Salvation on Sand Mountain

by Dennis Covington

  Jim leaned over the back of the pew in front of me. “Looks like we missed the snakes,” he whispered. He sounded disappointed. Like me, he’d become obsessed with the handlers. (On the way to Jolo, he’d talked about an art installation he wanted to do — a rusted-out car on blocks, with rattlesnakes coming out of its rotted front seat and Brother Carl preaching on the radio.) It’s hard to know what to wish for in a serpent-handling church. You want to see the snakes taken out, but at the same time you don’t. The more the snakes are taken out, the more the odds begin to work against the handlers. As an observer, you are in a moral quandary, responsible in an acute way for the wishes you make.

  Four serpent boxes lay askew on a raised platform at the front, where a marionette of a man with thick glasses and the remains of a pompadour was flailing his arms in midsermon. “People today, they’re hunting for an excuse,” he said. “They want to look around and see what the other fellow’s doing. They say, ‘Well, I’m not doing this,’ and ‘I ain’t gonna do that.’” He marched to one side of the platform in mock disgust. “Honey, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You get the other fellow in your eye, and you’ll both go to hell!” And then he hopped back across the platform on one foot while the congregation amened.

  The preacher’s name was Bob Elkins. A former mine superintendent, he was the official pastor of the church, which was called the Church of the Lord Jesus, but I would later find out that his wife, Sister Barbara Elkins, held true power. Sister Barbara was reportedly the last person still alive who had handled with George Went Hensley, the man legend said was the first to get the notion to take up a serpent, near Sale Creek, Tennessee, around 1910. At the time of our visit, Sister Barbara was seventy-six and so ill she couldn’t attend the Friday night service. But she would be there on Saturday, as I would find out when I felt the sting of her reprimand.

  As Brother Elkins brought his sermon to a close, Charles and Aline McGlocklin finally walked in. Brother Elkins pushed his glasses up onto his nose to get a good look at the couple, and then he continued preaching. Aline was wearing a satiny blue dress, and both she and Charles were spangled with droplets of rain. They sat next to Sister Carolyn.

  When Brother Elkins had finished, Charles took to the platform with his guitar. I assumed that Brother Carl, the visiting evangelist for this year’s homecoming, had invited Charles to sing and preach a little. Sermons at snake-handling churches are short but numerous. Nobody ever uses notes, preferring to let the Spirit move. Charles was a master of this kind of improvisation, but that night was his first visit to Jolo, and he seemed nervous. The West Virginia crowd was a hard-looking lot, stricter in dress and behavior than congregations farther South. Hand-printed signs on the wall behind the pulpit forbade such things as short hair on women, long hair or beards or mustaches on men, short sleeves on either sex, and gossip, talebearing, lying, backbiting, and bad language from the pulpit. The West Virginians had been in this thing a long time, and they’d been hurt. The year before, one of their members, Ray Johnson, had died after being bit by a rattlesnake during a service at the church. His son-in-law, Jeffrey Hagerman, a new member, had been bitten four times. Barbara Elkins’s own daughter, Columbia, had died of snakebite at the church in 1961, and Barbara’s son, Dewey Chafin — a handsome, disabled coal miner with broad shoulders and white hair — had been bitten 116 times.

  Charles had been bitten only once, and that was when he saw a rattlesnake crossing the road in Alabama and picked it up to impress some fellows he worked with. “They were sinner men,” Aline confided. Charles maintained that the bite didn’t even hurt him. The dilemma was clear: Charles hadn’t been hurt, and now he was fixing to preach to a bunch of strangers, at their own homecoming, who had been hurt, and hurt bad.

  “The Bible says the Holy Ghost will lead you, teach you, and guide you,” he said. “I didn’t even have a map to show me this place.” Despite his smile, he was greeted with silence. “I know we drove about five hundred miles to get here,” he continued.

