Salvation on Sand Mountain (6 page)

The prosecutor had maintained during the proceedings that the trial was not about snake handling. But in ways that is all it had been about. Facing fear. Taking risks. Having faith.

“I knowed I was telling the truth,” Darlene said after the trial. “I figured they’d say I was lying, but it didn’t matter. I knowed I was telling the truth.”

But what I would most remember from the trial was something Darlene Summerford said in the first floor hallway before the verdict came down. We were leaning against the wall while she smoked a cigarette, our heads close together so no one would overhear. I had asked her what it was like to take up serpents. She knew it was a serious question. She blew smoke thoughtfully toward the ceiling, and even after all she’d been through, there was a note of wistfulness in her voice when she finally said, “It makes you feel different. It’s just knowing you got power over them snakes.”

Power over them snakes.
On the road back to Birmingham that night, I wondered exactly what she meant. I was in that fugue state familiar to most journalists, the exhausted aftermath of the legwork of an assignment, before the writing begins. The article about the trial, which I was composing in
my head even then, had a predetermined shape and a natural end. Glenn Summerford had been convicted. Justice had prevailed. But the moment Darlene Summerford told me what it felt like to take up serpents, I knew the real story wouldn’t be over until I’d seen and experienced what she was talking about for myself. Darlene’s journey with the handlers was behind her now. Mine had just begun.

“
I guess you heard about Brother Clyde,” said Cecil Esslinder, the redheaded guitar player with the perpetual grin. We were standing on the square in Scottsboro a few weeks after Glenn Summerford’s trial, and Cecil was squinting up at the noonday sun.

“All I know is what I read in the papers,” I said.

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

The papers had reported that on the Saturday night after Glenn’s conviction, a man named Clyde Crossfield had been bitten by a rattlesnake at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following. He’d been flown by helicopter to a hospital in Chattanooga and had survived the bite, but some members of the church thought he wouldn’t have been bitten in the
first place if Glenn Summerford had been there to pray over the snake before he picked it up.

“Brother Clyde was acting crazy,” Cecil said. “He just pulled that serpent out of the box and started jerkin‘ and swingin’ it around like he was mad at it.”

The rattlesnake bit Brother Clyde on one hand and hung on. When he managed to pry the snake off, it bit him on the other hand. Infuriated, he pulled the snake’s fangs out of its mouth, put it back in the box, and sat down once more among the congregation. At first, it looked like he might be all right, Cecil said. But about twenty minutes later, he fell over onto the floor. That’s when they sent for an ambulance.

“Brother Clyde wasn’t anointed to take up that serpent,” Cecil said. “You’d have to be crazy to go and pick up a snake like that.”

“He didn’t even pray over the box or nothing,” said Cecil’s wife, Carolyn, a short, pear-shaped woman who was leaning against their car while she tugged at a stubborn hangnail.

“Do you know Punkin Brown?” Cecil asked.

I shook my head.

“Brother Punkin is from Newport, Tennessee,” he said. “Now there’s a man who really gets anointed by the Holy Ghost. He’ll get so carried away, he’ll use a rattlesnake to
wipe the sweat off his brow.” Cecil paused and glanced around the square. “That Brother Clyde, though. He must have been a little mentally ill.”

 

 

It happens all the time in the South — preachers leaving a church in disgrace. Most of the scandals are predictable and banal: illicit sex or the misuse of church funds. Few preachers leave their churches under circumstances as peculiar as Glenn Summerford’s, and rarely have the dangers been so great for those left behind.

Cecil and Carolyn Esslinder had remained loyal to Glenn after his arrest and conviction. Other church members hadn’t. Some had sided with Darlene. And still others, who had stood by Glenn after his arrest, became disillusioned with his behavior and left the church even before the trial began. Among them were Sylvia and Johnny Ingram, who had been attending the church for about three years. Johnny, a sheet metal contractor who had made a rare leap to the middle class, had been the church treasurer and had paid for Glenn’s lawyer. “We loved the preacher,” said his wife, Sylvia. But when Johnny’s sister-in-law, Tammy Flippo, left her husband and children to visit Glenn while he was free on bond after his arrest, Johnny and Sylvia had a change of heart. “We didn’t choose to go to a church where the preacher did one thing and preached another,” Sylvia said.

