The sight of my daughter, so clearly a Covington, so clearly at home in the chaos of a snake-handling service, made me quicken.
Were we actually kin to these people
? I was going to look more closely at my father’s notes in the green binder. I wanted more. Who were my people? Who were my daughters kin to?
When the snakes had been put away, and the music had stopped, Vicki and Laura came back into the sanctuary. Brother Carl placed a bottle of Welch’s Sparkling Concord Grape Juice on one side of the pulpit, where minutes before a rattlesnake had stretched. On the other side, he put a bottle of Manischewitz wine. Between them sat a pan of unleavened bread. And I knew we were going to have Communion.
It was the first time Carl had celebrated Communion in the new sanctuary, which was three years old. Rituals like Communion are rare events in snake-handling churches, anyway; snake handlers don’t stand on ceremony or pay much attention to the traditional church calendar. I’d been in a snake-handling church on Easter morning when the word Easter was not even mentioned. But Carl’s church seemed to be striving for a measure of respectability, and he wanted to make sure that if they did something like this, they did it right.
Carl opened his Bible to a passage in Matthew.
“And as they were eating,
” he read, “
Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.”
Carl looked up from the book. “Now, he didn’t mean it was really his body.”
Amen.
“They weren’t cannibals.”
Thank God.
“Can you imagine me taking a big bite of Brother Junior over there, and him not even cooked? He’s forty something years old. He’d be tough as foot leather!”
Bless him, sweet Jesus!
Carl looked back at the book.
“And he took the cup,”
he read, “
and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. ”
Again, he glanced up. “I sure ain’t gonna drink nobody’s blood.”
Amen.
“I ain’t no vampire.”
Praise God!
Carl solemnly closed his Bible and held it up in one hand. “This book here,” he said, “will tell you everything you need to know. It’ll tell you how to bake bread. It’ll tell you how to raise a garden, how to treat your wife, how to wash your feet. It’ll tell you how to comb your hair.”
Then he blessed the grape juice, wine, and unleavened bread. A certain awkwardness descended on us all, but at Carl’s encouragement everybody lined up either in front of the Welch’s or in front of the Manischewitz. Vicki and the girls and I chose the grape juice. Charles and Aline McGlocklin chose the wine. Drinking unfermented grape juice, Charles confided, would be like taking up a nonpoisonous
snake. Bill Pelfrey, another snake-handling preacher from Newnan, Georgia, helped Carl serve the Communion in Dixie cups. As each member of the congregation took his cup, he also reached into the pan for a piece of unleavened bread and popped it into his mouth. The women stepped off to the side to drink their grape juice or wine. The men threw theirs back right where they stood, then crumpled the cups and looked around for a trash can. Occasionally one of them would throw his arms out and praise God. Carl’s cousin, Gene Sherbert, spoke rapidly in tongues.
It wasn’t quite like the Communions I’d taken in my family’s Methodist church in Birmingham. Back then, we went to the altar by pews and knelt. The organist played softly in the background. Brother Jack Dillard, in the black choir robe he wore only for this occasion, would serve the Welch’s grape juice in tiny glasses arranged on a circular silver tray. The host, also served from a silver tray, consisted of crumbledup Premium saltines. But except for those details, the spirit within the churches was not so different. We Methodists just didn’t speak in tongues, and prior to Communion we didn’t handle rattlesnakes.
After everybody in Brother Carl’s church had been served, he held up his Bible and said, “It says here they ate his flesh and drunk his blood and sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives.”
So we sang a hymn, accompanied by guitars, drums, and Carl himself on cymbals, and then Junior McCormick and Gene Sherbert brought out pans and pitchers filled with water for the foot washing. I’d been waiting for this part. I’d heard of foot washing, but had never done it. I liked what it was supposed to represent — the idea of following Jesus by becoming a servant to others.
Carl put down his cymbals and got his Bible out again.
“If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.”