  Still, nobody said anything. Charles strummed a chord on his guitar and looked out over the congregation as if waiting for the right words to come. He had, after all, seen angels and been taken out in the spirit for long messages from the Lord. “You know, there’s a lot of church forms and a lot of church buildings, but there ain’t but one church,” he said, and that seemed to start the crowd warming to him. They knew what would follow. “There ain’t but one God,” Charles said. “One church.”

  Amen.

  “One God, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one father and God of all who is above all, and over all, and in you all!”

  Amen. Yes, he had them.

  “And it’s time the people that’s in the real church of the living God, the one that Jesus gave Peter the keys to the kingdom to in the sixteenth chapter of the book of Matthew, it’s time that God’s people let the world know God’s the same yesterday, today, and forever!”

  Amen. Thank God.

  “Amen,” he said back to them in relief. “That’s already been worth the trip.”

  He had hit them with the Holiness precepts: one God, one spirit, the alpha and omega, unchanging. He did not say it then, but everyone understood what rightly followed: God had but one name, Jesus. For the church at Jolo, no matter how it differed otherwise from the churches in Alabama and Georgia, was a Jesus Name church. Instead of baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, they baptized in the name of Jesus. To them, Jesus was the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Trinitarians called them “Jesus Onlys.” They called Trinitarians “three-God people.”

  Charles McGlocklin had staked his claim with the West Virginians as a Jesus Only like them, and riding their approval, he picked up his guitar again and started singing a song called “Like a Prodigal Son.” He was accompanied on bass guitar by Dewey Chafin, on drums by Kirby Hollins, and on organ by Kirby’s wife, Lydia Elkins Hollins, the granddaughter of matriarch Barbara Elkins and daughter of Columbia, who had died of snakebite in this very sanctuary while she was in her early twenties. Charles strode back and forth across the platform as he sang. “Well, I want to go home, and feast with the Father. The table is set, and they’re waiting for me. ...”

  The members of the congregation stood and swayed to the music, a gentle hill ballad that suddenly took, with Lydia Hollins’s eccentric organ work, a dark and dissonant turn. Lydia, head cocked, seemed to be searching intently for an unexplored harmonic. Dewey Chafin, on bass, flicked his wrist spasmodically, just shy of the beat. The effect was gradual, an elevation. I felt myself moved in an unexpected way, as though the music were a mild intoxicant. Most of us had tambourines, including Brother Timmy McCoy, a red-haired man who worked in produce at the Kroger’s in Richlands, Virginia. Brother Timmy was dressed in a ruffled yellow shirt, vest, and pointed shoes — the Liberace of snake handling, I thought. He threw his head back as he shook his tambourine. The light in the church seemed to have changed. It was softer, more liquid. Behind us, Aline lifted her hands into the air, reaching for the Spirit, like she had at the brush-arbor meetings. Her eyelids were closed, her fingers extended in a curiously splayed pattern that suggested desire in the process of being remedied. I felt gooseflesh on my arms as I watched her, and Melissa unobtrusively started taking photographs of her.

  When Brother Charles finished his song and stepped down from the platform, it was clear he had been a success. He had invoked the Spirit and set the stage for Brother Carl, an old friend to the believers at the Church of the Lord Jesus. In typical fashion, Brother Carl seemed to be hanging back. Maybe it was modesty. Maybe he was just waiting on the Spirit. When he finally did take the platform, he was holding his Bible close. “This thing is good,” he said. And by thing, he meant it all — the Bible, the serpent handling, the way of Holiness, the Holy Ghost. “It’ll make you talk in the unknown tongue,” he said. “My daddy used to say, if you want to see the devil run, shoot him in the back with the Holiness gun.” And he held his Bible
aloft. “This is it right here. With the word of God, you can put that devil to flight! That’s what Jesus used to get the devil when he was fasting for forty days and nights. He used the Word!” Amen. Thank God. “He’ll put the devil to flight. It’ll make him put his tail between his legs and run like a scalded dog!” And he hopped and convulsed like it was him instead of the dog who’d been hit with the Holiness gun. “This thing is real!” Amen. Thank God.

