¹ Shelby Lee Adams, Appalachian Portraits (1993); Appalachian Legacy (1998); and Appalachian Lives (2003). Adams has photographed poor Kentucky families over the last three decades and been accused of exploiting his subjects for a middle-class audience by perpetuating stereotypes of the rural southern poor in a theatrical sideshow. See, for example, the debate at the heart of Jennifer Baichwal's documentary The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams's Appalachia (2002). Glenn Summerford was convicted of attempting to murder his wife using snakes and sentenced to 99 years in 1992.

² Preachers have reputedly been bitten hundreds of times but survive to continue handling cottonmouths and rattlesnakes, disdaining medical attention in the belief that faith is the only cure. Although the drinking of poison is rare, occasionally a lethal dose of strychnine – a “salvation cocktail” – is imbibed without fatal consequences. These are experiences that defy an outsider's logic and a media phenomenon that has animated the National Enquirer and The X Files as often as the New York Times.

³ Benjamin Dunlap, “The Worm and the Snake,” in Carole E. Hill and Patricia D. Beaver, eds., Cultural Diversity in the US South: Anthropological Contributions to a Region in Transition (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 190–200, 194.

⁴ For a description of Hensley see Thomas Burton, Serpent-Handling Believers (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 41–60. Nahai's Sam listens to a Pentecostal Holiness preacher citing Mark 16:17–18 and is inspired to scale a mountain in search of God's sign. The sign he follows is to pick up a snake and to descend with it into the church, declaring, “This is the spirit of the devil, and it has no power over me.” The congregation freezes. Sunday's Silence (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 68. Subsequent references will be included in the text in parentheses.

⁵ The image of the mirror has been deployed by historians, theologians, and anthropologists in their discussions of the Holiness Church. For example, Mary Lee Daugherty asserts, “The handling of serpents as a supreme act of faith reflects as in a mirror the danger and harshness of the environment in which most of these people have lived.” See M. L. Daugherty, “Serpent-Handling as Sacrament,” Theology Today 33, 3 (Oct. 1976), 232–243.

⁶ Edward Francisco, Robert Vaughn, and Linda Francisco, eds., The South in Perspective: An Anthology of Southern Literature (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001), 1057. See William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell, eds., Blacks in Appalachia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985) for an early study that tried to disprove this assumption.

⁷ Nahem Yousaf and Sharon Monteith, “Making an Impression: New Immigrants in Southern Fiction,” Forum for Modern Languages, special issue on “Rethinking the US South,” 40, 2 (2004), 214–24.

⁸ Nahai Alumni Interview at http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/mpw/interviewNahai.

⁹ H. L. Mencken, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” New York Evening Mail, 13 Nov. 1917, in H. L Mencken, Prejudices: A Selection made by James T. Farrell (New York: Vintage, 1958), 69–82.

¹⁰ Arnold Toynbee quoted in Ada Haynes, Poverty in Central Appalachia (New York: Garland, 1997), 48–49. Nahai is very aware of the seductiveness of stereotypes of the region. While still conducting early research for the novel, she fell into exaggerated terms in interview: “These people put their faces in blow torches and pile snakes on themselves in these religious meetings they're having … and this is a growing movement.” The published novel is – fortunately – much quieter than this early reference implies. Nahai Alumni Interview.

¹¹ In her review of Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, “Rushdie's ‘Clown’ No Laughing Matter,” she argues that the novel “reads more like a political allegory than great literature; it preaches rather than allows the reader to arrive at her own truth.” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, 28 April 2006, at http://www.jewishjournal.com/nahai.

¹² Jameson is at his most reductive when discussing “Third World” literature, assuming a national allegory always functions as the determining factor in “under-developed literature” and that “it is precisely this very different ratio of the political to the personal which makes such texts alien to us at first approach … ” (my italics). See F. Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” Social Text (1986), 65–88, 69. Aijaz Ahmad provides an incisive critique of the three-worlds theory in Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 95–122.

¹³ Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 9–10. Disappointingly, in such an insightful work, in this formulation “other existing cultures” does not preclude a discussion of Gone with the Wind though it presumably would have precluded Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, in the assumption that “black” and “white” cultures are not porous, an idea that also persists in the Three-Worlds Theory, See, for example, 92–93.

¹⁴ Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55.

¹⁵ David L. Kimbrough emphasizes socio-economic factors in that snake handling coincided with the rise of capitalism in the region and coalmining's devastation of the land and folkways so that capitalism is the Devil and the snake is a “symbolic intermediary in the contest with evil capitalists.” D. L. Kimbrough, Take Up Serpents (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 95.

¹⁶ Lee Smith, Saving Grace (New York: Ballantine, 1995), 22.

¹⁷ Even writers whose connection to the Holiness Church is familial or personal retain something of the sensational in their work. Novelist Dennis Covington's story began when as a freelance reporter covering the trial of a serpent-handling preacher for the New York Times he began to trace his own Alabama ancestors' “dangerous and unloved” white southern past back to snake-handling Pentecostalism in the memoir Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (New York: Penguin, 1996).

¹⁸ Smith recalls witnessing serpent-handling and most especially a woman about the same age from the same part of Appalachia who even looks like Smith (“I could have been her”). The woman answers her question as to why she engages in something so dangerous with, “When you've had the serpent in your arms, the whole world kind of takes on an edge for you.” Smith is “hooked” and “I knew I had to write a novel in order to find out” how she could say such a thing. See Susan Ketchin's interview with Smith for Random House at http://www.bookclubs.ca/catlogue.

