Snakes: Southern Myth Maker & Legend

By Tom Poland 

Last week’s column about a fatal snakebite stayed on my mind, so here I go writing about snakes again. Few animals arouse primal fear like snakes and yet we seldom see ’em. Few people encounter snakes, and even fewer cross paths with venomous snakes, like pit vipers. People in general fear snakes but down here snakes nonetheless enjoy special status. Snakes slither their way into literature, religion, myths, and legends. Writers Tim McLaurin and Harry Crews, both no longer in this world, have written mightily of snakes.

A Feast of Snakes by Crews, a powerful book, is about a rattlesnake roundup in Mystic, Georgia. Yes, Mystic is real. It’s an unincorporated community in Irwin County. The book is filled with bitter, mean losers who show you what life is like at the bottom, a place they never move up or away from. Of it one reviewer wrote, “A Feast of Snakes is probably the most skillfully crafted and entertaining novel ever written in which a fed-up person goes violently berserk. Crews serves up the reality of people’s savage and unrelenting cruelty toward animals and toward each other, stark truths about human despair, male-female face-offs at their sexiest and most ruthless, and humor so powerful you can’t help but laugh.”

Photographer Robert Clark & Corn Snake  (Photo by Tom Poland)

Crews, who never went to college, (neither did Hemingway) could write. Consider this passage. “White people were dangerous and snakes were dangerous and now the two were working together, each doing what the other told it to. She was sure she had seen a snake in a weeded ditch with the head of a white man. Right after she came out of the house on the way to Big Joe’s, which she had immediately forgotten, she saw it, long and black and diamond-patterned in the ditch with a white man’s head. It had blue eyes. The bluest eyes any white man ever had. She was sure she had seen it. She thought she had seen it. Maybe it was only a dream or a memory of another time. Whatever it was, she still saw it every time she closed her eyes, coiled there on the back of her eyelids, blue-eyed and dangerous.”

Ever since Eve and the apple in the Garden of Eden, snakes have been part of Christianity. Still are. We’ve heard of the Pentecostal preacher who got bit by a rattler during a religious ritual. “It’s the Lord’s will,” he said. Preachers and snakes: the New Georgia Encyclopedia sheds light on their history. “Snake handlers in Alabama and Georgia also trace their heritage to James Miller, a preacher who independently began the practice in 1912 in Sand Mountain, Alabama. Beginning in the 1940s, several southern states, including Georgia, passed laws prohibiting snake handling in religious services. The law in Georgia developed after a six-year-old girl was bitten during a service near Adel. In 1941 Georgia passed a law that made snake handling a felony punishable by twenty years in prison in the case of injury to another, or by the death penalty in the case of a fatality. The law was repealed in the 1960s. Today, the handling of poisonous snakes in Georgia is legal only by permit.”

Speaking of snake handlers, I’ve written before about Tim McLaurin, the “last great snake man.” Though he died in 2002, he speaks to us from the grave on his relationship with snakes.

“My sanity was questioned. But all I knew was that with a rattler or a copperhead in my hand, a path between people opened before me like the Red Sea rolling back.”

The great snake man was eight years old when he caught his first snake. He was walking home from the school bus stop when he saw a slender snake the color of wheat. “I stopped and stared. A voice as old as religion spoke to me. ‘Run, boy. Get your daddy. Get the hoe. Chop that thing into as many pieces as you can. Snakes can hypnotize you. They can sting you with their tongues. They are the incarnate of evil.’ ”

Tim did just the opposite. He grabbed the snake and put it in a mason jar. Two fine things happened. The next time the bookmobile came his way he checked out a book on snakes. That act began a lifelong love for reading. As he read, another great thing happened. He learned that not everything you are taught is true. He learned that snakes were incredible.

Incredibly big, too. In October 2011, I drove to the southwest corner of Georgia to Colquitt. A friend and I went to see a play that I had written for Swamp Gravy, Georgia’s Official Folk-Life Play. Driving back the rhythm of South Georgia asserted itself … cotton fields, pecan orchards … cotton fields, pecan orchards, and on and on this farmland cadence went. Then ahead in a long straight highway flanked by cotton fields lay a large oak limb. “Must have fallen off a truck,” I thought. As I drove closer the limb began a slow, serpentine motion. It was a monstrous eastern diamondback, the rattler South Georgia is famous for. We had to take the opposite lane to avoid it.

Ever heard this? “Hey, did you hear about old so and so? A snake bit him.” Well, if you manage to get bitten, don’t try that tourniquet and poison sucking stuff. Get to the nearest hospital fast and stay calm so the venom doesn’t travel far in your bloodstream. Most likely you’ll be all right and can live to tell quite a story.

About that bite. A survey of snakebite victims reveals that about 85 percent of the victims were messing with the snake, provoking it. Leave snakes alone. Don’t put your hands where you can’t see them. A lot of bites occur when people stick their hands into places they can’t see. Don’t sit on logs in the woods. Snakes generally slip away when they hear man coming. For sure, we are not prey. Too big to swallow.

My dad, I guess he just couldn’t help it. Dad always killed a snake if it crossed his path. Then he’d hang it in a tree and say it’d rain in three days. It’s dry as a bone these days but I’m not going to sacrifice a snake to the rain god. Listen to the last great snake man. Snakes are incredible.

The next time you see a snake, don’t run over it; don’t get the hoe and chop it up. Just leave it alone. We all have to survive in this world and live off it best we can. Why make it hard on another creature just because somebody taught you the only good snake is a dead snake. Live and let live.

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Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”