Serpents of the Spirit : In Some Corners of Southern Appalachia, Religion Is a Matter of Faith, Forgiveness, Redemption and, of Course, Snakes

“It’s hot in here, ain’t it?” Preacher Carl Porter was standing in the pulpit at the Church of Jesus with Signs Following in Scottsboro, Alabama. His audience, a congregation of about a dozen men and women in the tiny church, knew he wasn’t talking about the temperature. But I thought he was.

Brother Carl had taken for his text the story of Pentecost, when the Holy Ghost swept over the apostles and they “began to speak with other tongues.” He opened his Bible and read from Acts, Chapter 2, then he looked up, over glasses that had a tendency to slip to the end of his nose. “This wasn’t just something that happened to the apostles,” he said. He ducked to one side of the pulpit and came up bobbing. “Jesus sent the Holy Ghost for us ,” he shouted. “I can feel it all over me right now. Woo!” He did a little hopping dance on one foot. “Woo! I just love it when it gets in my hair.”

The congregation was on its feet now, hands outstretched, amen-ing and praising God. Brother Carl took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

“Whew,” he said, “I’m glad I’m His, aren’t you?”

“Amen!” the congregation answered. “Thank God!”

“I wouldn’t have no other God. No, sir. I want the real thing. And let me tell you, this thing is real.”

He opened his Bible again, this time to Mark 16. “It was after they crucified Him,” he said, “and the women went to the grave. You know what He said, don’t you?”

“Amen!” They all knew.

“He said, ‘And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them . . .’ ”

Brother Carl lay his Bible on the pulpit in triumph and took a hard look at the wooden box, finely joined, that rested on the altar. He leaned over and tapped it. The dry rattling that arose seemed to satisfy him. He did a stutter step. He shuddered. He shook. He praised and shouted and prayed. When he finally opened the box and lifted out a canebrake rattlesnake, we were all singing “Prayer Bells From Heaven.”

The snake was fat and desultory, a yellowish gray. After holding it up, Brother Carl passed it to one of the faithful and took out a copperhead that had almost finished shedding its skin. In the overhead light, it flashed bronze and gold. He let the snake fall to his side and then lifted it up again. This time, he held it high above his head, draped over his forearm and stretched across the tips of his fingers. It was as though he were holding aloft a fine gold chain, some elegant piece of filigree. When the snake moved in and out of Brother Carl’s fingers, bits of shed skin fell to the floor. It appeared to be in the process of reinventing itself, forging a new self out of the old.

After a few minutes, the snake was put back into the box, and the service went on. One woman was anointed with oil; another spoke in tongues. But it was the image of the copperhead, slowly winding through Brother Carl’s hands, that I couldn’t shake. It was March, 1992, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a snake at church.

*

I grew up in East Lake, an urban residential neighborhood of Birmingham, Ala. My family attended a small Methodist church there. Occasionally we’d get preachers from what we thought of as the sticks. They usually seemed a little out of place in our neighborhood, where the families of grocers and plumbers and office workers tried to secure a hold on middle-class respectability. These preachers would attempt to liven up the services by shouting till they were hoarse. Sometimes they resorted to bolder tactics. In the middle of a sermon, for instance, Brother Jack Dillard, my favorite, would suddenly be so overcome by the Spirit, he would run down to the piano and start banging away on it. He could not, in fact, play the piano, but that didn’t seem to matter.

Of course, all of us teen-agers got saved in that church during Brother Dillard’s tenure, some of us multiple times. The record was held by a girl named Frances Fuller, who never passed up an opportunity to rush to the altar. She occasionally had a seizure halfway there, though, and someone would have to run to the kitchen to find a spoon to put in her mouth while the choir sang “All to Jesus I Surrender.”

Those days were filled with desperate innocence and with a spiritual light that I would later miss. If my experience in that church did nothing else for me, it accustomed me to strange outpourings of the Spirit and gave me a tender regard for voices crying in the wilderness. I believe it also put me in touch with a rough-cut and reckless side of myself, locked way back somewhere in my cell memory, a cultural legacy I knew nothing about at the time.

