Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

Years ago I was showing a group of visitors through the house and I noticed one man giving his wife the high sign. I saw him mouth the words ‘old money!’ The man was David Howard, the world’s leading expert on armorial Chinese porcelain.

Georgia Fawcett, a longtime preservationist, recalled how difficult it had been to get people involved in saving downtown Savannah in those early days. “The old part of town had become a slum,” she said.

Now he bought far grander houses. One of them was Armstrong House, a monumental Italian Renaissance palazzo directly across Bull Street from the staid Oglethorpe Club.

A copy of the book At Home in Savannah—Great Interiors lay on Williams’s coffee table. I had seen the same book on several other coffee tables in Savannah, but here the effect was surreal: The cover photograph was of this very room.

“If there’s a single trait common to all Savannahians,” he was saying, “it’s their love of money and their unwillingness to spend it.”

“Construction of the house was begun in 1860 by the Confederate general Hugh Mercer, Johnny Mercer’s great-grandfather.

These, then, were the images in my mental gazetteer of Savannah: rum-drinking pirates, strong-willed women, courtly manners, eccentric behavior, gentle words, and lovely music. That and the beauty of the name itself: Savannah.

In 1964, Martin Luther King declared Savannah “the most desegregated city in the South.” In 1980, the population of Savannah was half white and half black.

“When you were a kid,” I said, “were you the type who pulled the wings off flies?” “No,” he said, “but I caught June bugs and tied balloons to them.”

“There’s another wonderful thing about being able to play music,” she said. “It’s something Johnny Mercer told me. He said, ‘When you play songs, you can bring back people’s memories of when they fell in love. That’s where the power lies.’”