Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington

Author:Dennis Covington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

Snake-handling Covington brothers! But there was more. Two years later, Mansel Covington and his sister, Anna Marie Covington Yost, were bitten by rattlesnakes during a service in Savannah, Tennessee. Both were under suspended sentences for snake handling at the time. Mansel stubbornly refused treatment until the county coroner physically dragged him to a doctor for antivenin injections and then to jail. Anna Marie also refused treatment, and the next morning she died.

There were seven children in this family of Covington snake handlers, three daughters and four sons. All were born in Alabama. The sons are dead now. But Anna Marie’s two sisters are still alive. Edna Covington, eighty, still lives in Savannah, Tennessee. I tracked her down and visited with her in the living room of the modest brick home to which she had retired after thirty-one years as a registered nurse, most spent at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.

Edna was compact and athletic looking, with shortcropped sandy hair and a clipped accent. She invited me to join her on the floor, where she had been thumbing through a genealogy book in preparation for my visit. I didn’t know whether Edna and I were related, but she looked like a member of our family. She had our sharp chin and deep-set eyes. Her Covingtons, she said, had settled on the north bank of the Tennessee River, at a place called Rogersville, Alabama. My great-grandfather and his family, on the other hand, had settled on the south bank of the Tennessee River, forty miles away, at Valhermosa Springs.

In 1932 Edna’s family followed the natural curve of the Tennessee River up to Savannah, Tennessee, a stone’s throw from Shiloh, where the seeds of the South’s defeat had been sown, and the twentieth century conceived. That’s where Edna’s brothers and one of her sisters took up serpents. Edna never handled any.

“My brothers got into snake handling at outdoor camp meetings,” she said. “They were just fooling around. They didn’t keep busy enough.”

Mansel Covington was the most outspoken of the brothers, she said. He was a big man in later life, but he had been born prematurely. “He was like a little rat,” she said, continuing to flip through the pages of her book. “We’d put him on pillows to handle him. He couldn’t talk till he was seven or eight.” She paused to scan a list of names that may or may not have been her Covingtons. “Mansel and William were both eunuchs,” she said matter-of-factly.

I asked what she meant.

Edna gave me a sharp look. “They had high voices and couldn’t grow beards.”

I wanted to hear more about this.

“They were born without testicles,” she enunciated clearly, as though I were dense, and then lay her book aside.

As a young man, she said, Mansel worked in the freezer department at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. He took hormone shots and began to shave, but he didn’t like his job in the city, so he came back to Savannah and started going to outdoor revivals, where he eventually took up serpents.

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