38 pages • 1 hour read
Dennis CovingtonSalvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Roots”
Covington decides to take a closer look at his own ancestry as recorded by his father after an all-night snake-handling service in Carl Porter’s church in Georgia, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. For the first time, Covington has brought not only his wife, Vicki, but also his two daughters, Laura and Ashley. He is surprised to find that Ashley is very comfortable around the snake handlers during the ceremony and not at all disquieted by their loud noises or reckless behavior.
Covington finds that his father was born on a ridgetop close to Sand Mountain in Alabama, and that on his mother’s side he is related to a Methodist circuit-riding preacher, whose circuit centered on Scottsboro, Alabama: “Out of Methodism came Holiness. Out of Holiness came Pentecostalism. Out of the Holiness-Pentecostal belief in spiritual signs and gifts came those who took up serpents” (126-127). From this, Covington concludes that if nothing else, he at least shares a kind of “spiritual ancestry” (127) with the handlers.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Snakes”
Several months later, while in Atlanta working on a different assignment, Covington feels tempted to visit Carl in Kingston. At this point, it has been almost a year since Glenn Summerford’s trial. Carl and Covington prepare to go to a service at Carl’s church by loading 19 snakes into Carl’s car. Covington recalls that as a child, he caught snakes near his home in Birmingham. In fact, he remembers being bitten by water snakes, recalling it as “a humiliation more than a pain” (138). While much of his childhood was spent catching non-poisonous snakes, Covington has actually captured three poisonous snakes as an adult, all of which have been rattlesnakes, long before his current foray into snake handling.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
Covington is quick to point out that his father’s green binder is full of current members of the family, whereas it is a lot more difficult to glean historical facts from these pages. In fact, while some accounts are given for the mid-1800s, most of what has been recorded is within the 20th century. This means that most of what happened before Covington’s grandparents’ generation remained a mystery—particularly on his father’s side—until Covington unearthed it. On Covington’s mother’s side, his lineage could be traced back to his great-great-grandparents in Tennessee, who migrated to Summit, Alabama, when Covington’s grandmother was alive. Befitting a chapter that begins with an epigraph about a group reporting on the “poor white trash” (119)managing to survive in the Alabama hills circa 1862, Covington recognizes his own father would have been ashamed of his past. As a supervisor for Tennessee Coal and Iron and a perfectionist who kept impeccable records, Covington’s father—much like the snake handlers themselves—would have had an aversion to “backsliding” (40). It is improbable that either of these groups would have appreciated being labelled with the term “white trash.”
Covington, on the other hand, becomes fixated on diving deeper into his past, hoping to make connections with the lower class, poorly educated hill people he attributes to his own ancestry and that of the snake handlers. His stance appears to be unapologetic, whereas his father and the hill people might be in denial or take offense to any claims of commonality. For the snake handlers, their rituals have been passed down to them by the Bible and Jesus Himself, and their reasons for things like foot washing and rejection of modern medicine are not an issue of literacy but rather very much so attributable to their beliefs.
Covington’s revelation that he is no stranger to catching snakes, particularly of the water variety, in his childhood seems to be an extension of this desire for commonality between himself and the snake-handling community. His immersion in this community at this point has led him to desire their acceptance. As snake handlers finding out that an outsider or reporter might once have been fascinated by the same creature that fascinates them today, Covington can only be hoping that by exposing himself in this way, he will become more closely bonded within this new community.