¹⁹ When first describing the novel she would go on to write, and in which she would address such stereotypes, Nahai said, “These people put their faces in blow torches and pile snakes on themselves in these religious meetings they're having, and they believe in faith healing. And this is a growing movement. Instead of shrinking, as you would think it would be in the twentieth century, this movement is growing in popularity. These people refuse medical treatment thinking their faith is going to heal them after they've been bitten by snakes and such.” Nahai Alumni Interview.

²⁰ Jim Birckhead, “‘Bizarre Snake Handlers’: Popular Media and a Southern Stereotype,” in Hill and Beaver, 163–189, 168.

²¹ Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 86.

²² Jeanne McDonald, quoted in Diane Tennant, the Virginian Pilot, 19 Oct. 2000. See Jeanne McDonald and Fred Brown, The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and their Faith (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 2000).

²³ Kentucky was the first Appalachian state to make serpent-handling illegal in 1940. In 1966 West Virginia successfully defeated a bill to make the practice illegal and remains the only state where it is not.

²⁴ Bill Leonard quoted in Terry Mattingly, “Snakes, Miracles, and Biblical Authority,” Gospel Communications Network (GCN), 24 July 1996. See Online Christian Resources at http://www1.goselcom.net/mattingly; accessed 12 Dec. 2005.

²⁵ Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 213.

²⁶ Lusa Landowski is an interesting exception in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer (2000), set in rural Appalachia around the Zebulon National Forest. Like Blue, Lusa is of mixed ethnic and religious heritage, describing herself as Polish Arab American; her grandparents were Polish Jews on her father's side and Palestinian Muslims on her mother's. Lusa is a second-generation American of New Yorker parents who enjoys the “mix-and-match” in her background but her story is told in the third person.

²⁷ Although it should be noted that Rodger Cunningham reads the novel in comparative context when he asserts that “Oral History is Appalachia's nearest equivalent to García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in “Writing on the Cusp: Double Alterity and Minority Discourse in Appalachia,” in Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe, eds., The Future of Southern Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41–53, 50.

²⁸ In context of the rugged nomadic lifestyle of her father and his tribesman, Blue is surprised by the Professor's urbane self-presentation, but the description may also echo longstanding anti-Semitic stereotypes that associated Jewish men with femininity.

²⁹ Mary Lee Daugherty, “Serpent-Handling as Sacrament,” 235.

³⁰ Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 161.

³¹ Sudip Bose, “Caught in the Coils,” Washington Post, 23 Dec. 2001.

³² Cunningham, “Writing on the Cusp,” 42.

³³ Gina Nahai Alumni Interview.

³⁴ Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain, 151; Goad, Redneck Manifesto, 86.

³⁵ Marcos McPeek Villatoro, “Snake Eyes,” LA Times, 14 Oct. 2001.

³⁶ In Nahid Rachlin's novel Foreigner (1978), for example, an Iranian woman marries a white American. When they first meet, he is excited by the image of Iran: “It used to be called Persia. I liked that name better. It fits with my image of the place … Gardens springing up in the midst of deserts, magic carpets, caravans jingling in the night, and dark-eyed girls behind veils.” His future wife tells him the image he has is close enough. Foreigner: A Novel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 141. See also Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994) for cinematic examples.

³⁷ Liane Hansen, Interview with Gina Nahai on NPR, 6 Jan. 2002.

³⁸ But passing has seen a recent revival as a literary theme not only in its racial guise but in ethnic and religious terms too, in novels as different as Emily Prager'ss Eve's Tattoo (1993), Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000), and Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2002). In Sunday's Silence Nahai also twists the classic passing narrative in new directions.

³⁹ The Professor's words echo those of Dwight Eisenhower, who was not a member of any denomination but who during his presidential campaign of 1952 confided in southern evangelist Billy Graham that “I don't believe the American people are going to follow anybody who's not a member of a church.” In the event he only became a Presbyterian after becoming President. See Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; second edition), 88.

⁴⁰ For a detailed discussion of the history and movement of Jewish immigrants to the South see, for example, Lee Shai Weissbach, “East European Immigrants and the Image of Jews in the Small-Town South,” American Jewish History, special issue on “Directions in Southern Jewish History,” 9, 1 (1997), 231–262; and see the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience at http://www.msje.org/.

⁴¹ Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), 270.

⁴² See Ibid., 165–78, for a detailed overview of the period.

⁴³ Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (New York: Schocken, 1995); David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994), 190.

⁴⁴ It is the only moment when the Professor's successful religious passing is misread and although Nahai states that he seeks a wife, not a lover, this aspect of their relationship proves a weak point in the narrative. It may be an overextended effort to force correlations with one of the facets noted about the local poor whites: a propensity to marry young girls to much older men. Nahai Alumni Interview.

⁴⁵ Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (London: Penguin, 1990; first published 1963), 106.

⁴⁶ Brooke Kroeger, Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 210.

⁴⁷ M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in M. Holquist, ed., The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258, 250.

⁴⁸ In this regard, see Nicholas Abrahams explication of exorcism in “Notes on the Phantom,” Critical Inquiry, 13 (1987), 287–92.

⁴⁹ Dennis Covington, for example, refers to the serpent-handlers as “spiritual nomads … refugees from a culture on the ropes,” in Salvation on Sand Mountain, 24.

⁵⁰ To examine Appalachian writers writing back to such stereotypes, see Dwight D. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, eds., Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999). See also Linda Tate's overview of literature of the region, “Southern Appalachia,” in Richard Gray and Owen Robinson, eds., A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 130–147.

⁵¹ This is also represented through the character of Isiah Frank, for whom life should be as grand as theatre and who is a little in love with both Adam and Blue for their extraordinariness.