"Nowhere Else On Earth" by Josephine Humphreys, One Helluva Novel!

This is a tremendous novel! This is one of the best novels I have ever read! This is, by far, the best novel I have read since I read "Wilderness" by Robert Penn Warren. I haven't had enough time to read everything I have ever wanted to or should have read. But it still amazes me that I never heard of Josephine Humphreys until I blundered into this novel by accident. The novel is a story of the late Civil War and Reconstruction just as is "Wilderness" and a couple of other things I have read and written about on this blog lately. But I have not set out on any conscious effort to read a lot of novels about the Civil War. It just happens by accident when I am not deliberately reading for a research based purpose. But I have never been more pleased to find a great writer by accident. Humphreys novel is a masterpiece of southern literature. Her plot work is astounding in this book. Her character development is tremendously detailed, written into the flow of the novel with purpose and without visible intent. It just happens which is what great writers do when they are writing at their best. The novel is set in the late years of the Civil War in coastal North Carolina and the heroine is a daughter of a Lumbee Indian woman and a Scotsman. She is intelligent, hard working, committed to her family and her place in the world. She is in love with a fellow Indian man who is becoming the leader of the local resistance to both the Union and the Confederacy in a community which they call Scuffletown. Scuffletown is one of the great names ever created for a place where poverty is king, starvation common, discrimination a daily reality, and the development of what we victims of discrimination like to call "backbone" is the one essential quality which will keep you alive. In those ways,Scuffletown is a sister to every impoverished coal camp in Appalachia, every row of slave cabins on every plantation in the Deep South, and every ghetto in a northern metropolitan area. The people of Scuffletown know how to survive, how to adhere to each other in tough times which are guaranteed to get tougher, and how never to mistake collusion with an enemy as cooperation. Most of the people in Scuffletown live in one room cabins scattered throughout a pine woods swampy world where turpentine making from pine trees is the one way to make a living in a better way than just being a hunter gatherer or scavenger or robber. Scuffletown is located not far from Hell but always has a bit of Heaven in it. It is a place where Love of Place, loyalty to your peers, and generosity no matter how poor you are is a fact of life.

Rhoda, the heroine, falls in love with Henry Lowrie, a young man her own age who grows up to lead the local resistance to both the Union and Confederate forces neither of which has any respect for the locals. As the war degenerates toward Lee's surrender, times just keep getting harder and Henry and Rhoda's two brothers become key members of the resistance with Henry assuming the top position. They are opposed by a local sheriff, his top deputy, and a group of their henchmen who will stop at nothing to maintain control of the populace and pillage as much as they can. The resistance fighters leave home to live in the swamps and strike whenever and wherever they can in order to feed both themselves and those who are dependent upon them. The novel is regularly improved by an event of such striking oppression, suppression, and sometimes resistance to the other elements just mentioned that the reader is spellbound. It is realistic and true of nearly every war of oppression ever waged in the world. In the end, Henry is branded as an outlaw and a reward of $20,000 is placed on his head with the production of himself or his dead body as necessary to collect the money. The war ends before the novel but it does not improve conditions in Scuffletown. Bad goes to worse! One of Henry's loyal men is hanged and Rhoda takes her children to proceedings where she stands in front of the gallows with the condemned man's mother as he falls to his death. But that is not the end of the story. I have never seen a novel I am more happy to recommend. It is a beautiful and often chilling piece of work. This author, Josephine Humphreys is a tremendous writer. I realize full well that one novel is not sufficient platform on which to build monuments to a writer, but this novel is a fine start of the foundation. If her other work is as strikingly wonderful as this novel, she deserves to have her name mentioned in the same breath as Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, Pearl Buck, and Steinbeck.

Reflections On Reading "Appalachian Anthology: Histories, Historiographies, and Oral Histories of Appalachia" by Diane Alexander

