Not
even the foot-stompin' Charlie Daniels sound of its title or a
disparaging review by Michiko Kakutani (the Don Rickles of lit'ry
criticism) likely would have saved Salvation
on Sand Mountain
from
my eternal disinterest were it not for a friend's lending it to me.
And even that was a stretch, because of some doubtless twisted
psychology I avoid like coiled vipers most books friends lend me. And
so it was at first with Salvation
on Sand Mountain. For
weeks it sat atop one of my twin to-read towers—on the tower
furthest from me, if it matters (and maybe in a Jungian sense it
does), challenging my inertia with its Southern rock title and cover
photo of a young woman. The woman is clearly beautiful despite the
uncanny resemblance of her moon face to a young David Crosby's. Her
striking features are distorted in a grimace that suggests erotic
ecstasy as her suppliant hands appear to be offering someone a live
rattlesnake.
Author
Dennis Covington, who held a rattlesnake similarly in his hands while
doing research for Salvation
on Sand Mountain,
describes the sensation:
And
I could not hear the earsplitting music. The air was silent and still
and filled with that strong, even light. And I realized that I, too,
was fading into the white. I was losing myself by degrees, like the
incredible shrinking man. The snake would be the last to go, and all
I could see was the way its scales shimmered one last time in the
light, and the way its head moved from side to side, searching for a
way out. I knew then why handlers take up serpents. There is power in
the act of disappearing; there is victory in the loss of self. It
must be close to our conception of paradise, what it’s like before
you’re born or after you die.
I'm
thinking one of the incentives for me ultimately to pick Salvation
on Sand Mountain
from its tower of qued books was the same as Covington's for doing
the book. Curiosity. I was looking for something to review for Patti
Abbott's Friday's
Forgotten Books
weekly blog feature. The little I knew about religious snake handlers
came from news items, usually about someone being bitten. I'd assumed
the handlers were crazed in the way of youngsters playing chicken to
see who is bravest. Instead of proving their bravery to each other
the snake handlers ostensibly were proving their faith to an unseen
god. Unhinged, as I saw it.
My
curiosity grew incrementally from the book's cover, starting with
the beautiful woman holding the snake. My eyes eventually drifted
from her face directly across to the copper-colored seal proclaiming:
National Book Award Finalist. Hmmmm, I thought. I allowed my eyes to
drop beneath the photo to a blurb from The New Yorker, which praised
Salvation
on Sand Mountain as
“An extraordinary account of how a journalistic assignment evolved
into a spiritual quest.” Hmmmm, indeed. I opened the cover and read
more blurbs. My favorite is from Fannie Flagg, author of Fried
Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe:
Salvation,
she said, “will jar you to the bone. It will make you wonder about
things you never thought to wonder about and meet people you never
dreamed existed. Dennis Covington is either the bravest or the
craziest journalist I know.”
 |
| Dennis Covington |
Well,
as you might guess, I now concur. With all of it. As the Newsweek
blurb promised, Salvation
on Sand Mountain
mesmerized me. Mesmerized me like a swami's flute summoning a cobra
from its basket. I read the book in one sitting, and remained
entranced through to the end. Unlike Covington, though, I was not
compelled to visit a snake handling church and hoist a rattlesnake
barehanded over my head. Not that I have a phobic fear of snakes,
like my mother, who faced her fear by boiling a harmless grass snake,
stripping the flesh from its bones, and fashioning the skeleton into
a necklace. It didn't help her much with live snakes, but I'm
certain the courage it revealed stood her well with her siblings
growing up on the farm. I learned I did not inherit her phobia when I
felt no qualms wrestling Miles the five-foot-long black rat snake
from our chicken coop and carrying him back to the woods every other
week or so. I demurred a similar response when it came to the
mid-size copperhead, for the same reason Covington gives in his book,
because it was on our property endangering our children and pets.
 |
| Copperhead and I |
An
assignment for The New York Times prompted Covington's journey to
Sand Mountain. Reporting on the trial of a fundamentalist preacher in
Scottsboro, Alabama, charged with attempting to murder his wife with
rattlesnakes, he became fascinated with the people testifying about
snake handling in their worship services. Covington grew up a Baptist
in Birmingham, but quickly understood he was glimpsing a part of
Southern culture alien to him. With the curiosity of a journalist and
a taste for danger—he'd covered war on the ground in El Salvador—he
plunged in head first. He learned his ancestors had been mountain
people, one of them a snake-handling preacher. His curiosity moved
him beyond getting a story to finding deeper cultural roots and
religious faith within himself.
I
shall leave off now, as it seems the enchantment Salvation
on Sand Mountain
cast on me is enjoying a revival of sorts. Afraid if I keep going I
just might abruptly stand, throw my arms in the air and shout “AMEN!”
And I would mean it. Not the most prudent behavior, I suspect, in our
public library.