The tensions between those who sided with Glenn and those who sided with Darlene exploded in bitter name-calling on the day of the hearing to determine who would get custody of the Summerfords’ teenage son, Marty. Although the hearing was closed to the public, the hall outside was packed with supporters of both Glenn and Darlene. No blows were exchanged, but occasionally someone from one side or the other would have to pass through a gauntlet of catcalls and icy stares. It was uncomfortable even for an outsider like me to cross the line and talk to both sides.

“They’re nothing but a bunch of liars, thieves, adulterers, and hypocrites,” Darlene said to me as she glowered at the church members who had remained loyal to Glenn. She accused them of having taken many of her personal belongings from the house on Barbee Lane, including her pet bird, a cockatiel. “They even stole my underwear,” she said.

A reluctant witness on Glenn’s behalf paced the opposite end of the corridor. He was waiting to be called into the hearing room. He said he had known Darlene’s family, the Collinses, for over twenty years. “It was a house full of sluts then, and that’s what they are today,” he whispered.

In an alcove off the hall, under the watchful eye of an armed sheriff’s deputy, Glenn Summerford himself sat brooding in his white prison garb. His eyes looked hooded and remote. “I didn’t even know she
had
a bird,” he told me. It
was Darlene and her supporters, he insisted, who had taken everything. “They brought a truck and stole a bunch of church equipment, several hundred dollars worth.”

Predictably, Glenn’s version of the events that had landed him in prison also differed from Darlene’s. He said that he didn’t even know she’d gotten bit by a snake on the night of October 5. “I loved her,” he said. “I didn’t try to kill her. I kept her from killing herself.”

In the weeks prior to that night, they had both backslid and taken to drink, he said. “She was bad to run around,” he added. “On September eighteenth I caught her with a man, a preacher from the church. When I told her on October fifth I wanted to get a divorce, she tried to kill herself.”

He said she took a box of Sominex and a bottle of extrastrength Tylenol. He made her drink warm water so she’d throw the pills up. She threatened to kill him. It was a similar story to the one the jury had heard in snatches during the trial, but not from Glenn’s own mouth. On the advice of counsel, he hadn’t testified in his own defense. “If there’s a new trial, I’ll testify,” he said.

About that time, he craned his neck to peer down the hallway, where those supporting him and those supporting Darlene had coalesced into the two opposing camps. He couldn’t have seen Darlene from there, but he shook his head sadly as though he had. “She’d completely backslid,” he said.
Then he leaned closer to me. “I looked at her at the trial. She looked spiritually dead. When Darlene was living right, she looked clean, nice. Afterwards, she just looked dead.”

We talked for a while longer, and then I asked him if he’d ever drunk strychnine in church. “I’ve drank it different times,” he said.

“What about Darlene?”

“When she was really living right, she drank it,” he said.

When she was really living right, she drank poison.
What a peculiar idea, the journalist in me thought. But who was I to judge?

 

 

I never intended to become a journalist. I wanted to be a forest ranger. In college, though, I took fiction writing courses instead of forestry, and after a stint in the army, I went to graduate school at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I had it in my head that I would write short stories and teach at a good liberal arts college somewhere in the Midwest.

After some detours, that’s exactly what happened. I wound up at The College of Wooster in Ohio. I was on my second marriage by then, to the sister of a childhood friend. Vicki, too, was from Birmingham and a writer, although she didn’t fully know it yet. She was employed in Ohio as a social worker and had just written her first short story. She hated the Ohio winters. I hated academic life. I decided I wanted to
turn thirty unemployed in an apartment back in Birmingham. Writing would be my living from now on. The idea had a romantic ring. It was a wonderful moment when we quit our jobs, thumbed our noses at common sense, and headed south again. We felt like we’d committed the ultimate rebellion: We’d taken our lives into our own hands.

