38 pages • 1 hour read
Dennis CovingtonSalvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Religious Persecution During and After Colonization
Many British Protestant immigrants who arrived in America in the mid-1700s were fleeing religious persecution at the hands of Ireland’s Catholic majority. Their plight did not end at the shores of America, but rather continued on through economic deficits and intolerance of cultural differences at the hands of East Coast Quakers, who drove the immigrants into the hills and mountains of the Appalachian ranges. Established religion, as a whole, was generally feared and rejected by these Scotch-Irish highlanders, who preferred to create their own brand of Anglicanism or Presbyterianism, using the term “People of the New Light” to distance themselves from the rigidity of Calvinism and highlighting the celebration of “free grace” (93) and the outdoors as a means of salvation.
Dennis Covington’s great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Lea, served in the Civil War as a Confederate soldier and became a Methodist (founded by John Wesley) circuit-riding preacher after the war. The center of his first circuit was just four miles west of Scottsboro, Alabama—directly where snake handling would spring up just a few years after his death. This version of Methodism was big on holiness, so much so that after “salvation,” also known as “new birth,” came a second act of grace, the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit” (126), intended for moral purification. At least sometime later, this phrase came to mean a kind of power from God, which included spiritual gifts such as signs and wonders, healing, and speaking in tongues. This is what Covington’s great-great-grandfather would have been preaching on horseback “to congregations around Scottsboro and most likely on top of Sand Mountain, where Methodist camp meetings, complete with brush arbors, drew enthusiastic crowds” (126).Covington explains the progression of religion: “Out of Methodism came Holiness. Out of Holiness came Pentecostalism. Out of the Holiness-Pentecostal belief in spiritual signs and gifts came those who took up serpents” (126-127).From this, Covington concludes that whether or not he is blood related to the handlers, they at least share the same “spiritual ancestry” (127).
Snakehandlers asserted their difference from other, more mainstream, branches of Methodism by utilizing the precepts of Holiness: one God, one spirit, one church. This was a belief that separated them entirely from the popular Christian idea of the three gods in one:
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’ (95).
Covington explores how religious persecution affected his Southern roots and continues to shape his experiences in Appalachia.
Class Structure and Educational Limits
Recognizing the hill people’s lower-class status and educational limits within the framework of American culture in the 20th century becomes unavoidable for Covington. The author explores how in pushing the Scotch-Irish immigrants and highlanders into the mountains and cutting them off to such a high degree as they were from secular, mainstream society—to the point that, when they emerged in the late 1800s, industrialization was a surprise—the local communities have chosen to identify the hill people as less than. Covington maintains that not all members of the snake-handling community are inherently less intelligent, or that people who make their homes in the Appalachian Mountains are backward. Darlene Summerford’s bravery and quick-thinking in the face of danger, and her perseverance when seeking to obtain help after sustaining multiple venomous snakebites, show an aptitude to logic and planning. Considering another angle, not all snakehandlers have grown up in that environment or even in the South; yes, Diane Pelfrey’s husband Steve Frazier is related to Punkin Brown, but he grew up in Michigan as a practicing Catholic. Anyone can choose to become a snakehandler; there is no evidence for a genetic predisposition.
However, not all people consider snakehandlers in this optimistic light. When looking through his father’s binder of family ancestry, Covington discovers a census that depicted his family in Alabama in 1870:“The census taker had described both my great-grandfather and great-grandmother as illiterate. He had also checked the boxes for deaf, dumb, blind, insane, and idiotic” (124).Covington questions how much of this census taker’s decision would have been derived from objective analysis of these people, and how much was a product of popular belief. As different as these people may have seemed to the census taker, they could not both have exhibited all of the characteristics he marked and still managed to be functional, fertile people capable of raising a family and passing their genes down to Covington.
Sub-culture As a Tool for Community Building
In any given society throughout history, there is generally a mainstream culture and several subgroups with divergent aims that set themselves apart from it. For example, the snake-handling churches depicted in Salvation on Sand Mountain are, in fact, descended from more mainstream versions of Christianity that have historically attracted a large number of followers in the States. Cultural subgroups are often discriminated against based on relatively minor differences between themselves and the mainstream. For some groups that are unwilling or unable to change to fit the mainstream, isolationism can present as an answer to the problem; in turn, these smaller groups promote their own a sense of identity and community.
There are many different ways that communities select their membership: family, interests, skills, etc. The snake-handling community is based on a shared passion for their religion and its unique practices. While there is no singularly named denomination of Christianity that has been attributed to all snake-handling churches, generally speaking, those who are accepted into the community are those who travel to the different churches to share their sermons and handle snakes. In this way, the community has been formed around a common interest and a common interpretation of a central text: the Bible.
The human need for connection can be so strong within this kind of sub-culture that as one becomes immersed in it, one may feel an immense need to prove that they belong. In this way, Covington felt compelled to research his own family history to try and find connections to the snake handlers, with aims to stake a claim to his own membership in the group. He found several leads in his family tree, and even revealed them to an unsurprised but amused Carl Porter. However, for Carl, and others in the community, their measure of acceptance was based much more squarely in Covington’s outward behavior—his own willingness to participate and believe in their rituals. Carl himself knew even less about his own family, mostly that they were Alabaman sharecroppers, but felt his own connection intuitively, and thus, had been accepted by all.
