Dennis Covington

Prologue from Salvation on Sand Mountain

 

The peculiarity of Southern experience didn’t end when the boll weevil ate up the cotton crop.  We didn’t cease to be a separate country when Burger King came to Meridian.  We’re as peculiar a people now as we ever were, and the fact that our culture is under assault has forced us to become even more peculiar than we were before.  Snake handling, for instance, didn’t organize back in the hills somewhere.  It started when people came down from the hills to discover they were surrounded by a hostile and spiritually dead culture.  All along their border with the modern world—in places like Newport, Tennessee, and Sand Mountain, Alabama—they recoiled.  They threw up defenses.  When their own resources failed, they called down the Holy Ghost.  They put their hands through fire.  They drank poison.  They took up serpents.

They still do.  The South hasn’t disappeared.  If anything, it’s become more Southern in a last-ditch effort to save itself.  And the South that survives will last longer than the one that preceded it.  It’ll be harder and more durable than what came before.  Why?  It’s been through the fire.  And I’m not just talking about the civil rights movement, although certainly that’s a place we could start.  I’m talking about the long, slow-burning fire, the original civil war and the industrialization that it spawned.  I’m talking about the colonization of the South by northern entrepreneurs.  I’m talking about the migration to the cities, the cholera epidemics, the floods.  I’m talking about the wars that Southerners fought disproportionately in this century, the poverty they endured.  I’m talking about our fall from Grace.  I’m talking about the scorn and ridicule the nation has heaped on poor Southern whites, the only ethnic group in America not permitted to have a history.  I’m talking about the City, and I don’t mean Atlanta.  I mean Birmingham.

In the country, Southerners put their evil spirits in colored glass bottled hung on trees.  But let me tell you what we do with evil spirits in the City.  We start with coal that a bunch of our male ancestors died getting out of the ground.  We heat it in ovens till it gives off poisonous gases and turns into coke, something harder and blacker than it was to begin with.  Then we set that coke on fire.  We use it to fuel our furnaces.  These furnaces are immense things, bulb shaped and covered with rust.  You wouldn’t want one in your neighborhood.  We fill the furnace with limestone and iron ore and any evil spirits we find lying around.  The iron ore melts in the coke-driven fire.  Impurities attach to the limestone and float to the top.  What settles to the bottom is pure and incredibly hot.  At a precise moment, we open a hole in the bottom of the furnace, and molten iron cascades out, a ribbon of red so bright you can hardly look at it.  When I was a kid you could stand on the viaduct above the Sloss furnaces in downtown Birmingham and watch the river of molten iron racing along the ground, incandescent, inexorable, and so unpredictable that a spark from it flew up one night while my father’s friend, Ross Keener, was leaning over the rail of the viaduct, flew up and put out his eye.

That’s the kind of South I’m talking about.