Growing up in East Lake, where people were trying so hard to escape their humble pasts, I had come of age not knowing much about my family history. As far as I was concerned, we went back only two generations, to my grandparents. It was only later that I discovered that the Covingtons had not always lived in Birmingham--that at some point, we, too, had come down from the mountains, and that those wild-eyed, perspiring preachers of my childhood were, in a way, kin to me. In retrospect, I believe that my religious education was pointing me all along toward an ultimate rendezvous with people who took up serpents.

*

Six months after my first visit, I was feeling comfortable among the handlers, and they had begun to call me Brother Dennis. They knew I had decided to write a book about them. They seemed to want to show me something. And I was ready to be shown.

At my regular church, urban Southern Baptist, I was beginning to get restless. I’d occasionally want to put my hands up in the air. I didn’t. But sometimes I’d tap my feet during the choir’s anthem or mumble an amen or two. I was pretty much obsessed with snake handling, though I had not, in fact, handled one myself.

Just before Labor Day, at an outdoor service, Brother Carl invited me to a “homecoming” in Jolo, W. Va. “It’s a 10-hour drive,” he said. “But you’ll miss some good services if you don’t go. They always have a lot of serpents in Jolo.”

Brother Carl had become something like my spiritual guide by then. It had never come up between us before, but I knew what was on the tip of his tongue: Maybe I’d take up a serpent in Jolo.

The Jolo church turned out to be a small frame building perched on the edge of a ravine in the southwest corner of West Virginia. When I arrived, with photographers Melissa Springer and Jim Neel, the Friday night service was in full swing. The Jolo preacher, Bob Elkins, a marionette of a man with thick glasses and the remains of a pompadour, was flailing his arms. “People today, they want to look around and see what the other fellow’s doing,” he preached. “Honey, I’ll tell you what, you get the other fellow in your eye, and you’ll both go to hell.” And he hopped back across the platform on one foot while the congregation amen’d.

Sermons at snake-handling churches are short but numerous. Nobody ever uses notes, preferring to let the Spirit move. After Brother Bob spoke, a visiting evangelist took the pulpit, and after that, Carl Porter preached. Nothing in his demeanor hinted of his peculiar power behind the pulpit. He looked like a barber, or someone’s favorite uncle. Watching him make his way tentatively to the front of the church, you would never have suspected that the Spirit of God regularly moved upon him or that he handled rattlesnakes.

“This thing is good,” he said, when he finally took his place at the microphone. By thing , he meant it all--the Bible, the serpent handling, the Holy Ghost. He held his Bible aloft. “With the word of God,” he said, “you can put that devil to flight.”

“Amen! Thank God!”

“It’ll make him put his tail between his legs and run like a scalded dog.” And he started hopping and convulsing like it was him, instead of the devil, being put to flight. “This thing is real,” he shouted.

“ Amen! Thank God! “

“There’s a hedge,” said Brother Carl, and he threw his arms out as though to describe its arc. “That hedge is Jesus.”

“And let me tell you, if we break that hedge, we’ll get serpent bit.” He was pointing straight into the congregation now, crouched and red-faced. “You can leave this world, and honey, it don’t take you long to do it.”

“ Amen! “ The West Virginians knew how long it’d take. The year before, one of their members, Ray Johnson, had died after being bitten by a rattlesnake during a service at the church.

Carl finished with a flourish. “We better know who our Savior is.”

“Oh, yes!” they said. “We do!”

I was sweating and expectant by then, lifted on the general surge. I could tell something was about to break loose. Sister Lydia Hollins, Jolo’s bird-like organist, was singing in a voice as raw and tortured as Janis Joplin’s: “ Everything’s gonna be all right!” Brother Timmy McCoy, who worked in produce at the Kroger’s in Richlands, Va., started dancing down the aisle. Timmy was dressed in a ruffled yellow shirt, a vest and pointy-toed shoes--the Liberace of snake handling, I thought.

