Two Unusual Trips To Arkansas

 

I have always really enjoyed Arkansas and truly wish I could have spent more time there over the years and enjoyed the beauty, hospitality, and unique nature of the state from border to border. While it is not remotely Appalachian, the cultures of the Ozarks and Appalachia do share some significant similarities. I hear people all the time making disparaging remarks about the state and I have never found legitimate reasons to do that.   I will admit that after the Clintons left Arkansas the politics has gone downhill terribly and it is, in many ways, a truly southern state, and that is not a good thing in many ways, especially in politics.  For me the only truly negative aspect of Arkansas, or at least Arkansas geography, is the long, horribly boring drive on the interstate from Memphis to Little Rock.  It is flat as a pancake nearly all the way and you actually want to cheer every time you see a tree standing out in a cotton field or cow pasture.  But the people are generally kind, cheerful, and interesting to talk to.  

But what I really want to write about here are the first trips both my wife Candice and I made to Arkansas and they came years apart because my first trip there happened almost ten years before I met Candice.  In the early 1980's, I was between jobs in the Thoroughbred horse business in Lexington, Kentucky, and I had a friend, Joe Durkin, who owned a small Thoroughbred farm outside Lexington and Joe was having a very bad year.  His father had recently died.  He and his wife were getting a divorce and he eventually lost primary custody of his young son.  Because of the divorce, he also had to declare bankruptcy and was in the process of losing the farm.  Between Joe and the one or two Thoroughbred boarding clients he had left, they owned a total of 7 Thoroughbred mares none of which had outstanding pedigrees.  They collectively made the decision to sell the mares in Little Rock at an auction of horses of all ages which was known as The Arkansas Thoroughbred Breeders Sale which now seems to be defunct which is not surprising.  The next Man O' War was not remotely likely to have ever been sold through that sale.  

Joe got me to agree to make the trip to Arkansas with him, drive a horse van he had borrowed from a well known, generally low end horse trainer named Smiley Adams who won a ton of claiming races but very few stakes races.  I was going to drive the van and do the work of caring for the horses and showing them to potential buyers at the sale.  It turned out the van was a six horse van and we had seven mares.  But the van also had a large tack box which extended over the cab of the truck and a narrow walkway between the cab of the truck and the wall behind the three front stalls which faced backward toward the center aisle of the van.  We managed to load the normal six mares in the normal six stalls and then got the seventh mare loaded into the walkway behind the cab with her rear end facing the door.  We headed to Little Rock with me driving the van and Joe driving behind me in a small pickup he owned with the necessary hay, straw, feed, and other items in the bed of the truck.  We didn't quite look like Okies but maybe a bit close.  

We got just outside Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and the engine blew in Smiley's van.  There we were sitting on the side of the interstate with seven mares in a six horse van which was inoperable and Joe was not a rich man.  But amazingly, it wasn't long before a thirteen horse van owned by Sallee Vans in Lexington came along headed straight to Little Rock.  At that time and still today, Sallee is one of the biggest, and the best, companies in the horse vanning business.  We were able to flag down the van and, to our great surprise, they had only six horses in a thirteen horse van.  The drivers agreed to take Joe's mares to Little Rock if we could figure out how to transfer them from the six horse van to the Sallee Van. 

Then, which was not surprising, a Kentucky State Trooper came along, turned on his blue lights and pulled in behind the two vans and the pickup truck.  We were beginning to look like a drive by parade and traffic was whizzing by at 80 and 90 miles an hour as we held a conference on the side of the interstate.  We all knew there was no safe way to move those mares from one van to the other and our six horse van was immobile.  But the state trooper had the answer which was also very lucky for us.  He said there was an abandoned Kentucky Weigh Station just a mile or so down the highway and we could pull the trucks into there and load the mares on the Sallee van.  So the trooper called for a heavy wrecker which showed up fairly quickly and we had them pick the front tires of the six horse van about four to six inches off the pavement and slowly drive it to the weigh  station.  The wrecker set the van down and the Sallee driver pulled his van up about six inches away from the door to our van.  We laid one of the van ramps across the space between the vans, put the side boards up, and walked the mares from van to van.  Getting the seventh mare into the Sallee van was the hardest part of the deal since she was loaded with her hindquarters toward the door.  The Sallee van driver pulled up beside the door to the walkway and we slid the wooden ramp as close to the mare's hind feet as we could get it and managed to back her from van to van.  

