NESHOBA DEMOCRAT (Philadelphia, Mississippi) 02 July 08 Listening to snake lore (Ovid Vickers)
A fear of snakes and the unending accumulation of snake lore probably began when the devil in the form of a serpent offered that forbidden fruit, an apple, to the mother of mankind. The truth of the matter is that an apple is not mentioned in Genesis, so the lore concerning snakes begins right there in the Garden of Eden.
Time after time, I have been amazed at the wide variety of tales I have heard all my life whenever snakes were mentioned. At the country store near my childhood home, men gathered on Saturday afternoons to chew tobacco, dip snuff, play checkers and tell tales. The stories often concerned snakes. One story was often told of a snake biting a woman in the throat while she was picking blackberries. They found her dead, so the story goes, by the blackberry bushes along a fence. One hand was filled with crushed blackberries, and the other hand was so tightly clutched around the snake's neck that it too was dead.
Children are constantly warned to watch out for snakes if they walk in a wooded area. People will often remark that they did not go into an abandoned house, or walk through a thicket because it looked so "snakey." There are several poisonous snakes in Mississippi including the diamondback rattlesnake, the water moccasin, and the copperhead. Although these snakes are known and can be identified, most folks will avoid and often attempt to kill any snake they see.
A great body of lore concerning coachwhips exists. The coachwhip resembles a black snake and at maturity are about five feet long. The coloration of the tail resembles a plated whip. This snake, according to older folk, wraps itself around a person, a cow, dog, or whatever else it happens to attack. Then the snake kills by whipping or running its prey to death.
Stores about joint snakes are told with many variations. Observers declared that if a joint snake were hit, it would break into pieces about as long as a man's finger. If the snake were left, it would grow back together. Not only could the snake disjoint its own body, but if it were chopped into pieces by hoe or shovel, it could also grow back together.
During a dry spell farmers once believed that killing a snake would bring rain. In order to assure that rain will come, the snake has to be hung upside down to a fence, preferably a bobbed wire fence.
I grew up hearing about hoop snakes. I always wanted to meet a hoop snake in the road because of the way they were described to me. Mr. H. A. Wynne, our neighbor, told about a hoop snake one rainy afternoon when he came to visit my father because it was too wet to plow. According to Mr. Wynne, a hoop snake has a stinger at the end of its tail. The snake can roll up into a hoop and sting anything. Mr. Wynne declared that he once saw such a snake roll into a tree. The snake was after Mr. Wynn who jumped behind the tree. About fifteen minutes later, the leaves of the tree started to wilt.
My mother was a great one to hunt blackberries, huckleberries, wild plums and haws. Once while we were in a plum orchard, I realized a snake was under the bushes. It made a hissing sound and flattened out its body. We quickly left the plums to the snake. Mama explained that the snake was a spreading adder. She also believed that if the snake bit someone, there was no cure and the person would die.
Some snake stories are true. My father's sister was a nurse. In the 1930s, nurses would sometimes go into homes to nurse the sick. My aunt was employed to nurse a man who lived about five miles from town. The man was very ill, so my aunt slept on a cot in his room. During the night she was awakened by a noise in the fireplace. When she got up and lit a lamp, she found a snake coiled around one of the andirons. She decided the snake had fallen down the chimney. It seems more likely the snake crawled into the house and then into the fireplace.
Rattlesnakes are perhaps the most feared of all reptiles. When turpentine was a big industry in the South, companies paid their workers for each rattlesnake they killed. Turpentine workers were often bitten by rattlesnakes, and many workers carried a small kit with a razor blade and a tourniquet to bind off that part of the arm or leg where they were bitten.
In those days, it was recommended that a cross be cut into the bite, and the blood sucked from the bite. It is also believed that the age of a rattlesnake can be determined by the number of rattles it carries. It is also the only snake that warns of its presence by making a sound.
It is known that snakes are an integral part of the ecosystem and that snakes can be beneficial in the eradication of rodents. Perhaps if Satan had never turned himself into a serpent, the plight of snakes might have been different.
Listening to snake lore