Frequently, I buy books about Appalachia, with Appalachian titles, or some which allegedly cover Appalachian subjects, and sometimes I buy some I have to ask myself later, whey did I do that without digging deeper. This book was described on Amazon as "A collection of Appalachian journal articles, research papers, historiographies, and oral histories prominently featuring Appalachian culture, dialect, and stereotyping. Vignettes of oral history from the 30s and 40s..." It is also apparently one of those books which have been published over the last ten or so years by Amazon under deals which have them sold as printed on demand. As a class of books, I have usually found them to be less than the most rational purchases I have ever made, and I have often stated my intentions to never order another one of this type. But before I come off as totally negative about this book, let me say that it does have some merit, primarily in the purely oral history sections of the book. But it is amazingly redundant in the first two articles or chapters. The first is called "The Forties" and listed as being credited to a Joseph Alexander instead of the listed author Diane Alexander. The second article or chapter is called "Appalachian Youth in World War II: An Oral History" and Diane Alexander is listed as the author of that article or chapter. The first, "The Forties" is a genuine oral history which was apparently written by Joseph Alexander about his experiences during World War II both in the mountains of North Carolina and in Newport News, Virginia, where his parents emigrated to for employment during World War II. As pure oral history, it has merit, is relatively well organized, acceptably written, and covers the emotions of the young man about being removed from a rural Appalachian mountain life to life in a Tidewater city during the war. The second, credited to Diane Alexander, is nothing more than an article, or most likely a high school or college term paper, based on the oral history in the first section. It gives her rendition of several of the same episodes Joseph Alexander discussed in his oral history and the quotes from that oral history are ethically attributed to him. But the highly repetitive and redundant nature of the paper or article leaves it only slightly more than useless. Ms. Alexander would have been far better served to have used only one of the chapters in the book, either the pure oral history or her own conclusions about that oral history with credit to Joseph Alexander. But putting both in the book was a waste of both time and paper. By the time I had read both of these sections of the book, I considered abandoing the remainder which is an act of which I am rarely guilty. But I perserved as I almost always do in such cases since I know that I have also written some things which some people did not really choose to suffer through. I have always thought that is another person suffered through the effort to produce a book they at least deserve the respect to have me finish reading it since I chose to buy it and spend my money on it. The third section of the book, entitled "Firewood", is another piece of oral history written by Joseph Alexander about a chore of his youth in the North Carolina mountains. It has a degree of merit equal to that of his first contribution to the book although most modern readers outside a group of off gridders would find it more meaningful than simply something to read for a brief while. It is acceptable as oral history from a prior era and a man's discussion of a portion of the life which made him the man he was when he wrote it. Thankfully, Ms. Alexander does not insert her own article about this particular oral history. The next section, "Spotlight on Appalachia: Settlers and Speech, Music and Moonshine" by Ms. Alexander makes an attempt to discuss all three of the listed elements of Appalachian Culture over the next fifty pages of the book. After having spent the first twenty years of my life in an Appalachian area of Kentucky where moonshine was commonly made, sold, and consumed, and having grown up in a country grocery store where my parents regularly supplied sugar, malt syrup, cracked corn, yeast, and other items to several local moonshiners, I do know a little more than the average novice about this subject. Ms. Alexander does a minimally acceptable job of discussing the topics, but they would have been better served by having been individually discussed in shorter papers. This particular section also shows what is a common problem with the entire book. It would have been much more readable with a higher level of editorial input from a qualified person. That is a common problem in these books which are produced and sold by Amazon without editorial input. Most of those I have seen by all such authors whose work I have read are short on editorial input and long of errors of both omission and commision in all aspects of writing and language. I did think think about this book long enough to produce a blog post about it. I have also saved some of my readers both their time and money if they take my advice and never buy a copy. If you do decide to ignore my advice about the purchase, please do follow my advice about the utility of Joseph Alexander's oral history and the lack of utility in Diane Alexander's writing about it. It will save you half the time it would otherwise take you to read the book and glean most of the value from it.

"The Far Family" by Wilma Dykeman

"The Far Family" is a novel written by famed Appalachian author who is, perhaps, best known for her other novel, "The Tall Woman".  I have to admit that I have read little by Wilma Dykeman over the years and had tended to focus on a few other female Appalachian authors to my own detriment.  This is fine novel about a close knit but far flung Appalachian family who grew up in Nantahalla County, a fictional county which is somewhere in the area of Western North Carolina.  That area is loosely located somewhere in Nantahala National Forest and/or Nantahala Township.  The book is written in alternating chapters labeled "Yesterday" and "Today". In terms of actual time or current time, it covers a long weekend in which the family gathers together to assist one of the sons, Clay Thurston, who has just been charged with the murder of a friend or acquaintance, a black man named Hawk Williams during an all night long hunting trip which Clay organized for several of his friends.  Hawk Williams was hired to cook for the men on the trip because of his wide spread reputation as an excellent cook.  He is also acknowledged widely as a vicious and dangerous man.  The Thurston family is composed of Clay, his brother Kin, sisters Ivy Thurston Cortland, Phoebe, and Frone.  Their mother Martha is still alive but bedfast in Ivy's home being cared for by her daughter who is a widow after having married an older widower from New York State whom she had met while living in a boarding house in town while attending high school.  Ivy has a son, Phil, who happens to be a young, newly appointed United States Senator, who has also returned for the visit and its related attempt to keep Clay, a notorious alcoholic and ne'er do well, out of the penitentiary.  The "Yesterday" chapters of the book flash back to the developmental years of the brothers and sisters and tell the story of their father's repeated hopeless attempts to make a massive mark on the world around him and his eventual relatively young death in a sawmill he owned.  

