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.
Reading The South 