Thinking about Savannah I always get very different images from the city experienced by tourists. Living there in the 1990's briefly after many years of absence, I tried to understand a little of how the city influenced me. As an adolescent I had often wandered around the city, visiting churches and synagogues to meditate and pray at their altars, even sleeping on tombstones in the Colonial Cemetery, all in the vain attempt to understand the birth and death that frames our lives with so much mystery. A useless exercise, the naivete of youth. I have since those many years ago lost many good friends to death without feeling I have any real understanding of this natural phenomenon. Savannah is the numinous locus of these early explorations of metaphysical meaning. Only at night did I seem to sense the meaning that eluded me in sunlight. Moonlight was better for reflection. Meaning, I believed, could only emerge out of the shadows in that softer light.
My mother may have inadvertently started me thinking about such matters: her favorite walk with me in a stroller was through the Colonial Cemetery. We lived in downtown Savannah, at No. 10 Jones Street until I was four and we moved to Ridge Road, a wooded area about six miles Southwest of the city off U.S. 17, the old interstate route to Florida. I could hear the bells of the Cathedral of St. John from ur apartment and acquired a lifelong love of those sounds. I remember looking up at a slanted cement wall with cracks and tiny pieces of mica or quartz that sparkled in the sunlight. It was just outside my front door and was my boundary for playing outside. Many years later I was amazed to see that this so-called wall was a slanted cement barrier that started about a foot high and ran up to about three feet. (Our memories, the earliest at least, seem proportioned to our own heights.) We lived downstairs and had a back door that led into a small courtyard where my mother did the washing on warm days, hanging the clothes up in the sunlight. I remember being fascinated with the action of siphoning water from one tub to another. Could water really be persuaded to flow opposite to the force of gravity? It still puzzles me.
Another walk with my mother was to Forsyth Park which had a fountain amidst a pool with goldfish. I found the statues of mythological figures less interesting than the fish darting around in the pool. The statues were only interesting for the water that gushed out of them in sprays and splashed into the pool. The fountain is a copy of one found in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The park around the fountain has numerous benches below the many spreading live oaks with Spanish moss. In the spring the azaleas provide spectacular bursts of pink everywhere, especially in the squares further north along Bull Street which runs right up to the dome of the Savannah City Hall behind which can be found Factor's Walk and the cobblestone roads leading down to the waterfront along the Savannah River, looking across toward South Carolina. Confederate troops fled across this area of the river in 1864 to escape the inexorable the Yankees in Sherman's March to the Sea as they came into Savannah.
The canny merchants of the city marched out to meet Sherman with a key to the city and a welcome that included a grand residence for his headquarters, the Green-Meldrom House (now the Parish House of the Episcopal Church next door). We lived about two blocks from this location. A few blocks way, many years later when I was in Savannah in the 1990's, I had to go around my favorite square so Forrest Gump could be seen on a park bench with his box of chocolates. His bench, however, was a Hollywood invention and was placed 90 degrees from the real direction of the benches where I sat. I love the opening of the movies best when a feather is seen floating down to where Forrest Gump sits. The filmmakers had in mind an editorial about the role of pure chance in one's life. I might agree were it not for Hildegaard of Bingen. She wrote a beautiful piece of music called "Feather On the Breath of God" and that is what I hear every time I watch this movie. The church tower in the movie belongs to the Independent Presbyterian Church just off that square where President Woodrow Wilson was married.
Once when I dreamed of Savannah it was of Forsyth Park, a little past the fountain to the spot where I used to play basketball in Junior High School, next to what was an old powder magazine in the Civil War. This area was just before the statue of a Confederate soldier where we used to line up our high school band to march in the St. Patrick's Day Parade. In the dream it always seems dark and the powder magazine is somehow ominously back to its original use. I awaken fearing an explosion. Other times I am driving through the city near this same area where the street diverts around the park and I get lost. I somehow end up in what used to be called "the colored section" of the city. People stare at me from their front porches and wonder why I am in their neighborhood. Then suddenly I am walking along near 37th Street, on the border of the city where many blacks lived; I am worried about finding my way out and getting home. Finally I am outside the city and trying to walk the last miles home when
I wake up.
The racial topography of the city is something most definitely NOT in the tourist guide book. I have followed the shifts over the years from the sixties until now, about a half century. Racial boundaries, though somewhat fluid at the edges in this small city, were well-known to locals. I was always amazed by this area as my father drove along US 17 into Savannah. We had to drive through a black neighborhood at the outskirts of the city before going into the heart of the city, mostly white. Once, when the traffic was intense along his usual route, he turned down a side street and went deeper into a black neighborhood. We passed a three story building with a large playground where black school children were outside playing at recess. It was just a gray, dusty courtyard without any play equipment except for one set of swings. The black children against that background made me think they were the sons and daughters of the earth--like the story in Plato about such a race who were, as a result, very attached to their place of origin. I was not aware at the time how much they suffered in their schooling from the so-called "Separate but Equal" doctrine (effectively "Unequal"). Many years later in the 1960's I met a young black man from Savannah who told me how they got hand-me-down schoolbooks from the white schools. Worse yet, he told me, his mother was turned away from the emergency room of a white hospital once and barely made it all the way across town to the black facility, understaffed and underfunded. No, the tourist view of Savannah is an Ignoble Lie. Slavery is barely mentioned though it dominated life in Savannah before the Civil War. The largest slave auction ever held in the country was there in 1859, the year Darwin published The Origin of the Species. The slaves were from the Butler rice plantation on one of the islands just off the coast and were sold to pay off the gambling debts of the owner who resided in Philadelphia.
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