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.
Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Dennis Covington begins by establishing himself as a Southerner born in the city—more specifically, Birmingham, Alabama—rather than one’s general idea of a country Southerner. In this way, Covington confesses that the world of the great Southern works of fiction was never his own. As he grows older, he learns to draw his own writing inspiration from the cities he experiences himself, leaving more rural settings to their own place in Southern literature. As he finds himself beginning to wonder if there is still a South at all, a 1990 Time essay published by American journalist Hodding Carter III confirms there is not. However, Covington foretells that his subsequent immersion in the snake-handlers’ community draws an opposing conclusion from the narrator. Covington reveals a central thesis of the text—Southerners are “as peculiar a people now as we ever were, and the fact that our culture is under assault has forced us to become even more peculiar than we were before” (xiii).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Following Signs”
Covington gives the reader an account of the first two times he attends services at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following in Scottsboro, Alabama, during the March of 1992. He decides to do this after covering the trial of Brother Glenn Summerford, convicted and sentenced to 99 years in prison for the attempted murder of his wife. The snake-handling church is merely a converted gas station and country store catering to “Appalachian hill people” (3). Before the trial, there would generally have been hundreds in the audience, but now there are only about a dozen. The first time he goes, a man named J.L. Dyal, not a reverend himself but rather just a layperson trying to keep the church together, leads the service. No serpents are handled that night and eventually the service ends naturally. In the parking lot, a group of men gather to discuss how things had been before Glenn’s arrest. A man named Cecil Esslinder invites Covington to come back to the church the next night.
Covington is exhilarated by his first trip and drives back the next night from Birmingham for more. On this trip, he meets Carl Porter, a preacher and snake handler practicing in Kingston, Georgia. Much like Dyal, Porter is filling in at the church for Glenn and brings some members of his own congregation to the service. He quickly gains trust from his audience by referencing the Pentecost and the Holy Ghost. Then he takes out the serpent box, containing a rattlesnake, and holds two snakes in front of his face, before moving on with the service. Other elements of the service include anointment, testifying, song, and speaking in tongues. After the service, Carl and Covington talk about Covington’s role as a journalist after the Summerford trial, of which Carl approves.
Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis
In the Prologue, Covington makes the case that poor white Southerners are the only minority yet to be recognized for their struggles, and in some ways, this book will work to redress that claim. From the start, Covington is establishing Southerners as steadfast and resilient people by using snake handlers to represent the peculiarity of the Southern experience. He believes poor Southern whites have not been permitted to have their own history and in writing this book he takes steps to reclaim it. Inlyricalprose, Covington outlines the process of turning coal into iron, setting the tone for his exploration of the snake-handling community that is centered around Scottsboro, Alabama.
In Chapter 1, Covington relates his own history with religion growing up in an “odd kind of Methodism” (7) in East Lake, Birmingham, trying for a middle-class respectability in a suburban landscape full of grocers, plumbers, and office workers. Occasionally, preachers came from the mountains into his town and their differences had an impact on young Covington, who recalls them shouting, playing loud music, and becoming “overcome by the Spirit”(9). At the time, Covington was unaware of his own family ties to the mountains and the serpents. His cultural and economic status alongside his parents’ desire to elevate themselves above any previous connections to that world would have made it impossible for him to connect with their lifestyle as a child.
