Glenn Summerford’s cousins, Billy and Jimmy, negotiated the deal for the church. Billy was friendly and loose limbed, with a narrow red face and buck teeth. He’d worked mostly as a carpenter, but he’d also sold coon dogs. Jimmy was less amiable but more compact. Between them, they must have been persuasive. They got the church for two thousand dollars. A guy down the road had offered five thousand, Billy
said, but the owner had decided to sell it to them. “God was working in that one,” he concluded.
It was called the Old Rock House Holiness Church, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t made of rock. But it was old in contrast to the brick veneer churches out on highway 35, the ones with green indoor-outdoor carpet in the vestibules and blinking U-Haul It signs out front.
The Old Rock House Holiness Church had been built in 1916, a few years before Dozier Edmonds first saw people take up serpents in Jackson County, at a church in Sauty Bottom, down by Saltpeter Cave. I’d met Dozier during the brush-arbor meetings. A rail-thin old man with thick glasses and overalls, he was the father-in-law of J.L. Dyal and the husband of Burma, the snake-handling twin. Dozier said he’d seen men get bit in that church in Sauty Bottom. They didn’t go to a doctor, just swelled up a little bit. He also remembered a Holiness boy at the one-room school who would fall into a trance, reach into the potbellied stove, and get himself a whole handful of hot coals. The teacher would have to tell the boy to put them back. There was a Baptist church in those days called Hell’s Half Acre, Dozier said. They didn’t take up serpents, but they’d do just about anything else. They were called Buckeye Baptists. They’d preach and pray till midnight, then gamble and fight till dawn. One time a man rode a horse into the church, right up to the pulpit.
Out of meanness, Dozier said. Everything was different then. “They used to tie the mules up to a white mulberry bush in the square,” he said. Why, he remembered when Scottsboro itself was nothing but a mud hole. When the carnival came through, the elephants were up to their bellies in mud. There wasn’t even a road up Sand Mountain until Dozier helped build one. And it seemed like the Civil War had just occurred.
Dozier came from a family of sharecroppers who lived on the property of a famous Confederate veteran named Mance. He had a bullet hole through his neck. He’d built his own casket. Every Easter, Colonel Mance invited the children of the families who lived on his property to come to the big house for an egg hunt. One Easter, he wanted the children to see what he’d look like when he was dead, so he lay down in the casket and made the children march around it. Some of the grown-ups had to help get him out. It was a pine casket with metal handles on it, Dozier said. Colonel Mance eventually died, but he wasn’t buried in the casket he’d made. He’d taken that thing apart years before and given the handles to the families who lived on his property, to use as knockers on the doors of their shacks.
That was the kind of place Sand Mountain had been when the Old Rock House Holiness Church was in its heyday. By the time the Summerford brothers bought it in the winter of 1993, it had fallen onto hard times. Didn’t even have a back
door. Paper wasps had built nests in the eaves. The green shingles on the outside were cracked, and the paint on the window sills had just about peeled off. Billy Summerford and some of the other men from the congregation repaired and restored the church as best they could. It’d be another year, though, before they could get around to putting in a bathroom. In the meantime, there would be an outhouse for the women and a bunch of trees for the men. The church happened to be sited in the very center of a grove of old oak trees. Fields of hay surrounded the grove and stretched to the horizon. As you approached the church along a dirt road during summer heat, the oak grove looked like a dark island in the middle of a shimmering sea of gold and green.
That’s the way it looked to me, anyway, on a bright Sunday morning in late June, six months after the Summerfords had bought the church, when Jim and I drove up from Birmingham for their first annual homecoming. Brother Carl had invited us by phone and given us directions. He was scheduled to preach at the homecoming. Other handlers were coming from all over — from East Tennessee and South Georgia, from the mountains of Kentucky and the scrublands of the Florida panhandle. If we hadn’t had Carl’s directions, we’d never have found the place. The right turn off the paved road from Macedonia was unmarked. It was one of several gravel roads that angled off into the distance. Where it crossed another paved road, there finally was a sign, made of
cardboard and mounted at waist level on a wooden stake. After that, the gravel turned to dirt. Dust coated the jimsonweed. The passionflowers were in bloom, and the blackberries had begun to ripen in the heat. There were no houses on this road, and no sound except for cicadas, a steady din, like the sound of approaching rain.