  “It takes the Spirit of God!” Brother Carl shouted. “They say this thing just started in George Hensley’s day. Well, honey, I want you to know this thing’s been around for years and years, when Moses built that graven serpent, and they looked upon it and lived! There’s a hedge,” he said, and he threw his arms out as though to describe its arc. “That hedge is Jesus!”

  Amen. Thank God.

  “And let me tell you, if we break that hedge, we’ll get serpent bit!” He was pointing straight into the congregation now, crouched and red-faced. “You can leave this world, and honey, it don’t take you long to do it!”

  Amen. They knew how long it’d take.

  Carl finished with a flourish. “We better know who our Saviour is!”

  Oh, yes! they said. We do!

  I was sweating and expectant, lifted on the general surge. I could tell something was about to break loose, but I couldn’t predict its shape or form. I just knew that I was going to be part of it, and during the next song, “Everything’s Gonna Be All Right,” things started getting a little wild. Lydia Hollins was singing in a voice as raw and tortured as Janis Joplin’s when flamboyant Brother Timmy, suddenly seized by the rhythm of the music, started dancing down the aisle toward the front, his tambourine going. I’d seen him in white patent leather shoes and a powder blue shirt with ruffles at the homecoming at Carl’s church in May. Timmy had whirled in circles like a dervish, a rattlesnake in each hand. This time, though, he didn’t head immediately for the serpent boxes. He just danced in front of the platform, stomping his feet and tossing his head in a step reminiscent of that old 1960s routine called The Pony.

  “Everything’s gonna be all right.” Close on his heels came an older couple, Ray McAllister and his wife, Gracie, a woman in a simple pink jersey and flower-print skirt, her gray hair pinned in a bun. She seemed the least likely person in the world to pick up a rattlesnake, but in the midst of her dancing, she suddenly veered toward one of the serpent boxes. Unclasping its lid, she took out a two-and-a-halffoot-long canebrake rattlesnake and held it up with both hands. Then she turned a slow circle with the snake outstretched, her face transfigured by something like pain or remorse.

  It occurred to me then that seeing a handler in the ecstasy of an anointing is not like seeing religious ecstasy at all. The expression seems to have more to do with Eros than with God, in the same way that sex often seems to have more to do with death than with pleasure. The similarity is more than coincidence, I thought. In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully come upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face reads exactly the opposite — as though someone, or something, were being violently taken away from her. The paradox of Christianity, one of many of which Jesus speaks, is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves, and perhaps that’s why photos of the handlers so often seem to be portraits of loss.

  By the time Gracie had passed the snake to her husband, Ray, a half dozen more of the faithful had joined them and had begun lifting snakes from the other boxes in no apparent order and with no apparent plan. They were shouting praise or praying out loud. Some were speaking in tongues. Things were beginning to spiral out of control. I came to the front then, banging my tambourine against my leg. I’d never been able to stay away from the center of storms. Brother Carl smiled at me. He was holding up a four-foot black timber rattler. He held it with reverence and a certain tenderness. I saw him stroke its chin. To my left, Dewey Chafin, the whitehaired ex-coal miner, took up three rattlesnakes at the same time. He dropped one onto the floor in the confusion, and stooped to pick it back up. One of his thumbs was still bandaged from a copperhead bite he’d received a few weeks before. A few feet away from Dewey, young Jeffrey Hagerman, twenty-five, the son-in-law of the last member to die of snakebite, grasped a rattlesnake in either hand and hopped joyfully with them while his wide-eyed children, one in pajamas, watched from a nearby pew. “Everything’s gonna be all right.” Then the men passed the snakes among themselves. At one point, all six snakes wound up with Brother Charles, who was standing next to me. “Everything’s gonna be all right.” With one of his massive hands, Charles held the snakes in a row by their tails, and smoothed them out with his other, as though he were straightening a rack of ties. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. The rattlesnakes seemed to have turned to rubber or gauze.

