Read an Excerpt
“Mister, there ain’t no wrong way to kill a rattlesnake.”
–Jerry Clower
Two things hit me right away: the smell and the sound. The air was saturated with the scent of fat-fried rattlesnake, and throughout the Nolan County Coliseum, no matter where I stood, I could hear incessant rattling. As I shuffled through the doors and down the stairs with a throng of other people, I descended from the bright, sunny day down into the dim, dusty floor of the Coliseum. I had driven three hours west of Dallas to be here for the 65th Annual Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater, Texas. Four days a year, this celebration turns the little city of Sweetwater into “the ‘poison fang’ capital of America.”
I was prepared for what I would see—I knew snakes would be hunted, killed, skinned, eaten, sold, and more. Just as I did before attending every festival in this book, I did my homework. I had researched the Roundup, watched videos on YouTube, and read interviews with the Sweetwater Jaycees, the civic organization who organizes the event every year. I talked with people who had attended before, and many who hadn’t. The problem was that everyone had skin in the game, so to speak. Animal activists, many who have never visited Sweetwater, decry the event from afar as cruel and barbaric. The Jaycees and the town of Sweetwater, on the other hand, seriously benefit from the millions of dollars the event brings in every year to this rural town; they promote it as an important tradition that keeps the local rattlesnake populations balanced. I knew the centerpiece of this festival was killing snakes. I just didn’t know what that would be like. Would it be respectful, or callous? Would the tone of the event be serious, or gleeful? Would the message be based in education, or propaganda? Killing animals can mean a lot of different things.
The Rattlesnake Roundup was the event my grandmother had worked on the most before she died. She attended the Roundup in 1990, taking copious and detailed notes about her time in Sweetwater. She conducted interviews and gathered books and journal articles on snake symbolism. She even had a rough draft of an essay about the Roundup. The draft was academic, explaining her experience of the festival from a neutral place. She focused on the long history of snake symbolism in America, and made no argument about the future of the Roundup.
What worried me the most, though, was a poem I found in my grandmother’s files that she wrote after attending the Roundup. Drenched in death, it began, the arena of nightmare / holds bone and sinew, / skin, blood, and the lidless eyes / of dismembered serpents. One stanza in particular haunted me. As I checked into my flight and boarded the plane to Dallas, the lines repeated in my head:
None shall escape.
Those who know earth best
Wrenched from their dens;
Now helpless upon cement
They curl and wait.
My grandmother was empathetic, but she was not overly sentimental. She was a veterinarian who cared deeply for animals, but she ate meat and was not an animal advocate per se. She was an anthropologist—she studied the people at the Roundup, not the snakes. For her to have been so affected by the Roundup that she had to process what she saw in a poem, giving voice to her more subjective observations, made me anxious. What would it be like? None shall escape rang in my head like a gong as I drove to Sweetwater.
Nevertheless, I wanted to stay objective, or at least open-minded. As I attended the festivals while researching this book, I experienced many of them differently than my research would have suggested. I never knew what I would see, or how a community would represent itself on the ground. The intangible parts of this research—the small conversations with local people, the spirit at the events, the care residents show for the animals—matter a lot. When I first started working on this book, I thought critically about what it would mean for me to go to these small towns and observe the human-animal interactions, coming from a particular background of my own. The world has changed since my grandmother was working as an anthropologist in the 1990s; now, we have more awareness of how outsider assumptions can misrepresent a community. Could I ever really have anything to say about what goes on in a town that is not my own?
As I drove into Sweetwater the Thursday afternoon before the Roundup, I felt humble about how little I knew about this place and these people, as I always do. It’s an odd feeling to step into someone else’s community, to watch what they do, to try to enjoy a piece of it yourself. But the Roundup, like every event in this book, is designed at least in part for tourists. By attending, I became an audience member to whatever show the community wanted to perform, a visitor to the world they wanted to create. One of the benefits of studying festivals is that they are events designed for the public, where the community opens their doors and put on a show specifically open to outsiders like me. I did not peer into anything private; this is not a book seeking to make a claim about any particular people in an anthropological or sociological sense. Throughout this book, in fact, I use the pronoun “we” freely to describe what happens at the festivals. By attending, by paying a fee and by watching the activities, I was part of it all. I was not outside the events. I could not observe them safely from afar; I could not maintain any moral defense to treatment I found hard to watch. Instead, organizers opened their doors to the public, and I paid to witness whatever happened. I contributed to every single action I saw by adding to the demand for the festival with my presence and attention.
