The Serpent and the Spirit: Glenn Summerford's Story.
Hood, Ralph W., Jr.
The Serpent and the Spirit: Glenn Summerford's Story. By Thomas Burton. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. xv + 262 pp. $19.95 paper.
Thomas Burton's narration of Glenn Summerford's story is neither a history of serpent handling nor an analysis of the merits of the events that resulted in Glenn's conviction for the attempted murder of his wife by means of serpent bites. While it does have a chapter on Glenn's life, it is not a biography. Thomas Burton begins Glenn's story with a tale of two trials. One is Glenn's, covered so widely by the local and national media, and in the same courthouse another trial, less visible in the local and national media, that of a man accused of beating an eighteen-month-old boy to death. Why the intense fascination with one case and not the other?
For those sympathetic to religion but seeking to purify it of its primitive excesses, serpent handling can be seen as a form of religion that gives religion a bad name. Imagine a serpent handling preacher, minimally literate, one of thirteen children on his father's side and one of six on his mother's. He never met his father until he was fifteen. Raised by a stepfather who had been in the Special Forces, he learned to fight in both semi-legitimate and underground circuits common throughout the South and Midwest. Felt called by God, he becomes a preacher and is taught to read His Word and to follow His signs. Though he was married twice, it is his second wife that he is charged with attempting to kill, by one of the very practices that Mark 16:17-18 claims are signs to be followed. One sign, the handling of serpents, both empowers faithful believers and distorts the lives of those whose handling only mocks the sincerity of the faithful. For some, even the thought that the Bible sanctions the handling of serpents is at best bizarre. Thomas Burton does not decide these issues for us. The central message in Burton's clever use of narrative is to reconstruct and deconstruct what is the central fact of the text: a serpent handling preacher was convicted of attempted murder in a state whose three-strike rule made his two previous felony convictions the means to a sentence of ninety-nine years. Glenn Summerford is now serving out this sentence as prisoner AIS 098070 in Limestone, Alabama. Both Glenn and his second wife are believing serpent handlers, but Glenn is convicted of forcing his wife to be bit on two occasions, without the protecting anointing of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps a twisted "fleecing of the Lord" in which handlers believe they can seek a sign of God's will. For Glenn perhaps it is to see, in his second wife's narration of the event, if the Lord wills her to live.
The location of Limestone Prison (Alabama) is important. Part of the appeal that had reporters jammed into Glenn's trial while they neglected that of a man accused of murdering an eighteen-month-old child is that Glenn's story is a Faulkneresque tale. Glenn is a Southern, serpent-handling preacher from the mountains of Appalachia who attempted to kill his wife via a contortion of the very ritual central to his faith. If serpent handlers in general and Glenn in particular are larger than fiction, then perhaps their stories are largely fictionalized. Yet Burton gives us no guidelines on how to judge. This is the merit, not the weakness of his text. The historical facts are too simple and become most simply irrelevant to Burton's task. Glenn was convicted. However, this is not a history of the event, the trial, or the merits of the verdict.
While Burton never uses the term, Summerford's story is told as a postmodern exemplar of the use of narrative. Burton's book is a bricolage formed by a series of overlapping narratives that reveal from each individual involved what truths they know and what truths they wish to conceal. It is composed of narratives from friends and the family of Glenn; narratives from his second wife, Glenda Darlene Collins and her friends; narratives from church members and medical experts called to the scene and from those who treated Glenn; narratives from Glenn's first wife, Doris Holcomb; narratives from his loyal followers such as Bobbie Sue Lynn; and narratives from reporters who covered the trail and from lawyers involved in the case. From these conflicting narratives, Burton finalizes no master narrative. One simple fact remains: the verdict of guilt has been reached. Implicit for some readers is the appeal of a popular image of the rural South and of the religion of the ignorant; for others is the explicit struggle of those whose lives are fed by a literal reading of a gospel that for many is all the reading there is. This is history implied by several snapshots of a single event that remains vague even as each narrative adds its own precision. If each narrative is a "snapshot," each also reveals the presence of the absence of the "photographer." The absent other invades various narratives as an omnipresence. The event (is it the trial? the verdict? the sentence?) floats in and out of focus as the various narratives unfold and interpenetrate one another. Thomas Burton may have started out to tell the truth about Glenn Summerford, but he wisely stepped aside as a potential master narrator. If the jury played that role, to what end? If it is truth that is sought, how do we know when it is found, if ever? As Thomas Burton concludes, "but as I came to see that the truth revealed moved upon the face of darkness and the human condition far beyond the facts of these events" (259). In Thomas Burton's skillful use of narratives, what is read is not simply Glenn Summerford's story but also our story. Both are well beyond the facts of any events.
Ralph W. Hood Jr.
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