The part I hadn't seen coming was that the Sallee drivers wanted me to ride from Elizabethtown to Little Rock as a van attendant in the back of the van with the thirteen horses.  By that time, I had done a lot things in the Thoroughbred horse business, including stretches as farm foreman at the Stallion Station in Lexington and a horrible year as a farm manager for a lunatic in Upstate New York, but I had never been a van attendant except to occasionally ride in small van with a brood mare on her way to and from a breeding shed or with a yearling or two on their way to a sale, all of which I had never done except in the environs of the Lexington general area.  I had sometimes fantasized that I might like to be a full time van attendant with Sallee so I could travel the country from New York to California.  But I had no idea until then just how miserable it is to ride on four bales of hay and straw in the back of  a thirteen horse van headed into the deep south on a summer day.  It is almost 500 miles from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to Little Rock and one trip in the back of a horse van was enough for me to abandon all my fantasies about being a van attendant.  

I have no idea how much money Joe Durkin lost on that trip with the need to have a motor either rebuilt or a new one installed in Smiley Adams' van but Joe said Smiley actually took it all pretty well since it was his oldest backup van.  Smiley raced horses at many of the tracks across the country in those days and he had two or three newer vans which he relied on most of the time.  But Joe had to pay the repair bill and tow bill on the van, the haul bill on the seven mares from Elizabethtown to Little Rock, the sales commissions on his own mares, my labor, hotel bills and food bills while we were in Little Rock, and he was already facing bankruptcy, divorce, and losing his farm.  But after all his legal issues were settled, Joe went to work as a clerk in a liquor store in Versailles, Kentucky, and the last time I had any contact with him a few years later he was the manager of an S & S Tire Store in Versailles and had managed to survive.  After we got back to Lexington, he helped me get a job working on a small Thoroughbred farm in Versailles for one of the granddaughters of Huey Long which did not turn out be nearly as exciting as it might sound on paper.  

Now, let's talk about my wife Candice's first trip to Arkansas which was actually to Hot Springs. Shortly after Candice and I got married in 1992, I developed a friendship with an old, somewhat broken down Thoroughbred jockey named Quentin Schlafer.  Quentin was a wonderful fellow but he lived a life of bad decisions and could no longer ride races and most horse trainers were no longer willing to allow him to exercise their horses.  But he got the idea that some trainer he knew who trained horses at Oaklawn Race Track in Hot Springs would hire him if he could get there.   His mother, who was a wonderful, hard working Jewish woman about 80 said she would pay Candice and I to haul Quentin and his gear to Oaklawn.  It was the dead of winter in late December of 1993, I believe, when we started out with Quentin, an exercise saddle and bride, riding helmet, his clothing, and two tack sewing machines in the back of my Dodge Ram 50 pickup.  With three of us in the front seat, it got crowded and both Quentin and Candice didn't like it.  The truck had a manual transmission and every time I shifted gears I was banging somebody on the knees.  In spite of the weather, Candice and Quentin decided to take a sleeping bag and take turns staying in the back of the truck with all the gear under the topper which was still mighty cold.  I would stop every time whoever was riding in the back would bang on the front window of the topper and they would switch.  But we managed to arrive in Hot Springs with both of them still alive and without visible frostbite.  

The Finish Line At Oaklawn

We dropped Quentin off at the race track where he was able to find some trainer who would let him sleep in a tack room and we took the left over money his mother had paid us and checked into the historic Arlington Resort Hotel and Spa, the best, most beautiful place in Hot Springs.  It was between Christmas and New Years and the hotel was fully decorated with a large gingerbread house in the lobby and Christmas lights everywhere.  They were also having a New Year's Eve buffet in the dining room which was expensive but loaded with the best food the south can offer.  Hot Springs is also the home of Hot Springs National Park which used to be a resort for the ultra-rich in the early twentieth century.  We checked in, got reservations for the buffet, and scheduled massages at the hotel which used hot water pumped directly from the hot springs in old claw foot bath tubs with same sex attendants giving the massages while you were in the tub.  We had the spa/massage experience, at the buffet, visited the national park, ate lunch the next day in a little restaurant across the street which had great jambalaya, and headed back to Lexington.  But it is interesting to me to remember that the first trip each of us made to Arkansas was riding in the back end of a truck.  

