“My Faith’s Been a Little Poorly…I’m Putting My Faith in Here,” She Said.

Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia is a wonder of a book. It exists in the curious space between reportage and spiritual autobiography, charting the progress of Covington’s dual investigation of his spiritual inheritance and the case of Glenn Summerford, a pastor accused of attempted murder by rattlesnake. As the book winds to a close, Covington makes a point about the mystery of storytelling that resounded with me:

At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound that even as I begin to speak of it, the hairs on the back of my hand are starting to stand on end. I believe that the writer has another eye, not a literal eye, but an eye on the inside of his head. It is the eyes with which he sees the imaginary, three-dimensional world where the story he is writing takes place. But it is also the eye with which the writer beholds the connectedness of things, of past, present, and future. The writer’s literal eyes are like vestigial organs, useless except to record physical details. The only eyes worth talking about is the eye in the middle of the writer’s head, the one that casts its pale sorrowful light backward over the past and forward into the future, taking everything in at once, the whole story, from beginning to end (175).

I like the notion that Covington considers writing to be an almost holy act, as if merely speaking of the way it operates and the processes therein are part of a secret sect, a mystery cult whose rites can only be discussed in the most hushed of tones. Similarly, I like the line-blurring that occurs in this type of book; it isn’t a memoir, and it isn’t straight journalism. Once the divisions between the self and past that Covington didn’t realize he was searching for become confused with the story he attempts to recover from the Summerfords’ parishioners, the book becomes truly fascinating. The search for the truth and the motives behind different snake-handling traditions only lead Covington further inward and backwards into his own past – he discovers a pair of Covington brothers who were arrested for snake handling around Sand Mountain, a situation eerily mirrored by the tossed-off plot of a short story he had written several years prior to his research into the family name.

As much as I try to work out of the popular convention of “enthusiasm blogging” or writing exclusively about the things that make you blood run a little rougher, I felt it apt to write briefly about Covington’s book as I find myself fascinated by the act of biographical recovery and familial memory/amnesia. The creative movement of denying/embracing one’s blood-calling or spiritual-calling is the projected topic of my thesis and I am always delighted to discover evidence of this trope in particularly Southern writing.

 

Clyde Edgerton’s “Raney” :: or :: Shooting the Jesus Fish On your Bumper

Making fun of Christians from the South is an easy thing to do; first, there’s the troubling history of the Southern Baptists as a group formed in response to the question of slavery – they recanted these origins and officially denounced racism as a sin in 1995 – then there’s the apocryphal, though quite real, tradition of snake-handling in the Pentecostal church that is as misrepresented as it is misunderstood, and of course we have our own class of regional Shakespearean tragic heroes – the disgraced Evangelist, pride/greed/lust always coming yea before the fall. As the South is no stranger to easy targets of religious satire, it offers a wellspring of inspiration to the enterprising writer. Clyde Edgerton –  North Carolina native and current professor of Creative Writing at UNC-Wilmington – chose the Original Free Will Baptist Convention as the primary source of his comic aims in his first novel Raney.

The eponymous principal character Raney Bell – recently Shepherd – has a real problem with sex. Sex, for Raney, is the source of a great deal of hidden shame – a thing that must be less thought about than it is read about or certainly talked about. After marrying Charles – his family is from the much more cosmopolitan Atlanta and displays such unnerving cultural traits as drinking wine with dinner and refraining from the usage of racial slurs – Raney experiences her first real bout of sexual anxiety on their wedding night, when Charles suggests an unspeakable variation of the assumably proper and properly Baptist missionary position. One wonders here if the nuptial advice from Free Will Baptist mothers to daughters would sound like a variation of the British cliche: “Just close your eyes and think of the Song of Solomon.”

When Raney and Charles decide to mediate their inability to communicate about sex and other marital issues through a marriage counselor Raney’s nervousness over talking about intimacy is palpable – she is disgusted and offended that such a private topic would be discussed in front  of a stranger. Raney’s obliviousness about the presence of sex and sexual substance within her own community reaches a humorous fever pitch when she decides to take a job at her father’s store. Much to her surprise, she discovers that her father’s employees are selling Playboy and Penthouse. This revelation re-establishes Raney’s strident notions of the public and the private – the division lines that a community or individual must not subvert – in her rigid interpretation of the Bible’s role in daily life. Though her father sells dirty magazines, he does so without advertising or promotion; he engages in a marketing of sex much like the wholesale of moonshine. Regardless of the propriety of these transactions, Raney still wholly disapproves of them because of their sexual nature.

A curious twist occurs in the novel when Raney discovers her father’s employee Sneeds in the act of sexual congress with a woman in the feed room. Raney, the good Baptist, observes the whiskey-soaked prelude to licentiousness through a cracked door and tries to remain silent. As an undiscovered voyeur, Raney can hold these dirty things and ponder them in her heart without the need to be accountable to her community. Ultimately, this act of sexual witnessing and voyeurism inspires Raney to attempt to reenact the moment in the feed room with her husband. This closed circle of watching and acting sanctions Raney’s latent desires to experimennt sexually. Rather than finding the inspiration in such external sources as visual or literary pornography as her husband would, Raney needs to feel sexually vindicated by her community; she can quiet the still, small voice that would inquire “What would the community think?” by witnessing “What the community might do.”

All in all, Edgerton’s novel is a humorous and insightful portrait of a small mind made larger by circumstances and tragedy; it explores what happens when the rigidity of a barely-cracked Bible runs up against the uncomprehended desires of the flesh.

Confessions of a Chronically Under-Read Southerner

I have never read a single word Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston or Larry Brown have written. I have neglected them not out of regional pride – I hail from their part of the country – but out of my own misguided overemphasis on the works by the greats from other places. Similarly, my choice in reading material outside of classroom assignments tends to drift towards the general BIG NAMES IN WRITING, rather than the Barry Hannah’s and Daniel Woodrell’s of the world. Consider this blog a progression of amends-making, a gigantic love-letter to the fantastic writers from this God-blessed and godforsaken region within which I have spent these twenty-six years. The forthcoming post will include remarks and musin’s on Clyde Edgerton’s first novel Raney and my own torrid Baptist upbringing. I read the book because I heard it made some Baptists angry, which is never a bad or unfunny thing.