It’s 15 years since John Berendt’s book Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil brought the charms of Savannah, Georgia, to an international audience.
His bestseller about a lurid local murder made a celebrity of this Southern town with its sultry summers, elegant mansions and shaded squares lined with oaks dripping with Spanish moss. The book was turned into a film by Clint Eastwood in 1997, with Kevin Spacey and Jude Law, and since then Savannah has been reaping the benefits. But the city’s mixture of beauty, history and decadence has been charming visitors for far longer.
Its modern history began in 1733 with the arrival at Yamacraw Bluff on the Savannah River of General James Oglethorpe and 120 colonists, who founded the 13th and last of the British colonies in North America. As the port city grew, more settlers arrived from Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales, as well as mainland Europe. It was arguably the Celts who made the most lasting impression, and the cultural impact of the Scots is evident all over town. Molly MacPherson’s Scottish Pub stocks more than 100 malts and features kilt-wearing bar staff and a menu including Scotch eggs and neeps and tatties, while the annual Savannah Scottish Highland Games is one of the biggest such gatherings in America. The Irish are honoured with a monument at Emmet Park and with the biggest St Patrick’s Day Parade in the world outside Ireland and New York.
Wherever you walk, you’re never too far away from an influential Celt. A plaque in the Colonial Park Cemetery commemorates the life of Georgia’s first newspaper publisher, a Scot called James Johnston who settled here in 1761. The inscription credits him with being “well skilled in the art and mystery of printing”.
Even the pathway through the cemetery is of historical interest: it’s made of “tabby”, a distinctive Georgia building material made of crushed oyster shells, lime, sand and water. The huge number of oysters in the Savannah River made this a popular building material during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the fact that many tabby roads and paths still exist is testament to its durability.
The historic district, south of the river, teems with elegant mansions, and it is thanks to a dedicated group of residents who began campaigning for its preservation in the 1950s that it remains one of the most intact of such areas in America. In recent years, these efforts have been further boosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design, which has restored many previously run-down historical buildings using state-of-the-art technology.
It was the late-18th century discovery of a means of “ginning”, or removing seeds from cotton plants, that arguably had the biggest impact on Savannah’s fortunes. The city’s warm climate made it an ideal place to grow cotton, and its position as a port was convenient for exporting to international markets. Warehouses sprang up along the waterfront and were soon filled with “white gold”, as cotton became known. Hard currency flooded in, and many Savannah residents became extremely wealthy.
These included a man from Aberdeen by the name of Andrew Low, who journeyed by boat from Scotland as a teenager. He worked as a merchant in his uncle’s cotton firm and, proving himself to be a hard and able worker, was promoted to company director. Before long, Low was one of the richest men in Georgia.
But though he prospered in business, Low’s life was marked by tragedy. While he was waiting to move into the elegant Italianate villa he had commissioned from a fashionable New York architect, his wife, son and uncle all died. Today the house on Lafayette Square is one of the most visited attractions in Savannah, and features many family heirlooms and original furnishings, as well as elaborate plaster cornices, ornamental ironwork and carved woodwork. It also houses a desk used by the English author William Makepeace Thackeray when he was a guest in the house during lecture tours. In a letter home, Thackeray said: “I write from the most comfortable quarters I have ever had in the United States … a famous good dinner, breakfast and leisure to think and do and sleep and read … in the house of my friend Andrew Low”.
It was also in the Low House that the American Girl Scouts were founded, by Low’s daughter-in-law, Juliette Gordon Low. She was inspired to set up the girls’ group after meeting with Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the worldwide Scout Movement, on one of her frequent visits to the UK.
Lafayette is one of 22 squares in Savannah’s historic district. These vary in size and personality, from large formal ones complete with fountains and monuments to smaller ones with children’s playgrounds. Many are lined with oak trees, included in the city plan to offer relief from the sun which bathes the south in blistering heat for most of the year.
