Book Review: Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington

2010 at 5pm     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Fifteenth anniversary edition currently available from DaCapo Press

When Dennis Covington went to Scottsboro, Alabama in March 1992 to cover the trial of Pentecostal snake-handling preacher Glenn Summerford, who was accused of trying to murder his wife with rattlesnakes, he thought it was just another story. But as he got to know the members of Summerford’s church, eventually attending services and even taking up snakes himself, Covington found himself becoming an increasingly larger part of the story, and what began as a journalistic investigation turned into a memoir. Sort of.

Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia is Covington’s chronicle of the year he spent among the “hard, angular women and men with slicked-back hair and unfortunate teeth,” whose literal interpretation of a few verses of scripture led them into religious practices many find unbelievable and even crazy.

Mark 16:17-18 (King James Version)

¹⁷And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;

¹⁸They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

The members of Summerford’s church—and of the wider Holiness movement—took their worship to ecstatic levels. They “spoke in tongues, anointed one another with oil in order to be healed, and when instructed by the Holy Ghost, drank poison, held fire, and took up poisonous snakes.” And Covington was fascinated. Raised in the Methodist church, he attended a mainstream Southern Baptist congregation as an adult but admitted to being an adrenaline junkie and had long been interested in more mysterious, mystic, and dangerous spiritual experiences.

In retrospect, I believe that my religious education had pointed me all along toward some ultimate rendezvous with people who took up serpents.

Covington’s ability to suspend judgment and be open to the snake handlers’ beliefs initially makes his exploration feel like immersion journalism, but the longer he stays and the more services he attends, the blurrier the lines become. When Covington attends a brush-arbor meeting on top of Sand Mountain and finds himself swept up in the worship service, only to realize that he has been shaking a tambourine without noticing, he becomes a full-fledged participant in the story, and Salvation on Sand Mountain becomes just as much about him and his history as it is about the peculiar individuals who people the Holiness movement.

Through the tambourine, I was occurring with her in the Spirit, and it was not of my own will.

Covington seems to have drunk the proverbial kool-aid, and rather than creating a frustratingly muddy book, his connections to the “hill people” make them more sympathetic and their practices *almost* sensible. Almost.  Covington begins to buy into the beliefs so completely that even skeptical readers will find themselves tempted to leave behind the idea that experiences are only ecstatic because we construct them to be and will wonder if just maybe they’re really missing out on something.

I mean, Covington makes it all sound so highminded:

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…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.

Or, you know, loss of sanity. Which is what I was thinking, but I admire how deeply Covington allowed himself to be absorbed into the community (which eventually began referring to him as “Brother Dennis,” a true sign that he was accepted), and I appreciate that he still succeeds in distancing himself from his experiences enough to analyze them. After testifying during a service for the first time, he writes:

I was astonished at myself afterward. Appalled is not too strong a word. At the moment, though, the words seemed right, but inevitable.

Upon reflection, Covington calls what happens in many services “a sort of group hypnosis, group hysteria,” but he never questions the validity of the handlers’ practices, though he does remark that what they do can seem crazy and is certainly difficult to understand. My inner cynic (who, let’s face it, doesn’t reside too far below the surface) wanted more questioning, more skepticism, more “what the hell are these people thinking?” But I couldn’t help but be grateful to Covington for bringing the snake handlers out of caricature and into the kind of story that leaves me wanting to learn more.

The narrative framework of Salvation on Sand Mountain goes beyond the present-day snake handlers to explore the history of Appalachia’s people, who, as it turns out, are also Covington’s people. He paints them as “refugees from a culture on the ropes” who, after the industrialization of America, “had awoken to discover that the new Eden they’d inherited was doomed.”  Covington presents snake-handling and the Holiness movement as part of a larger cultural push to resist modernization and secure social and spiritual capital for a people who feel disenfranchised.

The more faith you expend, the more power is released. It’s an inexhaustible, eternally renewable resource. It’s the only power some of these people have.

As Covington looks into Sand Mountain’s history, he discovers that his great-great-grandfather was a preacher whose snake-handling antics earned him coverage in the newspapers of his day, and he realizes that the culture he’s become so fascinated by is a part of his spiritual heritage. The snake handlers have taken him in and trusted him enough to allow him to see their faults, and he has gotten in way over his head and involved himself to the point where he isn’t just writing the story but affecting what happens in it.

Readers looking for an exposé or critique of snake-handling culture will be disappointed by Salvation on Sand Mountain, but that’s only because they are looking in the wrong place. This is a book about the people of a movement and their struggles, both personal and corporate. Yes, some of the stories are salacious, but just as many are heart-wrenching, or baffling, or rage-inducing. And all are worth reading.

Ultimately, Covington involves himself with the community so deeply that he crosses boundaries and finds himself pushed out. And that is for the best. He says, “I had found my people. But I had also discovered that I couldn’t be one of them after all.”

If you have to classify Salvation on Sand Mountain, think of it as a journalistic memoir, but if you can get beyond the label, you’ll find a wonderfully-written, emotionally compelling story populated with unforgettable characters and an unknowable system of beliefs. 4.75 out of 5.

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