Snakes in the Corn: Christianity and Interspecies Relationships in a Jim Crow Swamp

• In Event: In the Swamps and the Fields, in the Toilets and the Churches: Where Environmental and Religious Histories Meet

Abstract

Snakes may be the most recognizable animal in Christian mythology, and they are certainly the most loathsome, cursed “more than every beast of the field” (Genesis 3:15, KJV). Snakes’ punishment for the temptation of Eve is to live body to the earth, mouth in the dust. They are crafty, deadly.

So when a rural southern police chief warned five white out-of-towners that the cornfield where they huddled in the dark wasn’t safe, was in fact “full of rattlesnakes,” he invoked a deep-rooted Christian trope. Whether or not he intended the irony, the police chief knew that the three hundred armed white men who had chased the youth into the fields represented the real threat.

This paper attempts an interspecies religious history of a single event—the 1947 expulsion of a Christian interracial work team—in a single place—Tyrrell County, North Carolina. Black farmers in those eastern North Carolina swamps had organized a cooperative to counteract land dispossession; the work team represented a Christian socialist experiment in interracial living designed to support the cooperative. Those are human stories. But they are human stories that unfold on a landscape as much water as earth, one that reminded its human inhabitants repeatedly of the limits of their power. This examination of a place “full of rattlesnakes,” asks how historians of religion might learn from environmental histories that take seriously interaction among species—not just mythical but living ones.

Author

• Alison Collis Greene, Emory University