 

The book is wonderful piece of work and shows a widespread, deft, and accurate depiction of life in Central and Southern Appalachia.  It discusses the massive exodus of young men and women from Appalachia indirectly in its discussion of the lives of Clay, Phoebe, Frone, and Ivy as they married, left the area, and in all cases except that of Ivy, never returned except to visit.  Ivy and her husband had chosen to sell his New York farm in the Mid-Hudson to return to North Carolina where she raised her son after the death of her older husband.  With the accusation of murder of a black man against a white member of a prominent family in North Carolina, the issue of race relations in the Appalachian South is a key focus of the story.  It is particularly addressed in one chapter when Phil, the US Senator, and his uncle Clay, the accused murder, visit the widow and other family members of the victim Hawk Williams.  As unlikely it is that a sitting US Senator would have ever made such a trip, it is a very impressively written scene in the family's shack as the two white men are welcomed by the widow and her aged father, who reminiscences about a time when a distant relative of the two men assisted him in a legal situation and saved him from conviction in a case which would have damaged the rest of his life.  It is an accurate depiction of life encounters between the races in the south in times past and, perhaps present.   

I won't ruin anyone else's reading of the book by telling the story of the outcome of the murder accusation against Clay and the conclusion of the book.  But it does involve another aspect of the race issue in the Southern Appalachians.  It is a wonderful book!  Read it!

Billy Edd Wheeler, Appalachian Polymath: Reflections On The Death Of A Great Appalachian

On September 16, 2024, Billy Edd Wheeler died at his home in North Carolina at the age of 91.  Depending on whom you ask, you could hear Wheeler described as a practitioner of various occupations and, before you ask, you should know that he was a master at several.  He was a song writer and performer, an author of nearly a dozen books, a college administrator, a humorist, and a playwright.  He was admired all across Appalachia as a shining example of what a great Appalachian should be and what all Appalachians should seek to become.  Several of his songs have embedded themselves deep in the psyche of the country.  His half dozen books of humor, co-authored with another great Appalachian, Loyal Jones, are found on the display shelves of book stores, variety stores, and general merchandise establishments.  Several of those humor books are likely to be reprinted for years to come.  He was also the author of several outdoor dramas in states as varied as his native West Virginia to Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky.  Wheeler was a man of man talents and he worked daily to utilize them all to the best of his prodigious ability.  In addition to those occupations from which he received most of his support, he was also a painter, wood worker, and sculptor whose works were actually good enough to be displayed in several galleries over the years.  

 

 

He was the  son of a mother who raised to be man enough at 16 to climb on a bus in his native West Virginia and travel to Swannanoa, North Carolina, to a residential school with only a single dollar in his pocket.  Over the years after that fateful trip to North Carolina, he served his country as a student pilot, was hired as Alumni Director at his alma mater Berea College, and completed graduate school in play writing at  Yale University.  His was truly a varied and prodigiously productive life.  

 

I never knew Billy Edd Wheeler but we have had three mutual friends including his coauthor of six books Loyal Jones, and Betty Lynn whom he hired as a secretary at Berea College and who also worked with Wheeler and Jones on the publication of their books.  My friend Betty Lynn had this to say about Billy Edd Wheeler: "I read the obit, but it didn't list BEW's first job out of BC. He was associated with the outdoor drama, "Wilderness Road" at Berea, and was the Alumni Director for a few years before going to Yale. He hired me in Jan.'59 to be the secretary/office mgr. in Alumni Office; and we completed the Alumni Memorial Bldg. in 196l under his leadership. I started being Assoc. Ed. of THE BEREA ALUMNUS, a publication for alumni, staff and the campus, under his leadership. I worked with him and Loyal Jones on the Traditional Music events, held annually on the campus and in the publication of their humor books. BEW wrote several outdoor dramas, one in Indiana about Abe Lincoln; one in West, KY at Murray (I went to both of those) and one in WVA about Hatfields/McCoys; and, maybe others? He put out several albums himself, I have most of them. He was very talented!"  

Another friend who had worked with Billy Edd Wheeler on an outdoor drama in North Carolina said, "he authored our sesquicentennial play in MacDowell County some years ago. 1993. " Voices In The Wind". My oldest daughter and I were both in the show. He was quite taken with her performance, at 9 years old!"   Billy Edd Wheeler was obviously a man who enjoyed watching children develop their talents and was willing to reward them for their achievements.  