Close on Timmy’s heels came an older couple, Ray McAllister and his wife, Gracie. Gray-haired, in a pink jersey and flower-print skirt, she seemed the least likely person in the world to pick up a rattlesnake, but in the midst of her dancing, she suddenly veered toward one of the serpent boxes on the altar. Unclasping its lid, she took out a 2 1/2-foot canebrake rattlesnake and held it up with both hands. Then she turned a slow circle with the snake outstretched, her face transfigured. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face reads exactly the opposite, as though someone, or something, was being violently taken away from her.

By the time Gracie passed the snake to her husband, Ray, a half dozen more of the faithful had begun lifting snakes from the other boxes. They were shouting and praying out loud. Some were speaking in tongues. I came to the front then, banging a tambourine against my leg. Brother Carl was there, smiling at me. He held a four-foot, black timber rattler, and I saw him stroke its chin.

To my left, a man named Dewey Chafin took up three rattlesnakes at the same time. One of his thumbs was still bandaged from a copperhead bite he’d received a few weeks before. A few feet away from Dewey, young Jeffrey Hagerman grasped a snake in either hand and hopped joyfully, while his wide-eyed children, one in pajamas, watched from a nearby pew. I saw Brother Charles McGlocklin hold six snakes in a row by their tails, smoothing them out as though he were straightening a rack of ties.

For 20 minutes, the action was wild and fast, and the music ground on like some wacko, amphetamine dirge. Sister Lydia’s voice was like ripping cloth: “ Everything’s gonna be all right. “ Sure it is, I thought. The Holy Ghost seemed to have descended like a hurricane, and we were all in danger of being swept away.

But right at that moment, when it seemed the frenzy could no longer be contained, the lunatic music stopped and everything seemed to go into slow motion. We’d reached the eye of the storm. The air seemed brighter than it had been before. Soothing. Clarifying. It was as though a thin, light oil had been poured down on us all.

I’d had this feeling before, under fire, as a journalist covering the war in El Salvador. It was an adrenaline rush. I felt as if I were in an element other than air. The people around me were illuminated. Their faces were filled with light. And it was as though nothing could happen to any of us that would harm us. We seemed invulnerable, forever alive.

Then the music intruded again, slower, more stately this time, and without any other signal, the handlers started returning the snakes to their boxes. Suddenly, I was seized by the desire to testify. I seemed to have no control over my legs or my mouth. I stalked out in front of the congregation and, in what sounded to me like an unnaturally loud and guttural voice, announced that the Holy Ghost had led me to West Virginia to document these events. I was astonished at myself afterward. Appalled is not too strong a word. At the moment, though, the words not only seemed right but inevitable.

“This thing is real,” I told Brother Carl after the service.

“That’s right,” Carl said, pounding me on the back and looking sideways into my face, inquisitively, the way a physician studies a patient’s eyes to see how the pupils are responding to light.

Driving to a motel that night, Jim and Melissa and I posed all kinds of questions to one another. Among us, we had been to scores of services by now, and we had seen similar displays of snake handling, but not this close up. Why didn’t more people get bitten? Jim thought there was a technique to it. Most of the time, the handlers held the serpents very lightly, right in the middle. The snakes seemed balanced, unable to strike. But tonight blew that theory. The handlers had just grabbed them any way they could. Maybe loud music disoriented the snakes? But snakes don’t have ears. Surely they felt vibrations? But what about the times when there wasn’t any music, when everything was still? Something extraordinary had happened, we decided, a sort of group hypnosis, group hysteria.

“Of course”--and here I paused, not because I knew how Jim and Melissa would take this, but because I, too, was surprised by my thinking it--”it could also have had something to do with the presence of the Holy Ghost.”

Jim looked at me. “That’s what I thought you’d say,” he said.