I parked on the side of the street near the Coliseum and stood next to my car. People were stepping out of their houses to watch the opening parade; I arrived in town just in time. Families with children were passing around plastic grocery bags to collect candy. Directly across from me, a large dog stared out the front window at his whole family, who had emerged and sat on the curb in front of their house. The parade began with a procession of the ten contestants for the pageant that would be held that night. Each contestant rode in an open-air car, waving to the residents assembled on the side of the street, sashes strung across their bodies. Local businesses organized “floats”—or groups of people in flatbed trucks—and threw candy to the children on the sidewalks. The Jaycees’ signature red bus, advertising the “World’s Largest Rattlesnake Roundup” on its sides, made an appearance, as did the high school marching band. When the last cars passed, kids ran to scoop up candy that had fallen in the road. It was, in other words, a fairly unnoteworthy small-town parade.
Later that evening, I settled into my seat in the back of the town Auditorium. For the past sixty-four years, the Rattlesnake Roundup weekend has kicked off on Thursday afternoon with the Miss Snake Charmer Pageant. As one resident put it, after all, “every festival needs a queen.” The competition itself began with the casual wear round, in which the contestants were encouraged to wear an outfit that represented who they were. Some wore sneakers and toted sporting equipment, some wore jeans and carried books, some wore sparkly clothes and waved pom poms. The talent round brought singers, dancers, poetry performers, painters and more. Lastly, the women donned long gowns for the formal wear round; as they promenaded around the Bridgerton-themed stage to accompanying violin music, you could tell how hard they had trained for this moment. Between each round, the emcee thanked dozens of local sponsors, who had provided meals, transportation, logistical support, and more for this pageant. It was a big event in its own right; Miss Texas was even present, signing autographs at the back of the auditorium during intermission.
The young contestants seemed brave to me, performing for the entire town, for their friends, and for strangers like me in the audience. They performed, many of them for the very first time, talents which involve a remarkable amount of vulnerability. (You couldn’t pay me enough to sing on a stage in front of a few hundred people, but these women took on that challenge with grace.) The audience was consistently supportive, even when a note fell flat or a dance step was missed. The point was not perfection; the point of this pageant seemed to be for the contestants to put themselves out there to the world and to have a chance to participate in the long-running community event.
When the winner was crowned Miss Snake Charmer, the other contestants all cheered and seemed genuinely supportive. The top three contestants were handed enormous trophies, bouquets of flowers, and sashes. As I drove back to my hotel after the nearly three-hour event, I felt heartened. The whole night was pleasant. It was not overly superficial or bombastic; it was not too cheesy or outdated. It was a good-spirited celebration of the ten young women who had decided to try something new to support the town. The town of Sweetwater, seen through the lens of this pageant, seemed charming to me.
The next morning marked the start of the Roundup itself. The drive to the Coliseum was very different this time—cars lined the street in bumper-to-bumper traffic, full of people waiting to park and explore the events. I pulled into a spot, handed the attendant some cash, and followed the crowd to the Coliseum. A high school-aged boy stamped the back of my hand with a red ink coiled snake once I paid my entrance fee.
As soon as I walked into the Coliseum, my senses were overloaded. There were hundreds of people taking selfies, buying souvenirs, and munching on fried rattlesnake, which looked gray and tough. The air was stale. The floor of the Coliseum had three “pits,” or closed off areas, for spectators to observe various snake-based activities: a Safety/Handling Demonstration Pit, a Skinning Pit, and a Milking Pit. When I passed the demonstration pit, I paused to watch the handler interact with the snake and discuss the animals with the crowd. He gripped the snake’s head tightly, so it couldn’t move, and then held its body out for people to touch. Person after person posed for a photograph with the snake.
Around the pits vendors were stationed to sell items like preserved snake skins, tee shirts, and bumper stickers both political and comical: “Live, Laugh, Love. If that doesn’t work, Load, Aim & Fire.” You could buy almost anything made from rattlesnake skin: bracelets, wallets, belts, keychains, and more. I wove through families and groups as they pointed out snakes to each other, posed for photos, and squealed in fear and delight. The Jaycees were clearly identifiable in their bright red vests holding court all around the Coliseum. One Jaycee was “milking” a snake as I passed the Milking Pit, pressing its open mouth against a glass funnel to force its venom out as people watched, rapt.
I made my way towards the largest pit in the back. This pit held all of this year’s captured snakes—hundreds of them. The sound of the rattling increased as I got closer to the pit. There were viewing windows low to the ground, and I squatted down to look at the snakes; the window had a small smear of blood. A writhing mass of bodies, some defiant and shaking, others subdued and motionless, lay before me. Within the next two days, every single snake in this pit would be slaughtered. The refrain from my grandmother’s poem reverberated in my head: None shall escape.