I have not even mentioned the things I appreciate most about Billy Edd Wheeler and his amazing life.  I love his obvious zest for life and his ability to achieve success in many fields, his lifelong striving to produce high quality work, his outstanding example for other ambitious Appalachians, and his incredible song writing ability.  I consider three of his songs about the coal mining life to be among the ten or so best songs ever written about coal mining.  "Coal Tattoo" is an incredibly masterful work about the difficulty of being a coal miner and facing periodic layoffs and injuries from the profession.  He addressed the frequent loss of a job in coal mining in that song with these words: 

Travelin' down that coal town road,
Listen to those rubber tires whine;
Goodbye to Buckeye and White Sycamore,
I'm leavin' you behind.
I been a coal man all my life
Layin' down track in the hole,
Got a back like an ironwood bent by the wind
Blood veins blue as the coal.

Then he went on to address the frequent injuries in coal mining with one of the great metaphors in all of song writing, comparing a near death experience in the mines with a tattoo,  And yet, that same stanza ends with another reference to the typical coal miner's love of the job which has nearly killed him: 

 Somebody said "That's a strange tattoo
You have on the side of your head."
I said "That's a blue print left by the coal.
Just a little more and I'd be dead"
But I love the rumble and I love the dark
I love the cool of the slate.

Billy Edd Wheeler addressed the deaths and injuries in the coal mines once again in another of the best coal mining songs ever written, "Red Winged Blackbird".  

Oh, can't you see that pretty little bird
Singing with all his heart and soul
He's got a blood red spot on his wing
And all the rest of him is black as coal

Of all the colors I ever did see
Red and black are the ones I dread
For when a man spills blood on the coal
They carry him down from the coal mines dead

Fly away you red winged bird
Leave behind the miner's wife
She'll dream about you when you're gone
She'll dream about you all her life

Oh, can't you see that pretty little bird
Singing with all his heart and soul
He's got a blood red spot on his wing
And all the rest of him is black as coal

 Using the coloration of a beautiful bird, the red winged blackbird as a metaphor for the wounding, disabling, murdering  accidents inside a coal mine was a brilliant piece of writing.  "For when a man spills blood on the coal  They carry him down from the coal mines dead."   It is my personal opinion that Billy Edd Wheeler was the greatest writer of coal mining music who ever lived.  And he proved it once again the beautifully poignant song "The Coming Of The Roads" about a broken love affair and the death of a coal mining town.

Once I thanked God for our treasure
Now like rust it corrodes
And I can't help but blamin' your goin'
On the coming, the coming of the roads
No, I can't help but blamin' your goin'
On the coming, coming of the roads 

While I value the song writing of Billy Edd Wheeler most for his incredible contributions to the genre of coal mine music, I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that Wheeler also wrote a couple of other songs which were even more favorably regarded by the market place.  He was also the author of the songs "Coward Of The County" which was a Number 1 song for Kenny Rogers; "Jackson" which was often regarded as the signature song of Johnny Cash and June Carter; and the humorous "The Little Brown Shack Out Back" which Wheeler  himself took into the Top 10.  He is a member of the Nashville Song Writers Hall of Fame, the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame; and the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame.  That, my friends, is a career. 

 

"Where All Light Tends To Go" by David Joy, A Book Without Light Or Joy

 

Sometime in the summer of 2023, I saw a television documentary about writers in Appalachia in which David Joy was portrayed as one of the newer and most respected writers of Appalachian fiction and ordered this book and three more of his novels.  I read this book with my wife shortly after it arrived, still don't know why, and have never touched either of the other two novels which I actually received.  I have also been quite thankful that one of the four I ordered from a used book website had actually already been sold but not removed from the website by the seller/member. I rejoiced when I got my money back instead of another of this man's books. I doubt that I will ever touch either of the other two novels unless I am snowbound for an extended period of time and have nothing else to read which is very unlikely since I own somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 books of all types.  I could very likely also buy copies of both "War And Peace" and "Ulysses" to hold in reserve for just such a blizzard.  DO NOT MAKE THE MISTAKE OF BELIEVING THAT I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK BECAUSE I HAVE CHOSEN TO WRITE ABOUT IT!

This novel is set somewhere in the Carolinas in a fictitious town in which the protagonist (and I use that word very loosely), the teenage son of the local drug kingpin, is about to graduate from high school and has an ongoing relationship with the most desirable girl in the school and hopes to marry her someday.  They have grown up as best friends from babyhood and the girl hates the occupation of this boy's father.  The boy is making what initially appears to be a genuine effort to avoid becoming his father's right hand man in the drug trade which they disguise behind an owner operated mechanic business.  The boy's father is well connected in the area and has strong and well funded connections with the local law enforcement which protect him and his drug dealing from any law enforcement interventions.  The boy's mother, divorced from the father, lives in another house and is a drug addict with a mutually negative relationship with her ex-husband.  The boy works daily to maintain acceptable relationships with both his parents.  

