Hidden Biscuits

Book excerpt: Every night of revival--1945 to 1956--the Evangelist and his family carried the mostly Appalachian folks to whom they ministered on up to a higher place. Worn down bodies in from the heat and dust of a sharecropper's cotton fields or unventilated rooms of the mill barely made it over to the local Pentecostal church house, to the shelter of a raised-up tent or bush arbor. But by the time they sang, shouted, and prayed in response to the Skondeen family's music and preaching, something shifted. In Hidden Biscuits, Audrey Skondeen Ward's memories come alive by way of her writing, as words, songs, and voices long silent are connected through a Deep South landscape.