*

I can tell you the exact moment I decided to take a closer look at my family history. It was New Year’s Eve, 1992, at Brother Carl’s home church in Kingston, Ga. My wife, Vicki, had been to a snake-handling church before, but this was the first time we brought our daughters, Ashley, then 7, and Laura, then 5. The moment occurred when the music got cranked up and the snakes started coming out of the boxes. Laura took one look at Brother Junior McCormick, dancing in front of the pulpit with two rattlesnakes draped across his shoulders, and decided to spend some time outside in our van. Ashley, though, was transfixed. “Cool,” she exclaimed over the uproar. She was clapping her hands and stomping her feet. The snakes didn’t faze her one bit.

Ashley has the Covington long arms and the Covington chin. The sight of her, so clearly at home in the chaos of a snake-handling service, made me think of this thing called cell memory. Could we actually be kin to these people?

The next day, when we got back to Birmingham, I dug out a green “family history” binder my father had left me when he died. The details were slim, especially when it came to the Covingtons, my father’s paternal forebears. But on his mother’s side, there was more information. I discovered that my great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Lea, had been a Confederate soldier, and that after the war, he had become a Methodist circuit rider in northeastern Alabama, on the cusp of what would soon become snake-handling country.

It was like closing in on the resolution of a mystery. I had no reason to believe that my great-great grandfather took up serpents, but my reading in the history of American religion suggested that he might have been a precursor to those who eventually did. In 1870, about the time Benjamin Franklin Lea would have begun his ministry, Methodism was in the sway of the Holiness movement, a belief that that after salvation, or “new birth,” there occurred a second act of grace, the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” For John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, the result of this second baptism, whether immediate or gradual, was supposed to be moral purification. But over time, for many believers anyway, the phrase also came to mean an imbuing of power from on high, spiritual “gifts”: healing, prophecy, casting out devils, speaking in tongues. Out of Holiness came Pentecostalism, and in 1910, out of the Holiness-Pentecostal belief in spiritual gifts, came those who took up serpents. Whether we were blood-related or not, the handlers and the Covingtons at least shared the same spiritual ancestry.

At about the time I came to this realization, a librarian in the Southern Collection of the Birmingham Public Library handed me a clip file containing, among other pieces, an Associated Press article from 1953, datelined Florence, Ala.: “Snake Handling Brothers Fined $20 and Costs.” Three brothers--Allen, Mansel and George Covington--had been arrested, jailed and fined for bringing a rattlesnake into a rural church. “We felt we were obeying the spirit of the Lord,” George Covington testified.

And there was more. Two years later, Mansel Covington and his sister, Anna Marie, were bitten by rattlesnakes during a service in Savannah, Tenn. Both were under a suspended sentence for snake handling at the time. Mansel was forced into treatment; his sister died.

As it turned out, there had been seven children in this family of Covington snake handlers. I tracked down one of them, Edna, 80, who still lived in Savannah. “My brothers got into snake handling at outdoor camp meetings,” she said. “They were just fooling around. They didn’t keep busy enough.”

When Anna Marie was bitten and died at the end of a two-week revival in 1956, Edna, a nurse, was working the night shift at the VA hospital in Louisville. She didn’t see any reason to rush back to Savannah, since Anna Marie was already dead. But George insisted she leave work and drive all night to get back. George said he and his brothers were going to raise Anna Marie from the dead through prayer, and he wanted Edna to be there to check her sister’s vital signs.

“There was a big full moon that night,” Edna said.

I left Edna’s house with that image in my head: a woman driving all night under a full moon so that she could check her dead sister’s vital signs while their brothers attempted to pray her back to life.

