy or right from wrong in those years, and aware only that he wanted his mother to stay with him.
So he clung to Clare with all the might in his weak and undernourished body and felt as if she would vanish the moment he turned around. He tried to draw solace from his grandmother Rose’s prayers, and sensed relief every time Clare mentioned Little Sam Jenkins and told Adam that was his father— that one of these days they were going to establish this as undeniable truth. But Clare’s promises never came true, and Rose’s prayers always ended in shocking acts of violence against her own body, and the preacher who was supposed to one day start loving his son, made a point of ignoring him instead.
Clare found a job at a coal mine, moved in with another man, turned up at church meetings in Florida and Alabama and all the way north in Ohio. Finally one day Little Sam Jenkins stopped and patted Adam on the head.
“Take him to an orphanage,” he advised Clare.
He even recommended a home.
The TENNESSEE State Home for Children sat on the edge of Highway 63, barely an hour outside Knoxville, at the end of a long stretch of farmland dotted by wooden silos and hand-carved crosses planted in the ground. A narrow, unpaved road led from the highway to a giant metal fence surrounding a gravel yard. Beyond it was a tall brick building with small tinted windows and a heavy wooden door reinforced by strips of black metal. On the other side of the building were a green lawn, a vegetable patch, and an orchard. A second structure, lower and more recent, contained a mess hall, four classrooms, and additional housing.