Then he looked up. “I want the women to go downstairs now,” he said. They would wash their feet in private. I watched the women file out. Vicki had dressed the girls in Holiness fashion, in modest, long dresses. Ashley’s was teal-blue, Laura’s ivory. Vicki had attempted to make herself plain, too, tossing aside her dangling earrings at the last moment. Once the women disappeared down the wooden stairs, the men gathered on the deacons’ bench and began taking off their shoes and socks. Brother Carl didn’t say anything.
The bare feet were gray and bruised looking in the fluorescent light. Most of the feet had thick yellow nails and crooked toes, rough heels, tufts of hair. I was a little apprehensive as I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up the legs of my jeans. I didn’t want to go first, and was relieved I didn’t have to. Brother Carl volunteered to do that. Junior
McCormick and Gene Sherbert sat on either side of him on the deacons’ bench. When Carl put his feet into the pan of water, he also placed his hands on the shoulders of Junior and Gene as they leaned over to rub his feet and splash water against his legs. All the other men gathered around. It was like a rugby scrum. Everybody tried to get a hand in the water, which was slick with the olive oil Carl had poured in. Carl’s head was thrown back, his eyes closed. “Lift him up, Lord,” said Brother Bill Pelfrey.
I was sandwiched in between Brother Bill and Charles McGlocklin. They were jiggling against me as they stirred the water in the pan. Brother Bill stomped his foot twice. The keys he wore on a chain through his belt loop jangled.
“Ah-canna-helimos,”
he said.
“Co-taka-helican.”
“Thank God,” Carl said.
“Yes, Jesus,” said Brother Charles.
I groped around in the water. I felt Carl’s ankle, his stiff toes, and the hands of the other men. It was peculiar and intimate to touch other men like that.
The men began praying out loud. The voices spiraled louder and faster.
“Thy will be done!” shouted Bill Pelfrey.
“We ask it in the name of Jesus!” echoed Brother Charles.
“Jesus!” shouted the other men.
“Sweet Jesus!” said a blond-haired boy with buck teeth.
Carl opened his eyes and looked at the boy with studied surprise, as though he were seeing him for the first time.
“Do you want to go next?” he asked.
The boy nodded. I don’t know whose son he was, although I remembered seeing him earlier in the service with a large family Bible in his hand. Carl lifted his feet out of the water, and Gene Sherbert dried them off with a towel. Then Carl and the boy changed places.
The movement of the men changed now. They were more methodical, more delicate. During the washing, Bill Pelfrey offered up a long and intricate prayer that collapsed into tongues at intervals, like the breaking of a wave. I stepped back from the men and looked at the boy’s face through their shoulders and heads. His shirt had miniature sailboats on it. His eyes were closed, his lips parted. His front teeth, one of which was chipped, glistened in the overhead light. And his body seemed to rock with the motion of the men’s hands on his feet. I was moved by something I could not name. It was like desire, and not like desire, a longing for something that could not be possessed. It was what I felt sometimes when I looked in on my daughters sleeping and was suddenly aware that they were not merely bursts of restless energy and sound, but bodies, solid and temporal, that had been entrusted to me.
“You next?” Brother Charles asked me. I’d lost track of
what was going on. The boy had already moved to another spot on the bench, where one of the men was drying his feet.
I nodded and sat in the boy’s place on the bench. When I put my feet into the water, I immediately felt the men’s hands all over them. They were praying aloud and invoking the name of Jesus. Brother Carl put his hand on my head, and I felt a vibration move along it and into my scalp. But the washing of my own feet seemed anticlimactic. The heart of the experience was watching the boy’s chipped tooth glisten as his feet were washed by men.
The next morning, when we got back to Birmingham, I took out my father’s green binder, which had sat since his death in a bookcase underneath a stack of magazines and unanswered correspondence. Until then, I hadn’t really felt a need to know where my people had come from. But there was something about the way Ashley had responded to the snake-handling service, the sight of her clapping her hands and stomping her feet, that convinced me we were connected in some way to a distinctive mountain culture. Ashley would write in her school journal: “Mother and Daddy took me to a snake-handling church for New Year’s Eve. They had copperheads, rattlesnakes, tambourines, and we got our feet washed at midnight.” Her teacher would casually bring the
journal out at a parent-teacher conference, and tilt her head as if to say, “And do you want to elaborate?”