When the weather gets too much, follow the locals into Leopold’s ice-cream parlour. Founded in 1919 by three brothers from Greece, Leopold’s has delighted generations of Savannahians including the lyricist Johnny Mercer, of Moon River fame, who couldn’t get enough of its tutti frutti flavour. One member of the family, Stratton Leopold, eventually left the business to pursue a career as a Hollywood producer, and pictures of him with A-list celebrities line the parlour walls.
Another distinguished Savannah resident of immigrant descent was Flannery O’Connor, whose ancestors were among Georgia’s earliest Irish settlers. One of America’s most influential writers, O’Connor once described herself as a “pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex”. It was in her childhood home at Lafayette Square that the writer had her first taste of fame: aged six, she taught her pet chickens to walk backwards. Pathe News learned of her trick and came round to film it, later showing it on national television. O’Connor once commented that it was “the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax”.
The house is still full of her possessions, including her childhood books. She read voraciously and then wrote reviews on the flyleaf of her books. On Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland she scribbled: “Awful. I wouldn’t read this book”. She was similarly scathing of Shirley Watkins’s Georgina Finds Herself, writing: “This is the worst book I ever read next to Pinocchio.”
She died in 1964, aged 39, from lupus, the auto-immune disease. Though she had a short, sheltered life, she left behind two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away), 32 short stories and many reviews and essays. Her writing was strongly influenced by her Catholic faith and was peopled with grotesque characters. Reflecting on these, O’Connor once said: “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognise one.”
Thirty years after O’Connor’s death, some of Savannah’s more colourful residents took centre stage in Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was in the New York Times’s bestseller list for more than four years. The “non-fiction novel”, with its voodoo magic and poison bottles, was inspired by the real-life shooting and killing in May 1981 of local hustler Danny Hansford, aged 21, by his lover, the wealthy antique dealer Jim Williams. The success of the book made celebrities of some other residents, including the drag queen The Lady Chablis, who features in the book as a kind of Greek chorus. She played herself in the movie adaptation and regularly performs at the Savannah nightspot Club One.
Opinion is split among Savannahians as to whether or not the attention the book brought was welcome. Some would rather forget the unhappy episode in the city’s history; others have been all too happy to cash in, with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil merchandise and a $40 tour which takes in places mentioned by Berendt along with locations used in Eastwood’s movie adaptation. Highlights include a visit to the Bonaventure Cemetery, with its obelisks, columns and dense shrubbery, to see the “real” garden and Danny Hansford’s grave.
As the work of O’Connor and Berendt suggests, beneath its gentrified surface, this port city has a hard-living underbelly. The waterfront warehouses are now home to a lively bar scene. And while much of America bans drinking alcohol outdoors, Savannah positively encourages it, permitting bars to sell “to go” cups that can be refilled with discounted drinks as customers hop from one hostelry to the next. Depending on how long you spend on historical Bay Street, your night out can be decorous or decadent.
There’s a popular line among Southerners that in Atlanta, the first thing locals ask you is your business, in Charleston, it’s your mother’s maiden name – and in Savannah, it’s what you want to drink. Whether this local trait is down to the famed hospitality of the locals or the influence that generations of Celts have had on this Southern Belle is up for debate.
Getting there and where to stay
The most direct flight from Scotland to Savannah is with Continental (www.continental.com), from Glasgow and Edinburgh via Newark Airport from £379 return. Savannah’s airport is 18 miles west of downtown. You don’t need a car to explore the historic district. The free CAT Shuttle operates in the historic centre, running on a north-south route once an hour and stopping at many of the major attractions. For more information about this, see www.savannahvisit.com.
The Bed and Breakfast Inn (117 West Gordon Street, 00 1 888 238 0518, www.savannahbnb.com) is a historic inn with double rooms from around £100 per night including breakfast, a cheese-and-wine hour and bedtime milk and cookies.
The Lady Chablis performs regularly at Club One, 1 Jefferson Street, 00 1 912 232 0200.