The Arlington Hotel, Hot Springs

Defamation Of Native Appalachians By The Ignorant

 I just did a spontaneous Google search at about 6:25am on February 25, 2022, on the word "Appalachia" which I frequently do in order to see what might have popped up lately which I might not have encountered yet.  I found this link to a website called Facts.net  and the first question I spotted in that drop down list of questions which often come up with links from Google was this question: "Are Appalachians inbred?"  Naturally, my hackles rose quickly and I went to the site to investigate.  I found the article (if that is not too magnanimous a term to describe the drivel I found) which that link will take you to and the first thing that caught my eye was this: 

The Fugate family head, Martin Fugate, came from France to restart his life in America with a local bride. Though they were unrelated, the gene started from them. This is because both Elizabeth Smith and Martin Fugate carried the genes for it, making it impossible not to be passed down. It was their children that committed incest afterward.

It wasn’t much of a problem before. Having an inbred family was once common in the past. In the 1910s, Kentucky didn’t have easy access to transportation. Because of this, people often married their cousins instead. Nowadays, incest is a moral issue that many people debate about. However, the biggest issue regarding inbred families is not the morality of it all, but the hereditary problems that follow. (Facts.net available on February 25, 2022, at 6:25am) 

I suspect nearly every native Appalachian who reads this will tend to become just as instantaneously angry as I did.  This is something we have heard ever since the first missionary from the great industrial north came to Central and Southern Appalachia and began to tell us what all was wrong with us, our culture, our belief systems, and our lifestyles both as a culture and as individuals.  I happen to be a Hicks on both sides which I have written about on this blog post many times.  I have also often made the joke both verbally and in print that if I could ever trace my ancestry back a few more generations I would probably find "that grandpa came through the Cumberland Gap alone".  But I have also always made it clear that when my parents married about 1946 that no one in the area of Beaver Creek in Knott and Floyd counties could remember far enough back to say that they were related.  I will also say that it is not uncommon in the greater area of Central and Southern Appalachia for people with the same last name to marry and raise large families of perfectly normal children. There are numerous amazingly common last names in Appalachia but that does not mean that every person with one of those names is related to the next person they meet with the same last name.  Examples of these common last names are Hicks, Smith, Jones, Brown, White, Johnson, Jones, and Jackson just as these last names are common all over America.  But nobody ever accuses the people with those last names of being "inbred" if they live outside Appalachia. The blog post on the website above has just enough truth in it, as all blatant lies do, to appear truthful.  That is how liars have continued to exist today.   When the author of that blog post states that

The Fugate family head, Martin Fugate, came from France to restart his life in America with a local bride. Though they were unrelated, the gene started from them. This is because both Elizabeth Smith and Martin Fugate carried the genes for it, making it impossible not to be passed down. It was their children that committed incest afterward. (Fact.net, available on February 25, 2022, at 6:25am)

they are speaking both truth and half truths along with a major outright lie.  The presence of a recessive gene in two parents does not automatically mean that "it is impossible not to be passed down" .  In actual practice, inheritance of any particular gene or related genetic defect is somewhat of a crap shoot. 

In humans, genes vary in size from a few hundred DNA bases to more than 2 million bases. Every person has two copies of each gene, one inherited from each parent. Most genes are the same in all people, but a small number of genes (less than 1 percent of the total) are slightly different between people. Alleles are forms of the same gene with small differences in their sequence of DNA bases. These small differences contribute to each person’s unique physical features. (Medicine Plus , available on February 25, 2022, at 6:51am) 

It is a massive difference between 2 million DNA bases and the 20,000 to 25,000 actual genes each of us inherit and inheritance is a completely random process.  I realize that some fundamentalist religious believers might even totally deny that DNA and inheritance are facts, or they might simply say that what we inherit is a "God thing" and we have no control over it or even knowledge about it.  But, I am certain that no matter what any native Appalachian chooses to believe about DNA they do not, with incredibly rare exceptions, believe in the practice of incest as the article which prompted this entire blog post states as fact.  When I boil it down to its most basic content, I'm pissed off about this screed about the Fugate family and I suspect you are too.  It is just one more instance of the ignorance of someone who knows little or nothing about Appalachia believing they are qualified to disseminate asinine and ignorant lies about all native Appalachians.  The website does not have an easily accessible "Contact" button or an e-mail address appended to the post.  It is also not clearly identified as to author with only a name "Bernice" on the byline.  If you can figure out a way to contact this idiot and complain, I would appreciate it.  I will also and if I can come up with a direct contact means, I will append it to this blog post as soon as I find it.  

 

January 6th, Another Date Which Will Live In Infamy!