As the novel progresses, the boy finds himself drawn into his father's drug operation due primarily to his dependence on his father for his daily existence.  He also becomes angry at a party because a local boy with connections to the sheriff's department is making a move on the girl he loves. He savagely assaults the boy and finds himself facing several criminal charges and must depend on his father's connections to dodge the penitentiary.  He eventually finds himself present at what he believes is the murder of another young man whom his father has ordered his son and two of his henchmen to take adverse action against.  They dump what they believe is the dead young man over a mountain and somehow he survives which intensifies the attention toward all of them by law enforcement.  Our hero, and I assure you that is a misnomer, finds himself deep in the drug business and appears to be trying to get out somehow after also helping the same two henchmen to dump a different body in the local lake in his father's favorite graveyard.  Just as the reader begins to develop hope that the boy will somehow find a way to testify against his father and escape the clutches of the drug trade, he goes completely off the deep end, shoots and kills the sheriff when they come to arrest him and the novel comes to a very undesirable end.  

It is abundantly clear that David Joy simply took his publisher's money and ran, has no commitment to supporting Appalachia or defending it in any venue, and is unworthy of the positive regard of any citizen of the greater Appalachian Region, especially if such a citizen has any positive regard for Appalachia, Appalachian Culture, or Appalachia's hopes for the future.  He is simply another writer who writes well enough to be published in the drug store novel trade, and likely has no ambition to become any better.  

What do I have to say further about this disgusting piece of work?  David Joy cannot be perceived, in my opinion, as a writer who is worthy of the respect of other natives of Appalachia.  This novel makes it abundantly clear that David Joy joined all the other detractors and defamers of Appalachia and Appalachian people, grabbed the easy money, and acquiesced to the commonly held belief outside the area that all Appalachia's best writers such as Thomas Wolfe, Pearl Buck, Marie Manilla, and a dozen others can either go to hell if living, and, if dead, can just roll over in their graves .  He has filled this novel with every negative, hateful, ignorant, and defamatory depiction he could envision of Appalachia; Appalachian people; the drug problem in America which is not just an Appalachian problem but a national problem; and has clearly chosen to produce the kind of writing which those other detractors of Appalachia love to produce, read, and spread as far around the world as they can.  This is a totally detestable novel and unworthy of anyone's time to read.  DO NOT MAKE THE MISTAKE OF BELIEVING THAT I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK BECAUSE I HAVE CHOSEN TO WRITE ABOUT IT! DON'T BOTHER WITH IT!  IF NECESSARY, GO TO YOUR BATHROOM WHEN YOU RUN OUT OF READING MATERIAL AND READ THE BACK OF THE AIR FRESHER CAN WHILE YOU TAKE A CRAP! 

Observations On Attending Serpent Handling Churches

Two Churches In Two States: An Ethnographic Observation Among Serpent Handling Believers

The morning of September 11, 2004, began the way most of my Saturday mornings began at that time.  I awoke at 5am and worked briefly on the computer before cutting my hair to its usual skin tight burr, showered, and awoke my wife, Candice, who is bound to a wheelchair, to assist her with her early morning routines before leaving the house to conduct a court ordered visit in the home of a client and then drive to a graduate class at Lindsey Wilson College’s branch campus program in Jackson, Kentucky. As I left the house, I inserted the Ralph Stanley “Saturday Night” CD into my player and listened to the opening song “Mountain Folk”, one of my favorites, as I thought about the weekend ahead and the people I was about to meet.

 I attended the morning session of the class as usual before leaving the all day session at 11:30am to return home to prepare for a trip to a small, rural community in Western North Carolina.  By the time Candice and I left home, I had already been up 8 hours and driven over a hundred miles.  We were on our way to an area just north of Asheville to attend the annual homecoming meeting of a tiny, but somewhat famous, serpent handling church, at the invitation of the pastor who is the brother of a deceased signs following preacher who died after receiving a rattlesnake bite while preaching in a different church in an adjacent state.  That deceased preacher’s wife had also died of a rattlesnake bite received in a similar  church in a third state about five years earlier.  Their five children had become orphans upon the deaths of their parents and were being cared for by their father’s surviving parents who were also signs following believers.  The grandparents continued to handle serpents as did their sole surviving son  and his wife.  I felt honored that I was about to meet these people about whom I had read so much and yet, somehow, knew that I knew so little.  I state for the record at this point that I have chosen to leave these people and all the serpent handling believers I have known anonymous for their own privacy and peace of mind.  