When I told Carl Porter that I might have run across some handlers in my family tree, he seemed amused but not surprised. Brother Carl came from a family of Alabama sharecroppers. He knew even less about his ancestors than I knew about mine. Unlike me, though, Carl seemed to have an intuitive grasp of the sort of people they were, and he had accepted it as the natural order of things. I was a city boy still trying to make sense of the notes in my father’s green binder. My journey with the snake handlers had become not so much a linear progression through time as a falling through levels of complacency toward some hard understanding of who I was. I did not know where or when I would arrive at my destination. All I knew for certain was that snakes would be waiting for me there.

*

When the time came, I didn’t stop to think about it. I just gave in. I stepped forward and took the rattlesnake Brother Carl held toward me with both hands.

Just a few minutes before, I had watched him lay the snake down--a yellow-phase timber rattlesnake--and tread barefoot on it from tail to head, as though he were walking on a tightrope. “Who knows what this snake is thinking?” Carl had shouted. “God knows. God understands the mind of this snake.”

It was more than a year after I first heard Carl Porter preach in Scottsboro. In that time, he had taught me about serpent handling from the inside out. He’d encouraged me to read the New Testament straight through, something I’d never done before. I had even considered asking him to baptize me in the Tennessee River. On this day, when he walked into the Old Rock Holiness Church in Macedonia, Ala., he was carrying the biggest rattlesnake I’d ever seen. “He’s never been in church before,” Carl told me. Then he tapped the screen until the snake started rattling: “Got your name on him,” he said, and smiled.

It’s not true that you become used to the noise and confusion of a snake-handling Holiness service. On the contrary, you become enmeshed in it. It is theater at its most intricate--improvisational, spiritual jazz. The more you experience it, the more attentive you are to the shifts in the surface and the dark shoals underneath. For every outward sign, there is a spiritual equivalent. The more faith you expend, the more power is released. It’s an inexhaustible, eternally renewable energy source. It’s the only power some of these people have.

The longer you witness it, unless you just don’t get into the spontaneous and unexpected, the more you become a part of it. I did, and that night the handlers could tell. They knew before I did what was going to happen. They saw me angling in. They made room for me in front of the deacons’ bench.

Carl’s eyes were saying, “You.” But he was embarrassed. The snake was all he had, his eyes also seemed to say. But as low as it was, as repulsive, if I took it, I’d be possessing the sacred. Nothing was required of me except obedience. Nothing had to be given up except my own will. This was the moment.

I turned to face the congregation and lifted the rattlesnake up toward the light. It was moving like it wanted to get even higher, to climb out of that church and into the air. And it was exactly as the handlers had told me. I felt no fear. The snake seemed to be an extension of myself. And suddenly, there seemed to be nothing in the room but me and the snake. Everything else had disappeared. Carl, the congregation, all gone, all faded to white. I could not hear the ear-splitting music. The air was silent and still and filled with a strong, even light. And I realized that I, too, was fading into the white. I was losing myself by degrees. The snake would be the last to go, and all I would see was the way its scales shimmered one last time in the light, and the way its head moved from side to side, searching for a way out.

I knew then why the handlers took up serpents. There is power in the act of disappearing; there is victory in the loss of self. It must be close to our conception of paradise, what it’s like before you’re born or after you die.

I came back in stages, first with the recognition that the shouting I had begun to hear was coming from my own mouth. Then I realized I was holding a rattlesnake, and the church rushed back with all its clamor, heat and smell. I remembered Carl and turned toward where I thought he might be. I lowered the snake to waist level. It was an enormous animal, heavy and firm. The scales on its side were as rough as calluses. I could feel its muscles rippling beneath the skin. I was aware it was not a part of me now, and that I couldn’t predict what it might do. I extended it toward Carl. He took it from me, stepped to the side and handed it off again.

I took another snake in my hand. It was much smaller than the first, but angrier, and fear had started to come back to me. I couldn’t seem to steer it away from my belt line. I studied it, as if seeing it for the first time, and then handed it back to one of the faithful. It curled, rattling furiously, as I walked out the side door of the church and onto the steps. Bobbie Sue Thompson, the woman who had first invited me to a snake-handling service almost a year earlier, was clutching her throat and leaning against the green shingles of the church.