 

One year ago today, on January 6th 2021, the United States, American Democracy, and American Style Democracy worldwide witnessed and survived the most blatant and most dangerous attack to have been levied against them since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which prompted the famous quotation from President Franklin D. Roosevelt about "a date which will live in infamy".  That attack assaulted the United States Capitol during the process to certify the 2016 vote in the presidential election which brought President Joe Biden into office and which defeated, for the second time, the TRAITOR Donald Trump who had been living illegally in the White House based on the Russian theft of the US election in 2016.  The January 6th assault on the capitol was perpetrated at the behest of the TRAITOR Trump by somewhere between a thousand and several thousand of the most dangerous, most treasonous of his followers.  As of today, one year later, roughly 500 of those traitors and domestic terrorists have been arrested and the FBI and Department of Justice are still seeking to locate, arrest, prosecute and convict at least 250 more including the person who planted two potentially lethal bombs near the headquarters of both the Democratic and Republican parties in Washington.  

Despite a stupendous amount of highly competent work by numerous law enforcement agencies in America to deal with the insurrection and domestic terrorism of January 6th, this country, Democracy, and American Style Democracy  are still under attack today and much of that attack is being perpetrated by many  of those original January 6th domestic terrorists who have still not been successfully prosecuted.  If we are to save America, American Democracy, and American Style Democracy worldwide, we must assist law enforcement in locating, prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating these domestic terrorists.  The same Russian internet trolls, intelligence agents, and generators of dissent are still working just as diligently today to destroy America as they were on January 6th 2021.  They will not stop and, sadly, it appears likely that those in America who are susceptible to their propaganda will not stop believing it or fighting to destroy this country.  I have written in the past about the four kinds of people who support the TRAITOR Trump and those same four kinds of people are just as prevalent today as they were one year, and four years ago.  They are also just as gullible now as they were then.  In order to deliver a sound and resounding message to those people, TRAITOR Trump must be indicted, convicted, and sentenced to a life sentence in federal prison for his TREASON with Russia and his still ongoing attempts to destroy this country.  So long as he remains outside federal prison, this country is in danger.  As a nation, we must fight to undo the damage he and his supporters have perpetrated against this country over the last several years.  All of them must be held responsible for their actions, their insurrection, their TREASON.  They must be located!  They must be arrested!  They must be prosecuted!  They must be convicted!  They must be imprisoned!  And it is the responsibility of every decent American citizen to assist in the efforts to locate them, identify them, and hold them responsible for their crimes.  If you know who one of them was, report them to the FBI in Washington.  Stand up for your country and do the right thing.  Help to save America and American Democracy!  

Reflections On A Year Of Mixed Results

 I shot the photo above of then "Former VP Joe Biden" in Owingsville, Kentucky, in October of 2018, at a time when there was little hope for America. Thank God, he is now President Joe Biden and since January 20, 2021, hope has returned to America.  But despite all that hope, this has still been a very mixed year of results.  Yes, after 4 years of an ongoing attempt to destroy America, American Democracy, and many other of the most basic values enshrined in the US Constitution and laws, we have a competent, committed, honest, legally and duly elected President who his working on a daily basis to save this country from "enemies both foreign and domestic".  We no longer have a TRAITOR living in the White House and I really wish that was all that is necessary to be said about that.  But it is not!  The same TRAITOR and his Right Wing Radical supporters are still attempting to subvert and destroy everything the Founding Fathers created.  Covid 19, in all its mutations and manifestations, is still destroying the country and we are in the middle of what is likely to become the worst disease surge yet of this pandemic. Sadly, Covid 19 would not have been anywhere near as bad a disaster if the TREASNOUS occupant of the White House in 2020 had done anything productive in the first 3 months of 2020 to stop the pandemic and help the country avoid the 800,000 unnecessary deaths which have occurred since then.   A worldwide shipping crisis is preventing much of commerce from happening, or at least form flowing normally, and an artificial inflation is beginning to make life hard, as inflation always does, on the lives of the lower classes.  