I left West Liberty, Kentucky, and drove south through Salyersville, Prestonsburg, and Pikeville toward Western North Carolina, where we intended to stay in a motel about 20 miles from the church.  From Prestonsburg to North Carolina, much of the route was along US 23 and wove through the mountains of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina in settings which reminded me of my childhood as a native Appalachian and helped to prepare me for this initial experience in a world about which I had been told since childhood, the world of the signs followers or “snake handlers”, as their detractors so often refer to them.  It is important to state that such a misnomer is just that, nothing more, nothing less.  Serpent handling believers is more appropriate nomenclature since their actions are based on their personal interpretation of Mark 16: 17-18 from the King James Bible.  To these people the poisonous reptiles which they sometimes handle in church as a sign of their faith are quite simply a sacramental object much as the bread and wine in a communion service.

We arrived at our motel in North Carolina to learn that the city had been flooded and was without water which the reservations clerk had not told my wife when she made the reservation the day before.  I looked at the time and realized I had only an hour and a half before church began 25 miles away.  The clerk informed me that the water would likely be on that night or the next morning and I chose to stay in the motel.  I did not have time to drive from motel to motel searching for a wheelchair accessible room suitable for my wife which had running water when my first opportunity to be an ethnographic participant-observer of the signs following world was at stake. 

We checked in and quickly changed clothes to go to the church.  I helped Candice to put on a long green dress, hose, and plain black dress shoes before putting on my own simple blue dress shirt and white khaki pants. It was our intent to respect the customs and beliefs of these people and to dress in a similar manner to the clothes they wear on a daily basis.  We drove to the little courthouse town near which the church is located, got last minute directions at the fire house, and proceeded to the church.  Our first trip up the holler revealed a small, treated wood church in an idyllic setting.  But no one was visible in the parking lot.

 Just down the hill, at the next driveway, several dozen cars were parked, an open tent was set up, and tikki torches burned.  We turned in the driveway and were met by a young man who looked baffled when we asked for the pastor by name.  It seemed that this gathering was either a party or a wedding and we decided to travel to a gas station at the forks of the road for more precise directions.  At the forks of the road, we saw a man of about seventy with hair cropped as short as my own and a plain shirt only slightly darker blue than mine standing outside his car.  On the hunch that he might be a member of the congregation, I asked where I might find the pastor.  The man introduced himself by name and told me he knew where the person I was seeking would be in about thirty minutes.  We followed him back to the church and this time found the pastor and his family standing on the little covered porch.  I recognized him instantly from the many photos I had seen in books about their religion. 

We introduced ourselves and the pastor recognized my name from conversations we had previously.  The pastor and the man who had led me to the church shook hands, hugged each other, and obviously were well pleased to be together again.  They spoke of the time since they had seen each other, talked of growing older, and of events that had transpired in their lives.  It suddenly struck me, when the pastor smiled and said “The Lord has been good to me”, that this was a unique and resilient man who loved his God and lived his faith.  No man on the face of the earth had more reason to doubt his beliefs than this man and yet, in the first three minutes I had been in his presence, he had reaffirmed his faith in the justness and fairness of God.  He had lost his only brother and sister-in-law, as well as numerous friends, to religiously based snake bites and poison ingestion, had been involved in a long drawn out custody battle, along with his parents, in their effort to retain custody of their grandchildren, and yet he freely and happily reaffirmed that “The Lord has been good to me”. 

As the two men caught up on recent events in their lives, I noticed a small cemetery at the edge of the hill below the church.  It contained several graves shaded by trees, planted with Hosta, azalea, and rhododendron.  It was a quiet, peaceful, and even idyllic setting.  I walked to the graves and began reading markers as I have done since childhood when I was growing up near three small such cemeteries in Knott County Kentucky.  The first name to strike me was a man who had died after drinking strychnine in a church service.  I realized that, finally, I was standing on some of the most hallowed ground of the signs following world and I was glad to be there.  I knew I had come to the right place to learn the truth about these people.

Shortly afterward, the congregation began to trickle in from the road.  They were men in plain shirts and simple pants like my own, women in long dresses and long hair, children who had learned to obey their parents and proved it as they went to their seats.  They were clean, neat, orderly, well mannered, respectful, and obviously deeply religious.  They always shook hands, often breathed “Praise the Lord” as they greeted each other, and moved to their seats as several musicians including the pastor and his wife began to tune instruments.  There were several guitars, an organ, a set of drums, and numerous tambourines which found ready hands among the congregation. 

“Are you happy to be in the House of the Lord?” asked the pastor several times as he walked through the crowd shaking hands, greeting friends and strangers, and making even me, a visiting writer new to this world, feel welcome.  A common, simultaneous prayer was offered in rising and falling cadences and two young women in long hair, long denim dresses, and measured modesty went to the microphones at the front of the church where they began to sing with their backs to the congregation.  The music began in a driving, syncopated rhythm which often vibrated the seat beneath me.  The congregation joined in freely.  The songs changed from one to another as the music remained the same.  People began to dance in the spirit.  “Hallelujah” and “Praise The Lord” could be heard all over the house.  I was in the House of the Lord and I felt honored to be there. 