For once, Jim and I were early. We stepped up on a cement block to get through the back doorway of the church. The door itself was off its hinges, and none of the windows in the church had screens. There were no cushions on the pews and no ornaments of any kind, except a portrait of Jesus etched into a mirror behind the pulpit and a vase of plastic flowers on the edge of the piano bench, where a boy with a withered hand sat staring at the keys. We took our places on a back pew and watched the handlers arrive. They greeted each other with the holy kiss, women with women, men with men, as prescribed by Paul in Romans 16. Among them was the legendary Punkin Brown, the evangelist who I’d been told would wipe the sweat off his brow with rattlesnakes. Jamie Coots from Kentucky and Allen Williams from Tennessee were also there. They sat beside Punkin on the deacons’ bench. All three were young and heavyset, the sons of preachers, and childhood friends. Punkin and Jamie both wore scowls, as though they were waiting for somebody to cross their paths in an unhappy way. Allen Williams, though, looked serene.
Allen’s father had died drinking strychnine in 1973, and his brother had died of snakebite in 1991. Maybe he thought he didn’t have anything more to lose. Or maybe he was just reconciled to losing everything he had. Within six months of sitting together on the deacons’ bench at the Old Rock House Church, Jamie, Allen, and Punkin would all be bit.
The church continued to fill with familiar faces, many from what used to be The Church of Jesus with Signs Following in Scottsboro, and the music began without an introduction of any kind. James Hatfield of Old Straight Creek, a Trinitarian church on the mountain, was on drums. My red-haired friend Cecil Esslinder from Scottsboro was on guitar, grinning and tapping his feet. Cecil’s wife, Carolyn, stood in the very middle of the congregation, facing backward, as was her habit, to see who might come in the back way. Also in the congregation were Bobbie Sue Thompson, twins Burma and Erma, J.L. Dyal and his wife and in-laws, and just about the whole Summerford clan. The only ones missing were Charles and Aline McGlocklin. Charles was still recovering from neck surgery on an old injury, but I knew from the conversation we’d had in New Hope that even if he’d been well, he wouldn’t have come.
One woman I didn’t recognize told me she was from Detroit, Michigan. This came as some surprise, and her story seemed equally improbable. She said her husband used to
work in the casinos in Las Vegas, and when he died she moved to Alabama and started handling rattlesnakes at the same church on Lookout Mountain where the lead singer of the group Alabama used to handle. “Didn’t you see the photo?” she asked. “It was in the
National Enquirer.”
I told her I’d missed that one.
Children were racing down the aisles. High foreheads. Eyes far apart. Gaps between their front teeth. They all looked like miniature Glenn Summerfords. Maybe they were. He had at least seven children by his first wife, and all of them were old enough to have children of their own. I started to wonder if there were any bad feelings among the Summerfords about the way Brother Carl Porter had refused to let them send the church offerings to Glenn in prison.
About that time, Brother Carl himself walked in with a serpent box containing the biggest rattlesnake I’d ever seen. Carl smelled of Old Spice and rattlesnake and something else underneath: a pleasant smell, like warm bread and apples. I associated it with the Holy Ghost. The handlers had told me that the Holy Ghost had a smell, a “sweet savor,” and I had begun to think I could detect it on people and in churches, even in staid, respectable churches like the one I went to in Birmingham. Anyway, that was what I smelled on Brother Carl that day as he talked about the snake in the box. “I just got him today,” he said. “He’s never been in church before.” Carl looked over his glasses at me and smiled. He held the
serpent box up to my face and tapped the screen until the snake started rattling good.
“Got your name on him,” he said to me.
A shiver went up my spine, but I just shook my head and grinned.
“Come on up to the front,” he said. I followed him and sat on the first pew next to J.L. Dyal, but I made a mental note to avoid Carl’s eyes during the service and to stay away from that snake of his.
Billy Summerford’s wife, Joyce, led the singing. She was a big woman with a voice that wouldn’t quit.