But the thing you need to understand about that inflation is that it is artificial and primarily created by large corporations who are taking advantage of both the pandemic and the shipping crisis to artificially and unnecessarily raise prices on everything from corn flakes to cars.  There are two new words which have come into the lexicon of economics which you should learn, remember, and fight against every day: Shrinkflation and Skimpflation.  On October 26, 2021, the NPR's "Planet Money" described Skimpflation in this way: Skimpflation is "when, instead of simply raising prices, companies skimp on the goods and services they provide."  Products are being produced in smaller packages and being sold at the same prices, or greater, as were being charged for the formerly larger packages.  Quoting once again from the NPR article this is what is happening: "Domino's is taking longer to deliver pizzas. Airlines are putting customers who call them on hold for hours. Restaurants, bars and hotels are understaffed and stretched thin. The quality of service seems to be deteriorating everywhere."  If there is a way for a major American corporation to cheat, chisel, connive, and rob the American citizen, they are doing it and blaming it on both the pandemic and the president.  Don't buy their lies!  "Business Insider" described Shrinkflation on July 18, 2021, in this way: "Shrinkflation describes brands selling smaller amounts of product for the same price as before."  You should also avoid falling into the easy mental error of confusing the two terms.  Skimpflation is a process which can affect both goods and services, along with their prices and delivery, all across the spectrum of business.  It includes issues such as never having a human answer a phone call; slow delivery of products, goods, and services; putting one smaller bar of soap in a hotel room where two larger bars used to routinely be; changing and washing those hotel sheets only when the guest requests it; and putting less of a product in a package, any product, any package.  Shrinkflation is more directly tied to amounts of product which are delivered and is accomplished by a variety of means ranging from small packages, larger prices for the same amounts, and accomplishing such feats in deceptive ways which hide the losses from the purchaser.  If Shrinkflation and Skimpflation were the only ways every American was losing today, we would have a few things to be happy about.  

The shipping crisis is real and greatly affects millions of different products which are now being made in foreign countries by or for American corporations who refuse to build those products in America while being required to pay employees a living wage.  But the major players in that shipping crisis are not truly cooperating with each other to mutually improve the situation.  The marine shipping companies are raising their prices to astronomical levels and blaming it on ports and their managers along with trucking companies, truck drivers, and their unions for those drivers who have the good sense and good fortune to belong to a union.  The ports and their managers blame various aspects of the shipping industry including both marine shippers and trucking companies and their drivers.  The facts of the matter are that our shipping ports are all outdated, poorly maintained, and the Right Wing Radical Repugnican Party is refusing to support President Biden in his effort to pass a major infrastructure bill which would provide money to repair, improve, and expand those ports, rail heads, roads, bridges, airports, hospitals, colleges and universities, and other major aspects of our economy.  For at least thirty years, the situation has been growing steadily worse in terms of how these major hubs of transportation have been neglected, allowed to fall into disrepair, and never expanded when the market needed it.  The shining example of how roads and bridges have been neglected is the Brent Spence Bridge which crosses the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington in my native Kentucky.  That key American bridge which sits at a major juncture of several of the largest interstate highways has been in disrepair for many years and little beyond emergency maintenance has been provided for it.  #MoscowMitch McConnell, the senate Republican leader who happens to be elected from Kentucky has even refused to support funding to repair this key bridge which serves his own state.  

The United States Postal Service has also been under a direct attack by its putative head, Louis DeJoy, who was rewarded by being appointed as head of the USPS for having been a key bundler of campaign contributions to TRAITOR Trump and was given the mission of doing as much damage to the mail system as possible in what must be assumed to be an effort to lead congress to sell it off to some of their other co-conspirators.  Luckily, President Biden has been able to gain a majority of appointees to the USPS governing board and it appears highly likely that DeJoy will soon be fired.  

America, President Biden, and the proposed infrastructure package are all being held hostage by Senator Joe Manchin, who is nominally a member of the Democratic party but has consistently voted against efforts by the president and the Democratic party to repair the country.  Sadly, Manchin is the only Democrat who can be assured of being elected in West Virginia which was once proudly and professionally represented by Democrats who gave their all to the service of the country incluing Senator Robert Byrd and Congressman Ken Hechler.  Sadly, West Virginia and Kentucky politics are generally controlled and hamstrung by the same coal barons and the Republican party who, for  a hundred years have worked to destroy both states.  

But, I began this blog post with the words that this year hope has returned to America and that is true.  But we must, as Americans, do more than hope.  We must support President Biden in his efforts to save America and American Democracy from big business, the Republican party, and Russia which stole the 2016 election in order to install TRAITOR Trump in the White House.  We must register more Democratic voters and turn them out to vote straight Democratic in every upcoming election in the country.  We must work on a daily basis to ensure that the hope we now have is fully realized and America is saved from these multiple negative and destructive forces. 

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