“Jesus!” she said. “Jesus! Jesus!”

I thought at first that she was in terrible pain, but then I realized she wasn’t. “Yes. I know,” I said. “Jesus!”

*

Endings are the most important part of stories. They grow inevitably from the stories themselves. The ending of a story only seems inevitable, though, after it’s over and you’re looking back, as I am now.

The ending of this story came in December, 1993, when Vicki, Melissa and I attended a wedding and then a regular evening worship service at Carl Porter’s home church in Kingston, Ga. For almost two years, I had been drawn by chance and inclination into a close relationship with the handlers. I had come to admire them and to respect their faith. I had taken up serpents; I had even begun to envision myself preaching out of my car with a Bible, a trunkload of serpents and a megaphone. I had wondered what it would be like to hand rattlesnakes to my wife and daughters. I had imagined getting bitten and surviving. I had imagined getting bitten and not surviving. I thought about what my last words would be. It sounds funny now. It wasn’t always funny at the time.

That night in Kingston, I knew I wasn’t going to handle. I didn’t feel the craving. Instead, as I thumbed through my Bible, I felt something similar, but oddly reversed, as though the urge was not to step off the ledge, but to step up onto it. It was a calm and secure impression of well-being that kept building, but I didn’t know toward what, until Brother Carl stopped in the aisle, pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, and said, “Are you gonna preach tonight?”

I don’t know if I surprised Carl, but I definitely surprised myself: I shrugged and told him yes.

It’s difficult for me to recall now the sequence of events or the words. I remember that the service began in customary fashion and that the snakes came out early. When Brother Carl began to preach, he walked down into the congregation, citing Scripture from memory as he descended. “You can’t do both!” he shouted. “You can’t walk in the flesh and walk in the Spirit.”

Melissa was following him unobtrusively with her camera. She wasn’t using a flash, and she was dressed in a style befitting a Holiness woman--an ankle-length black dress, uncut and unadorned hair, a blouse buttoned modestly at the neck. But there was one thing about herself that she could not disguise. Her husband and children weren’t by her side. She was 150 miles from home on a Saturday night, and she was at work.

At one point, Carl looked up and came face to face with Melissa. He suddenly seemed not to know her. His customary bashfulness gave way to a humor I can only describe as sexual discomfort. It was as though her camera had caught him naked. His cheeks reddened. His jaw set. He pointed his finger in Melissa’s face, and the sermon that suddenly poured out of his mouth was a diatribe about the necessity for women to stay in their place.

“It’s not godly for a woman to do a man’s job.” he said. “To wear a man’s pants. Or cut her hair like a man does his.”

Melissa kept on working, bobbing to get the best shots.

“A woman’s got to stay in her place!” Carl shouted. “God made her for a helpmate to man. It wasn’t intended for her to have a life of her own.” I could feel Vicki stiffen beside me. I was embarrassed, for Melissa’s sake, for Vicki’s, but mainly for my own. Carl had always been so gentle and encouraging. He knew better than this.

I thought the sermon would never end. But finally, Carl seemed to come to his senses. I wondered if he would remember everything that he had said. He stepped back toward the pulpit, then turned and came up short, as if he had just remembered an unpleasantness. “Brother Dennis,” he said into the microphone. “Why don’t you come up here and preach?”

I took a deep breath and glanced at Vicki. When I stepped up onto the platform, I looked once at the congregation. They were hushed and attentive, even the teen-age boys with slicked-back hair and unbuttoned shirts. I took the microphone from its stand and slung the cord out so that I’d have slack to move around.

I went to each of the brethren on the deacon’s bench and shook their hands, down the line, until I came face to face with Carl. He was sitting in a folding metal chair with his hands on his knees, a man who had been generous and fatherly to me and recommended me to his congregation. I couldn’t help but smile at him. What was about to happen had been ordained. I think we both knew it. I think we were both savoring that fact.