  For twenty minutes, we continued to dance and sing, while the music ground on like some wacko, amphetamine dirge. Sister Lydia’s voice was like cloth ripping. “Everything’s gonna be all right.” Sure it is, I thought. At one point Dewey Chafin gathered all six rattlesnakes together and held them up with one hand. Then Brother Carl took the rattlesnakes and put them on top of his head before distributing them back to the other men. The action was so wild and fast, I lost track of where the snakes were or who had them. I didn’t care. Brother Timmy careened into me, his rattlesnake in my face. I caught a glimpse of Jim and his camera tumbling backward under Timmy’s feet. Melissa was on her knees trying to get photos of the snakes from beneath. The Holy Ghost had descended like a hurricane, and we were all in danger of being swept away. But right at that moment when it seemed the frenzy couldn’t restrain itself any longer, the lunatic music stopped, and everything seemed to go into slow motion. We’d reached the eye of the storm now. It was absolutely calm. The brothers and sisters continued to cradle the snakes as they prayed or spoke in tongues. Sister Lydia came from behind the electric organ and got herself a copperhead to stroke. The air seemed brighter than it had been before. Soothing. Clarifying. It was as though a thin, light oil had been poured down on us all.

  I’d had this feeling before, under fire, in El Salvador. It was an adrenaline rush. I felt as though I were in an element other than air. The people around me were illuminated. Their faces were filled with light. And it seemed as though nothing could happen to any of us that would harm us, although in retrospect, of course, I knew that not to be the case. We felt invulnerable, forever alive. But then the music intruded again, slower, more stately this time, and without any other audible signal, the handlers started returning the snakes to their boxes. They actually stood in line, waiting their turn to guide the serpents back into the flat cages with “Jesus Saves” carved in the sides. After all of the serpents were safely inside, and the brothers had laid hands on Gracie McAllister to heal her troubled heart, I was seized by the desire to testify. It was an imperative. I seemed to have no control over my legs or my mouth. I stalked out in front of the congregation, and in what sounded to me like an unnaturally loud and guttural voice, announced that the Holy Ghost had led me to West Virginia to document these events in order that the gospel might be spread all over the country. I said it as though these were fighting words and I were daring anybody to disagree. I was astonished at myself afterward. Appalled is not too strong a word. At the moment, though, the words not only seemed right, but inevitable.

  “This thing is real!” I told Brother Carl after the service. I was sweaty and ebullient.

  “That’s right,” Carl said, pounding me on the back and looking sideways into my face, inquisitively, the way a physician studies a patient’s eyes to see how the pupils are responding to light.

  My most common nightmare is of having to go to the bathroom, but not being able to find one. So I wind up doing it in public, squatting on a busy street corner or in the center of the living room at a party, and I wake up utterly humiliated. Shame seems t
o drive my psychic engine. I don’t know why this is so. All I know is that I am excessively calculating, especially when I appear not to be, in order to avoid being shamed. Early on, I learned to feign spontaneity. During my drinking days, I honed it to an art. But what happened that Friday night in Jolo wasn’t calculated. I had experienced something genuine, and I was awed by what I had seen. I might as well have been watching people defy the law of gravity or breathe underwater. It was that startling, that inexplicable.

  Jim and Melissa felt the same way. The mood in the van on the way back to our motel in Virginia was one of reckless exhilaration. Jim and I had seen similar displays of snake handling at the homecoming at Carl’s church in Kingston, but not this close up. The handling Melissa had seen before had been nothing like this. She was duly impressed, although she confided that the snakes did not interest her as much as they did us. Maybe the snakes were a male thing, she suggested, although plenty of women do handle them. But what obsessed Melissa was Aline reaching for the Spirit. I’d forgotten about Aline during the chaos of the handling. Had she handled that night? No, Melissa said.

  Whenever Jim and I had talked about the handling in the past, he would always suggest that there was a technique to it. Most of the time, the handlers held the snakes very lightly, right in the middle, about the place where you’d lift them up with a snake hook. The snakes seem balanced like that, and unable to strike. But tonight blew that theory. The handlers just grabbed them any old way they could and were doing whatever they wanted to them.