38 pages • 1 hour read
Dennis CovingtonSalvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Trial”
Covington’s interest in the Summerfords’ case stems from a piece he is writing for The New York Times. He goes into great detail about the trial of Glenn Summerford, choosing to focus on Darlene Summerford’s eyewitness testimony from the night he allegedly attempted to kill her. In the court house, Covington points out that the hill people from Scottsboro stand out in their appearance amongst the crowd for their rangy, impoverished manner. The prosecution argues that Glenn had been under the influence of alcohol and that he tried to kill Darlene in a fit of jealousy, while the defense argues that both had been drinking and Darlene had chosen to put her hand in the box of rattlesnakes. Both attorneys seem to want to distance themselves from the Summerfords, with Glenn’s own attorney calling them a “dysfunctional family” (42), despite the fact that Darlene has gotten a job and moved into her own home while maintaining a safe pregnancy at the time of the trial. Covington recognizes that his own fixation on the snake handlers began at the trial, with his desire to understand their lifestyle and motivations.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Sheep without a Shepherd”
About a week after Glenn’s conviction, a man is bitten during a service at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following, stirring up more negative attention for the already failing church. Since Glenn’s arrest, the church in Scottsboro has become divided, leading to much smaller numbers in the congregation. Many do not approve of the presence of Tammy Flippo, who is collecting the church money on Glenn’s behalf and has been accused of adultery with Glenn. Glenn wins a custody battle over his son, Marty, despite having begun serving his sentence in prison.
Keeping the doors of the church open in Scottsboro consistently falls on the shoulders of Carl and J.L., who is able to do so on his own through the spring. A letter appears for the congregation, supposedly in Glenn’s hand, expressing his wish that his mother and a woman named Bobbie Sue Thompson take over the treasury, but J.L. refuses and walks out on the church. When J.L. leaves, so does Carl, and attendance numbers drop considerably, to the point that the church becomes unsustainable. A new group takes over the space, calling itself a Holiness Church but without snakes, and a new snake-handling church opens on Sand Mountain.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
Chapter 2 begins with a description of three ways of perceiving Scottsboro, Alabama: one is as a town in the northeast of the state; two, as it was 60 years ago, when it gained its reputation for the trail of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine young black men convicted and later acquitted for sexually assaulting two young white women; and three, the Scottsboro of Glenn Summerford, the converted filling station, and the snake handlers who came down from the mountains after World War II.
Covington describes Sand Mountain as a plateau spanning 25 miles across and 75 miles long, one of the southernmost reaches of the Appalachians. He places a description of thriving crossroad towns with libraries and civic centers beside rural outposts still consisting of junkyards, burned-out trailers, tanning beds, late-night video stores, fields of marijuana, and illegal cock-fighting. This is a world at odds with itself, at once residual of the Bible Belt and the lawlessness of a historically tribal people, the Scotch-Irish, from whom the modern-day hill people are descended.
In Chapter 3, Covington uses a tangent to relate that he never intended to become a journalist himself, but rather a forest ranger. He reveals an alarming amount about his personal history, in which he and his second wife, Vicki, quit academia, move back to Birmingham, lose a baby, become alcoholics, and take several trips to El Salvador during the war. Covington makes these confessions with the purpose of expressing his own humanity in the face of condemnation, reminiscent of the hill people’s own disjointedness from mainstream American society that may see them as backwards and uneducated, with poor lifestyles and bad habits. In this way, without stating it outright, Covington attempts to draw connections between himself and these mountain-dwelling people.