“Remember how it felt, when you walked out of the wilderness, walked out of the wilderness, walked out of the wilderness. Remember how it felt, when you walked out of the wilderness
...” It was one of my favorite songs because it had a double meaning now. There was the actual wilderness in the Old Testament that the Israelites were led out of, and the spiritual wilderness that was its referent, the condition of being lost. But there was also the wilderness that the New World became for my father’s people. I don’t mean the mountains. I mean the America that grew up around them, that tangled thicket of the heart.
“Remember how it felt, when you walled out of the wilderness ...
” My throat tightened as I sang. I remembered how it had felt when I’d sobered up in 1983. It’s not often you get a second chance at life like that. And I remembered
the births of my girls, the children Vicki and I had thought we’d never be able to have. Looking around at the familiar faces in the congregation, I figured they were thinking about their own wildernesses and how they’d been delivered out of them. I was still coming out of mine. It was a measure of how far I’d come, that I’d be moved nearly to tears in a rundown Holiness church on Sand Mountain. But my restless and stubborn intellect was still intact. It didn’t like what it saw, a crowd of men dancing up to the serpent boxes, unclasping the lids, and taking out the poisonous snakes. Reason told me it was too early in the service. The snakes hadn’t been prayed over enough. There hadn’t even been any preaching yet, just Billy Summerford screaming into a microphone while the music swirled around us like a fog. But the boys from Tennessee and Kentucky had been hungry to get into the boxes. Soon, Punkin Brown was shouting at his snake, a big black-phase timber rattler that he had draped around his neck. Allen Williams was offering his copperhead up like a sacrifice, hands outstretched. But Brother Carl had the prize, and everyone seemed to know it. It was a yellow-phase timber, thick and melancholy, as big as timber rattlers come. Carl glanced at me, but I wouldn’t make eye contact with him. I turned away. I walked to the back of the church and took a long drink of water from the bright yellow cooler propped up against a portrait of Jesus with his head on fire.
“Who knows what this snake is thinking?” Carl shouted. “God knows! God understands the mind of this snake!” And when I turned back around, Carl had laid the snake down and was treading barefoot on it from tail to head, as though he were walking a tightrope. Still, the snake didn’t bite. I had heard about this, but never seen it before. The passage was from Luke:
Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
Then Carl picked the snake back up and draped it around his neck. The snake seemed to be looking for a way out of its predicament. Carl let it nuzzle into his shirt. Then the snake pulled back and cocked its head, as if in preparation to strike Carl’s chest. Its head was as big as a child’s hand.
Help him, Jesus! someone yelled above the din. Instead of striking, the snake started to climb Carl’s sternum toward his collarbone. It went up the side of his neck and then lost interest and fell back against his chest.
The congregation was divided into two camps now, the men to the left, with the snakes, the women to the right, with each other. In front of Carl, one of the men suddenly began jumping straight up and down, as though he were on a pogo stick. Down the aisle he went and around the sanctuary. When he returned, he collapsed at Carl’s feet. One of the Summerford brothers attended to him there by soaking
his handkerchief with olive oil and dabbing it against the man’s forehead until he sat up and yelled, “Thank God!”
In the meantime, in the corner where the women had gathered, Joyce Summerford’s sister, Donna, an attractive young woman in a lime green dress, was laboring in the spirit with a cataleptic friend. She circled the friend, eyeing her contortions carefully, and then, as if fitting her into an imaginary dress, she clothed her in the spirit with her hands, an invisible tuck here, an invisible pin there, making sure the spirit draped well over the flailing arms. It took her a while. Both of the women were drenched in sweat and stuttering in tongues by the time they finished.
“They say we’ve gone crazy!” Brother Carl shouted above the chaos. He was pacing in front of the pulpit, the enormous rattlesnake balanced now across his shoulder. “Well, they’re right!” he cried. “I’ve gone crazy! I’ve gone Bible crazy! I’ve got the papers here to prove it!” And he waved his worn Bible in the air. “Some people say we’re just a bunch of fanatics!”
Amen. Thank God.
“Well, we are!
Hai-i-salemos-ah-cahn-ne-hi-yee!
Whew! That last one nearly took me out of here!”