On the television news, a herpetologist explained that September was the time for baby black rat snakes to hatch from their leathery eggs. He brought a mother snake and her hatchlings with him to the studio. He invited the anchors to hold the baby snakes, which he explained were harmless, but noted that they might raise their heads and hiss if they felt threatened.
Living with my family in a rural mountain neighborhood, I have seen my share of black snakes.
At our first home—a rustic wood-and-stone house—we occasionally had black snakes visit us. One day I headed down the long flight of wooden stairs to the basement laundry area. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, I looked back up, and to my dismay I saw a black snake stretched across the top step. Apparently I had managed to step over the snake without touching it. I could imagine my horror if I had felt the snake under my foot, which would have caused me to tumble headlong to the cement floor below.
In our upstairs bedroom in a storage closet under the rafters of the roof, I once found a dry snake skin that had been shed at some time.
And we had a snake that stayed for a while at the base of our stone chimney. At my request, my husband Steve carried it into the woods to relocate it. But it soon found its way back, and we left it alone. It was likely the one that I spied on the basement step and the one that had shed its skin in the attic closet.
Destroying a black snake was not an option to my husband. He had emphasized to me and our daughter Annie that we should tolerate black snakes—a nonvenomous species—and not harm them. When I asked him why he especially liked black snakes, he said, “My knowledge of black snakes goes back to my grandfather when I helped him in the garden during the summers.”
“Papaw always thought highly of black snakes,” he explained. “He had neighbors who had a pig lot, and rats were bad to be around livestock. But black snakes normally kept those rats run off Papaw’s property, and a black snake in a garden would scare crows and eat cut worms.”
In time, my family moved up the road into my husband’s childhood home, and in a corner of the back pasture we raised a garden. While I picked green beans, I regularly saw a black snake—one that we nicknamed Blackie—stretched under the bean vines. We came to think of Blackie as our garden snake. I was careful not to step on him, but I wasn’t afraid. He seemed to take no notice of me while I worked. And I remembered my husband’s words about the benefit of a black snake in a garden.
One day Blackie ventured down through the pasture to the edge of our backyard, where Annie and I noticed him crawling under a chain link gate that lay in the grass. I warned Annie to keep her distance from him—after all, black snakes would bite. But she and I enjoyed watching Blackie slither through the wires of the gate, and I got the camera and took pictures of him.
I hoped Blackie would not come into our backyard. Though tolerant of his presence in the garden and the pasture, I didn’t want him near our house.
But as far as I know, Blackie never entered the yard. And in any case, he eventually disappeared, no longer keeping me company in the garden. We suspected that a neighbor caught Blackie in his henhouse and shot him. My husband said that a lot of people who had chickens didn’t like black snakes because they ate eggs. “But,” he added, “a rat will do more damage to chickens, eating their eggs and chicks, than a black snake will do.”
Through the years, there’s never been another snake like Blackie that we’ve grown accustomed to and given a name. But come September, another such snake may hatch and find its way to us.