Things worked out all right at first. I did turn thirty unemployed in an apartment in a Birmingham neighborhood called Southside. Vicki found work as a therapist in a substance abuse program at the university there. I sure wasn’t making a living as a writer, though, so I began teaching part-time at the university. We decided to have children. Vicki conceived quickly, but lost the baby and nearly died herself. We thought we’d never be able to have children after that. And like many childless couples our age, we sank into cynicism and carelessness. Or should I say, we drank ourselves there, something we’d been doing for a number of years. But both of us continued to write. Our stories occasionally appeared in the literary magazines, and I wrote a novel that was rejected at a couple of houses before it wound up in a box under my bed.

A kind of desperation set in. I felt like my writing wasn’t going anywhere, and my job as a college English teacher seemed minor and absurd. I wanted to have an adventure before I turned thirty-five, one in which the risks were real. I’d been in the army during Vietnam, but I hadn’t been sent
overseas. Maybe I felt like I hadn’t proven myself as a man. My education as a writer wasn’t complete. In 1983, I decided I wanted to go to a war, and the nearest one was in El Salvador. Journalism seemed the logical means. I borrowed a thousand dollars from my credit union, found a photographer, David Donaldson, who also wanted to go, and talked the editor of a Birmingham newspaper into giving us press credentials. I’d never written a word for a newspaper. I’d never been out of the United States. The only Spanish I knew was “I am a journalist. Please don’t shoot me.”

I became a journalist in El Salvador. And something else happened to me down there. It was more than learning a new trade and a new language. In El Salvador, I found the antidote for a conventional life: I got the shit scared out of me. I haven’t been the same since. On the plane down, I read an article about John Sullivan, a free-lance journalist who, on his first night in El Salvador, had been taken from his hotel by armed men, tortured, beheaded, and buried in a wall. At the airport, armed customs police confiscated my binoculars and Boy Scout canteen. Our taxi driver barely got us into the city before the curfew began. Outside our hotel, security forces with automatic weapons were stopping and searching cars at random. The phones at the hotel were tapped.

On my first trip into the countryside, I went with other journalists to a town that had been overrun by guerrillas.
Walking down the cobbled streets, I could hear the clatter of machine-gun fire and the steady
whump
of mortar rounds. The guerrillas we encountered demanded “war taxes,” which we paid. That night, in the hotel lounge, a man came up to our table, accused us of being American military officers, and asked us to accompany him outside. He said he had a gun in his back pocket, and if we didn’t come with him, he would kill us on the spot. Hotel security got to him and hustled him away. There was no gun in his back pocket, but he’d achieved the desired effect.

After that first trip, I quit drinking. So did Vicki. The second time I went to El Salvador, she went with me. While she stayed at the hotel, I rode into the countryside and interviewed the fighters on both sides in the civil war. Both suspected I was a spy. At night Vicki and I would lie awake listening to the sound of gunfire and exploding grenades. During dinner one night at the home of friends, we had to crawl under the table when shooting erupted on the street outside.

When I returned to El Salvador for the fourth time, Vicki was pregnant with our first daughter, Ashley. On that visit, in September of 1984, photographer Jim Neel and I were interviewing guerrillas along the road to a town called La Palma, in the northern province of Chalatenango. While we were talking to a guerrilla commander, a Salvadoran army patrol opened fire. The guerrillas scattered like quail. Jim and I
dove for a drainage ditch. The gunfire was unrelenting and close. The air above our heads was filled with bullets. And time very nearly stopped. Jim watched an insect move slowly along my shoulder, and I found myself staring at the water pouring out of a culvert and into the ditch. The water was frothy with raw sewage, but the light falling upon it mesmerized me. Like the other physical sensations — the sucking sound my boots made in the mud, the hum of insects, the sting of sweat — the light on the water was precious to me, as though it were something I knew I was about to lose.