The Serpent and the Spirit: Glenn Summerford’s Story (review)

In the introductory chapter of his latest book on snake-handling religion in Appalachia, The Serpent and the Spirit, Thomas Burton invokes poet Robert Browning’s murder mystery The Ring and the Book, in which the complicated truth of the case unfolds in “a series of monologues by both the principal participants and the general public” (p. 3). Burton sets out to explore a more recent, but no less enigmatic, crime by employing a similar technique. The Serpent and the Spirit is a polyphonic collection of personal narratives and remembrances, documents and court proceedings juxtaposed in an attempt to represent a more complete, if messier, story. By foregrounding these narratives and documents in all of their contradictions and convolutions, Burton highlights the vagaries of personal and public memory, the elusiveness of truth in a world of disputable facts, the shortcomings of a legal system that privileges one story above all others as true, and the power of religion as a force of both unity and division.

On March 3, 1992, Glenn Summerford was convicted in an Alabama courtroom of attempting to murder his wife, Darlene. It was the manner in which the alleged crime was carried out, not the crime itself, that attracted worldwide media attention and spawned sensational newspaper reports and award-winning books (most notably Salvation on Sand Mountain, a journalistic account by Dennis Covington). Glenn Summerford, a Holiness preacher, allegedly forced his wife at gunpoint to put her hand into a cage of venomous snakes, a collection he kept for the purposes of religious worship. Newspapers ran sensational headlines, and the media circus intensified as the story developed. Tales of Glenn Summerford’s physical abuse and alcoholic binges were rivaled by stories of Darlene Summerford’s infidelities, including relationships with other congregants and Glenn’s children by a previous marriage.

But for all the publicity, and in spite of a legal trial, the facts of the case still remain obscured, hidden within the dense thicket of seemingly endless and contradictory versions of the story. Now more than fifteen years after the trial, with Glenn Summerford in the second decade of a ninety-nine year prison sentence, Thomas Burton has created a fresh and sensitive document by presenting this polyphony of voices. Each of the voices proclaims a certain version of the truth, but none—including Burton’s, who appears only in the introductory and closing chapters—is held up as final or authoritative. As one interviewee puts it, “What happened during that day, only those two could tell you—and God himself” (p. 90).

Burton may not have been able to hear the story directly from God, but he has managed to compile and craft an impressive array of first-person narratives from those most intimately involved in the events leading up to and including the trial: the two attorneys in the case, witnesses from the trial, Glenn’s first wife and their children, friends and fellow worshippers, the court reporter, and the EMTs who received the emergency call. These contributors do not break down into neat camps; instead, they further complicate the story and any hopes for recovering a final account of the events. Most telling perhaps are the three chapters, evenly spread throughout the book, presenting a biographical triptych of Glenn Summerford, from his early days as journeyman boxer with a short temper, to his religious conversion and ministry, and to his present life as prisoner AIS 098070 in the Limestone Correctional Facility.

Complementing this multivocal text are forty-two black-and-white photographs, primarily snapshots of congregants holding snakes and of the buildings that served as churches, as well as informal portraits of those who contributed their stories. But a few of the photographs reveal a deeper story of how marginalized groups—be they snake-handling Christians or prison inmates—establish and negotiate their identities and how they are regarded by the rest of society. In one photograph, several...