I had grown up in the 1950s, with radio and television and
Reader’s Digest,
and I had assumed that everyone around us was pretty much alike. The past didn’t matter. The only history we knew was who we’d fought against in World War 11. All we cared about was the present. And all our parents seemed to care about was the future.
East Lake was a solid neighborhood, just shy of middle class, with families trying to do things right, making sure that teeth got filled, shot records were up to date, church attendance pins got won, spelling words learned. Our parents were preparing us to do better than they had, as they had done better than their parents, but beyond that we had no idea who we were. All we knew was that wherever we came from, we didn’t want to go back there.
My mother and her sister had been born in a rural crossroads town southeast of Birmingham, but their father had moved them in and out of the city numerous times, following rumors of work. They’d grown up poor in the mining camps of Jefferson County, where, for a time, my grandfather was a hired gun for the coal company. My mother remembers hiding in the cellar while striking miners broke out all their windows with bats. She and her sister found a dead man in their yard one time, no questions asked. They often went
hungry. Their mother, my grandmother Nellie Russell, washed coal dust off their clothes outdoors in a number-ten tub. She had never smoked in her life, but she wound up dying of emphysema anyway. My grandfather, Charlie Russell, the strike buster and eventual railroad detective, died in the state mental hospital of the syphilis he’d contracted riding the rails. For many years my mother kept his revolver in a wooden box on the top shelf of her closet. Before he got too sick, he and my grandmother had lived in a big rock house in Pinson, Alabama. But it was the mental hospital I remember best. We’d visit him on weekends, picnic on the grounds. I used to think of the gold-domed mental hospital as our equivalent of Tara.
My father had fared better as a child. His father, though, had been born in Summit, Alabama, a ridgetop west of Sand Mountain. Only one of my grandfather Covington’s four siblings survived past adolescence. Her name was Tetie. She died in 1916, at the age of forty-six. She was the first of the children to be born in Alabama, which meant that the Covington family had come to the state sometime between 1862 and 1869. But exactly where the Covingtons began their journey, where they crossed the mountains, how they lived, what they believed, who they were, nobody knew. Nobody asked. The Covingtons were a people who’d left their pasts behind. A door had been shut somewhere.
Most of what my father had written in the green binder were the names, birthdays, wedding dates, and deaths of his eleven siblings and their children, a hefty enough task. The history of the family, though, was slim. Dad’s paternal grandfather, Richard Covington, had been born somewhere in North Carolina around 1826 and had married a Mary Clark from South Carolina in 1858. Their oldest child, Anna, was born in 1860 in North Carolina. The family disappeared after that and reappeared in the 1880 census in Summit, Alabama. Five more children had been born by then. Three of them had already died. The remaining two, Tetie and my grandfather, John, would be the only children of Richard and Mary Covington to live into the twentieth century.
Dad didn’t know who the parents of Richard and Mary Covington were or where exactly they had lived in North Carolina or what had happened between 1860 and 1880, years during which they migrated from North Carolina to Alabama. Searching the microfilm at the Southern Collection of the Birmingham Public Library, I finally found the family at another location in Alabama in the 1870 census. Prior to the years in Summit, Richard and Mary Covington and their children had lived just south of Huntsville, at a place called Valhermosa Springs. 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. That was the end of what I knew about the Covingtons.
But Dad had been able to go back one generation further on his mother’s side. My grandmother Covington had been a Howell. Her father had been born near Morristown, Tennessee, her mother in Nashville; at some point, they had migrated to that ridgetop called Summit, Alabama, where my grandmother, Hattie, was born. Hattie’s mother’s people had been Leas, and it was this line that my father had gotten the most information about. In particular, he had discovered that my great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Lea, also a Tennessean by birth, had served for three and a half years in the Confederate Army, and had been captured and held for six months in a Union prison camp. After the war, he became a Methodist circuit-riding preacher in northeastern Alabama. The center of his first circuit was Larkinsville, a town four miles west of Scottsboro.