“I love to testify,” I said into the microphone, “but I’ve never preached before. I just want you to know that I submit myself to your authority, Brother Carl. And if I step out of the Word, I want you to tell me.”

The choice of text was simple--the chapter the handlers believed so deeply, they risked their lives to confirm it. “Let’s look at Mark 16,” I said.

“Amen!” Carl replied. He was pulling for me.

“It was after they had crucified Jesus,” I said, “and some of the women who had stayed with him through it all came down to the tomb to anoint his body with spices. Am I in the Word?” I looked over to Brother Carl.

“You’re in the Word,” Carl said.

“Amen!” the congregation answered.

“But the stone had been rolled away from the tomb,” I said, “and a man in white, an angel, was sitting there, and the angel said to the women: ‘He’s not here. He’s risen.’ Am I in the Word?”

“Amen!” Carl said. “You’re in the Word.”

“I’m in the Word,” I repeated, and I moved along the platform like I’d seen Carl do so many times. “And who did Jesus appear to first after his Resurrection?”

“The eleven,” Carl said.

I turned back to him. “No. He didn’t appear first to the eleven.” And I walked slowly across the platform again. “He appeared first to Mary Magdalene,” I said, and I drove each word forward with my finger. “A woman out of whom he had cast seven devils.”

There was no amen.

I whirled back around and faced the congregation again. “The angel had told her to tell the disciples that Jesus was risen, but she was afraid, and she didn’t do it. So Jesus himself appeared to her, and when she told the disciples that he had risen, none of the men believed her.”

I knew I was in the Word now. It was close to the feeling I’d had when I’d handled. “Mary Magdalene was the first person to spread the news of the risen Christ,” I shouted. “She was the first evangelist, and men didn’t even believe her. So when we start talking about a woman’s place, we better add that a woman’s place is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Him there is no male or female, no Greek or Jew.” And I spun on Carl. “Am I in the Word?”

“No,” Carl said. “You’re not in the Word.”

“Are you telling me I’m out of the Word?”

“Yes, you’re out of the Word.” He smiled. It was a smile of enormous satisfaction and relief. At last we had reached the end of our story, his eyes seemed to say.

I looked back at the congregation. No help there. I’d never heard the place so quiet.

“Well, if I’m out of the Word,” I said, “I’d better stop preaching.” My heart was beating fast, and I could feel the blood in my cheeks. I put the microphone back in its stand and walked slowly off the platform and down the aisle.

*

Before we left that night, Carl smiled and bobbed at us, as he usually did. “We appreciate you and love you, Brother Dennis. You and Sister Vicki and Melissa,” he said.

It was as though nothing had happened, but, of course, everything had. I knew it could never be the same with the handlers. I had found my people. But I had also discovered that I couldn’t be one of them after all. Knowing where you come from is one thing, but it’s suicide to stay there. A writing teacher of mine once told me to live in his house as long as I could. He didn’t mean his actual house but the house of fiction he’d made. The only thing he asked was that when I left, I’d leave for good, that I’d burn the house down. That was exceptionally good advice, and I believe Carl Porter gave me that same advice that night in Kingston. I think he knew what he was doing in releasing me back to the wider world.

It’s sad, in a way. I wish I could assure Brother Carl and all the others that we will still be friends. But I won’t be taking up serpents anymore. I refuse to be a witness to suicide, particularly my own. I have two daughters to raise and a vocation in the world.

Driving home that night, on the highway from Kingston to Birmingham, we crossed the mountains twice: once as we entered Alabama and then again 50 miles north of Birmingham. Those last miles into the city were lonely and dark, but gradually the suburbs and towns became increasingly familiar, until I realized that the elevated highway would take us right above East Lake, the old neighborhood where I had grown up not knowing who my people were. The traffic began to pick up. First, there were the tractor-trailer rigs, and then the vans with children asleep in the back. Soon enough, we were being led back into the city, toward home, by a river of light.