THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 16, 1995 TAG: 9504120581
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ESTHER DISKIN
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
SALVATION ON SAND MOUNTAIN
Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
DENNIS COVINGTON
Addison Wesley. 240 pp. $20.
THE CHURCHES OF snake-handling preachers are secret places - abandoned gas stations and shacks at the end of unpaved mountain roads in southern Appalachia. Outsiders to the congregations won't find these churches, and if they do, by taking a wrong turn, they might fear to step through the doors.
With good reason - outsiders aren't welcome.
A window into that hidden world opened in the fall of 1991, with the murder trial of a serpent-handling preacher who forced his wife, at gunpoint, to stick her arm into a box of rattlesnakes. Dennis Covington of The New York Times went to Scottsboro, Ala., to write about it.
Salvation on Sand Mountain starts with that trial, but quickly moves beyond it to Covington's own journey to learn about the snake-handling culture and, on the way, to become one of the insiders - ``Brother Dennis,'' a man who picks up a rattlesnake and holds it up toward the sunlight.
Covington's exploration illuminates a spiritual universe that spins from domestic brutality to the ecstasy of faith. He describes the terrain and its people with lyrical prose, and his eye lights upon details of the rural South in transition:
``Today Sand Mountain's crossroad towns boast new libraries and civic centers, but the countryside itself is littered with burned-out house trailers, automobile graveyards, collapsed chicken farms, and those ubiquitous totems of cultural anomie - tanning beds and late-night video stores. Marijuana is a major cash crop on the mountain. Illegal cockfighting appears to be a favorite pastime. . . . The lure of the secular and worldly in a region once characterized as the Bible Belt has left a residue of rootlessness, anxiety, and lawlessness.''
Lawlessness, violence and danger are tied up in this faith experience. Covington, who returned four times to cover the war in El Salvador and finds danger ``an antidote for conventional life,'' admits an obsession with snake-handling.
The story begins with the brutality of preacher Glenn Summerford, who, in a drunken frenzy, sticks a gun to his wife Darlene's head, drags her by the hair to a shed where he keeps his 17 poisonous snakes, and gives her a choice: She can stick her hand or her face into the box.
She survives two snakebites and sends her husband to jail for life.
It's Darlene Summerford - a snake-handler herself - who offers the most succinct explanation of why anyone would want to tangle with snakes.
``It makes you feel different,'' she says. ``It's just knowing you got power over them snakes.''
Her comment exposes a painful existence: For the poor Southern whites in these congregations, who scrape bottom with their weekly paychecks, handling snakes is the only kind of power they can imagine.
Instead of exploring that question, however, and delving deeply into the lives of the people he meets in these churches, Covington gets distracted by himself. He makes himself the star of the book and goes awry: The characters he meets become a sideshow, though they seem far more interesting than he.
From the outset, it's clear that Covington won't be able to resist picking up one of the snakes. Church-goers predict that he'll become one of them. He searches into his family's past and discovers the Covington brothers, arrested for snake-handling in 1953. That clinches it. Amid the pandemonium at Old Rock House Holiness Church on Sand Mountain, Covington steps up and accepts a rattlesnake with a head ``as big as a child's hand.''
His snake-handling act has made Covington, a novelist and creative-writing instructor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, a minor celebrity on the literary circuit. Interview questions inevitably veer toward ``the moment'' when he lifted the rattler above his head, which he describes in the book as pure spiritual abandon.
Despite that spiritual high, he has quit handling snakes. Near the end of his book, he describes his delivery of a fiery sermon, in which he chastises the preachers for their treatment of women as second-class citizens. For purposes of the book's structure, it marks his high-minded exodus from snake-handling circles.
The real reason is likely less exalted. ``I refuse to be a witness to suicide, particularly my own,'' he writes. ``I have two daughters to raise, and a vocation in the world.'' MEMO: Esther Diskin is a staff religion writer. by CNB