Eventually, the pastor arose to preach in a structured, well thought out sermon about obedience of the servant to the master and of the wife to the husband.  Suddenly he reached behind the lectern where an unseen serpent box lay and brought out a rattle snake about 3 feet long and held it, much like an offering, as he passed behind the altar continuing to preach.  “Amen” and “Hallelujah”, as well as “Preach it brother” and “Help him, Lord” could be heard rising intermittently throughout the congregation. 

The sermon ended and he called on several people to testify, even eventually calling on me.  I simply said, “Thank you for opening your door to a stranger”.  The service came to an end with a few songs of a less strident nature and the crowd left in the same manner in which they arrived with hand shakes, gentle words, and a few “We’ll see you in the mornings”. 

As I drove back toward my motel, the cars from the party next door mixed into those leaving the church, and the believers reentered the world.  In the motel room without water, eating a hot pickled sausage because the restaurants had no water either, I realized it was nearly midnight and I was not tired.  I knew I had come to the right place.

Sunday morning, September 12, 2004, we awoke at about 8am, found a small stream of cold water pouring from the faucet in the sink and none in the shower.  I realized that, in the overall scheme of life, this was a minor inconvenience.  Candice used bottled water to wash her hair.   I shaved in the sink and each of us used a wash cloth to perform the minimum ablutions before getting back in the van to go to church.  I stopped at the motel office and argued only briefly with the manager who refused to give any discount for the lack of water and said “I have a meeting in one hour” as I left the motel.

I drove eagerly back to the church and found only the pastor’s family there ahead of us.  I mentioned our motel inconvenience to the preacher and inquired if Candice’s blue jeans and dachshund house slippers were inappropriate for church.  He assured me that they were not and I began to help him and his sons set up a large tent for the dinner on the grounds. 

The next person to arrive was a well-known signs following preacher from Newport, Tennessee, with whom I had also been corresponding recently.  We introduced ourselves and finalized plans for Candice and me to follow him and his wife back to their home before attending services at their church in Newport that evening.  He also began to help with the tent and the crowd began to arrive.  As each family arrived, the labor became less, a series of tables beside the church grew steadily in the food they held, and the spirit of the previous evening began to multiply even before the service began.  Several congregants carried in serpent boxes of wood with hinged Plexiglas lids and arranged them side by side in front of the altar.

The service began in much the same way as the night before with a common prayer, and the music drove to what seemed to be even greater stridency.  Congregants began to dance in the spirit; a few began to speak in tongues, a young minister from Harlan, Kentucky, delivered a sermon which was fiery, exhortative, and voluble.  Once again, the pastor initiated the handling of serpents by bringing out the same rattlesnake of the night before.  But this time, several others also joined in the activity and several copperheads were also passed from hand to hand. 

The music and dancing vibrated the floors, seats, and walls of the little church.  Joy could be seen, heard, felt, and nearly touched. Adrenaline could be sensed all round the room. Several people went forward to be prayed for and have hands laid on them.  A young woman of about thirty began to dance in the spirit, went to the altar for anointing oil, and finally came to my wife Candice in her wheelchair.  Kneeling before Candice, the woman wept freely, gently removed the dachshund house slippers from each of her feet, and slowly, gently, thoroughly, lovingly caressed each foot and lower leg speaking softly worded prayers of supplication and healing.  I found myself crying profusely and the man who sat beside me said or did nothing allowing me to live within myself and the moment.  The woman gently replaced the dachshund house slippers on Candice’s  feet, and rose to pass her hands over my wife’s entire body before returning to the altar.  Then she opened a fire bottle, had it lit by the minister from Harlan and passed it along both hands and arms as she danced in front of the altar.  The minister finally took the bottle of fire from her, handled it for awhile himself, blew out the flame, and replaced it on the altar.  The young woman returned to her seat in front of me where she continued to sing and dance for several minutes.  Eventually my crying ceased, the service ended with another handling of the serpents, and the singing of songs such as “Sometimes I Feel Like Heaven’s Come Down”. 

As I walked outside to the dinner on the grounds, I suddenly realized that I know what Jim Birckhead, a tenured professor at Charles Sturt University in Australia who researched signs followers for more than thirty years, meant when he stated to me recently that he misses “being able to attend spirit filled services”.  The food was abundant, well cooked, and freely given.  Fellowship and discussion of the services and signs following beliefs continued until, at last, Candice and I said goodbye to our new friends, got into our van, and followed the Cocke County pastor across the state line to his home in Tennessee.

The winding, pristine drive across the mountains into Tennessee was the ideal setting to deescalate from the powerful, emotional experience of the service.  We crossed the French Broad River several times on US 25, passed through the little town of Hot Springs, encountered a street called Serpentine Way which seemed somehow appropriate, and finally found ourselves on the front porch of this second pastor. 

This particular man has spent much of his life attending and preaching in signs following churches and has collected a vast amount of articles, books, and photographs about the practices.  He carried several large binders of material to the porch where we shared and discussed it.  Eventually, he took me to the small, double locked outbuilding where he keeps his serpents.  We discussed serpent catching, the police intervention imposed on signs followers in his native Cocke County, and techniques for keeping serpents alive in a Tennessee  winter. 

He showed me his collection of serpents, serpent boxes, and a winter den which is dug below the frost line and lined with a large section of ceramic drain pipe.  Finally, he placed a large copperhead in a locked serpent box and we prepared to go to his church a few miles away.  As he made the final preparations to leave, he set the copperhead in the serpent box on the porch near Candice’ feet in the dachshund house slippers.  We walked back out in the yard and he showed me the rats he raises to feed his serpents while Candice watched the caged copperhead near her feet.  Before we left the house, the preacher went inside one last time to retrieve a handmade Appalachian doll which he made as a gift for Candice.  Today it sits on our mantle and has been christened in his honor.

The preacher, his wife, Candice, and I traveled the few miles to his little church in a setting nearly as idyllic as that in North Carolina.  We walked over the church grounds, looked at a second collection of memorabilia in the church and talked about signs following beliefs until 7pm, the scheduled time for services to begin.  No one else had arrived and I wondered if this minister would continue to talk to us or begin a service.  Earlier in the day, he had told me that attendance was not strong in his church and blamed it on the police attitude in Cocke County.  He stated that he continued to “show up and keep the doors open”.

But, at the stroke of 7pm, this solitary signs following minister, stepped behind the pulpit and said, “It’s time to start the service.”  The four of us sang, none well or melodiously, “Amazing Grace” and “I’ll Fly Away”, our four voices joined in a weak, discordant, sometimes faltering choir and then the preacher’s wife, with her back modestly turned toward the congregation, sang a few other songs which Candice and I did not know.  Her husband stood, prayed, and began to preach from the sixth chapter of Revelations and delivered a full sermon in which he also briefly handled the copperhead.  We sang another song, the preacher said a prayer and the four of us walked out into the warm Tennessee night to say goodbye.  As we drove toward the interstate, Candice said suddenly, “You know, I think that even if we hadn’t been here, he would still have preached.”.

As I wrote these notes, I cried once again just as freely as I had when the young woman in North Carolina placed the anointing oil on Candice’ feet.  I may well never fully understand everything to which I have been exposed in these past two days.  But I do know, without a doubt, that these people are sincere, deeply religious believers who support their beliefs with their lives on a daily basis and the world is a better place because they are here.  I also know that I am a better man for having come to know them.  I have now come to know family members of three people who all died of snakebites received in church services about five years apart.  The five children of one of pair of those people are orphans who are cared for by their surviving grandparents who continue to handle serpents to this day as do their sole surviving son  and his wife.  I felt honored that I was about to meet these people about whom I had read so much and yet, somehow, knew that I knew so little.  

In the seventeen years since this unusual weekend of ethnographic study, I came to the decision to not reveal the names, personal details, or residence information about any of the serpent handling believers I have met.  I now no longer spend time among them and never completed a book I had been working on about them primarily because I realized, over time, that they have suffered far too much at the hands of both the media and researchers because of their beliefs.  They are ordinary, hard working people just about like all their neighbors around them.  They raise families, hold down ordinary jobs, strive to achieve the same dreams most of the rest of us seek.  They simply choose to interpret several key verses of the Bible differently than the majority of their peers.  They also choose to literally place their lives on the line for their beliefs on most of the occasions when they attend church.  One of the serpent handling preachers who was present at that North Carolina church when I attended the meeting described in this paper has died since from a rattlesnake bite.  In the time I knew him, I came to respect him for his dedication to his beliefs and knew full well that in the event he suffered a serious serpent bite in church he would never agree to be transported to a hospital.  He fulfilled that expectation on my part by returning to his home the night he suffered his fatal bite and died with his family and friends praying with him and for him in his bedroom. 

I do not make any judgments about these people or their beliefs and I place no negative opinions on them.  They are loyal to their religion and view a fatal serpent bite as an opportunity to be rewarded in Heaven for their faith on earth.  I cannot say they are right.  I will not say they are wrong.  They are simply people who hold beliefs which are different from those held by most of us who are in the majority.  They are to be respected, not shunned or belittled.  They should be allowed to practice their unique religious beliefs under the protection of the United States Constitution just as everyone else is.  They are no better or no worse than you or I. 

Copyright 2021 by Roger D. Hicks