Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

“What I enjoy most,” he said, “is living like an aristocrat without the burden of having to be one. Blue bloods are so inbred and weak. All those generations of importance and grandeur to live up to. No wonder they lack ambition. I don’t envy them. It’s only the trappings of aristocracy that I find worthwhile—the fine furniture, the paintings, the silver—the very things they have to sell when the money runs out. And it always does. Then all they’re left with is their lovely manners.”

It’s not that people in Savannah aren’t rich enough. It’s just that they’re very cheap.

Thomas Carlyle once said that magazine work is below street-sweeping as a trade, but in mid-twentieth-century New York it was a reasonably respectable calling.

Savannah could lay claim to enough real history, she said, that it had no need of false honors. Did I know, for instance, that Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin at Mulberry Plantation in Savannah? Or that Juliette Gordon Low had founded the Girl Scouts of America in a carriage house on Drayton Street?

The librarian recited a list of Savannah’s historic highlights: America’s first Sunday school had been founded in Savannah in 1736, America’s first orphanage in 1740, America’s first black Baptist congregation in 1788, America’s first golf course in 1796. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had been the minister of Christ Church in Savannah in 1736, and during his tenure had written a book of hymns that became the first hymnal used in the Church of England. A Savannah merchant had bankrolled the first steamship ever to cross the Atlantic, the Savannah, which made its maiden ocean voyage from Savannah to Liverpool in 1819.

The cumulative weight of all these historic firsts suggested that this sleepy city of 150,000 had once been more important in the general scheme of things than it was now. Sponsoring the world’s first oceangoing steamship in 1819, for instance, would have been the equivalent of launching the first space shuttle today. President James Monroe had made a...

At the outbreak of fighting, Savannah was the world’s leading cotton port. General William Tecumseh Sherman selected it as the climax for his triumphant march to the sea, bringing seventy thousand troops against Savannah’s ten thousand. Unlike their counterparts in Atlanta and Charleston, Savannah’s civic leaders were practical businessmen, and their secessionist passions were tempered by a sobering awareness of the devastation that was about to befall them. When Sherman drew near, the mayor of Savannah led a delegation out to meet him. They offered to surrender the city without a shot if Sherman promised not to burn it. Sherman accepted the offer and sent President Lincoln a famous telegram: I BEG TO PRESENT TO YOU, AS A CHRISTMAS GIFT, THE CITY OF SAVANNAH WITH ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY GUNS AND PLENTY OF AMMUNITION, ALSO ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND BALES OF COTTON. Sherman stayed a month and then marched to Columbia, South Carolina, and burned it to the ground.

Savannah emerged from the war impoverished, but it recovered within a few years and prospered once again. By then, however, the city’s financial underpinnings had begun to erode. Rural labor was being drawn away to the industrialized North; years of growing nothing but cotton had leached the soil of nutrients, and the center of the Cotton Belt had moved westward. In the financial panic of 1892, the price of a pound of cotton dropped from a dollar to nine cents. By 1920, the boll weevil had wiped out what little cotton activity was left. From that time onward, Savannah slipped into decline. Many of its once-great houses fell into disrepair. Lady Astor, passing through in 1946, remarked that Savannah was like “a beautiful woman with a dirty face.” Stung by the criticism, a group of concerned citizens began in the 1950s to restore Savannah’s downtown. Their effort resulted in the preservation of Savannah’s historic district.

“You can tell from the wording of the news item that Sadie Jefferson was black,” she said, “because the courtesy title of ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Miss’ is omitted. That was the practice until integration. It was also the practice to list blacks in a separate section of the city directory.

Despite a long history of oppression, the 1960s civil rights movement in Savannah was almost entirely nonviolent. Civil rights leaders staged sit-ins at lunch counters, swim-ins at the beach, kneel-ins in churches, and a fifteen-month boycott of segregated stores. Tensions rose, but peace prevailed, largely because of the tireless efforts of a forward-thinking mayor, Malcolm Maclean, and a nonviolent strategy adopted by black leaders, notably W. W. Law, the head of the local branch of the NAACP. 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.

I recognized her now as one of the many people I had seen going into the house down the street. There was no way I could possibly have forgotten her. She was a statuesque beauty with not a single angular contour on her soft and lovely body. Her blue eyes were set off by a bright framework of lavishly applied cosmetics. I took four ice trays out of the freezer and emptied them into an ice bucket. I told her I had been wondering who lived in that house.

I looked at the brilliant palette of colors on Mandy’s smiling face. This was no simple application of lipstick and mascara. It was a complex composition that involved the blending of many hues and tints. There were pinks and blues and umber, topped by the platinum-blond nimbus of her hair.

“What’s she waiting for?” I asked. “For her divorce to come through,” said Joe. “There’s no telling when that will happen, because her attorney’s a lazy cuss who hasn’t gotten around to filing the papers yet. I guess we can’t complain about it, though, because I’m her attorney.”

Savannah’s a real small town. It’s so small everybody knows everybody else’s business, which can be a pain, but it also means we know who all the undercover cops are, which can be a plus.

“Rule number three: Observe the high holidays—Saint Patrick’s Day and the day of the Georgia-Florida football game. Savannah has the third-biggest Saint Patrick’s Day parade in America. People come from all over the South to see it. Businesses close for the day, except for restaurants and bars, and the drinking starts at about six A.M. Liquor is a major feature of the Georgia-Florida game, too, but the similarity ends there. The game is nothing less than a war between the gentlemen of Georgia and the Florida barbarians. We get all keyed up for it a week ahead of time, and then afterwards it takes a week to ten days to deal with the emotional strain of having won or lost. Georgia men grow up understanding the seriousness of that one game.”

In this respect, it could be said that Luther Driggers was the modern equivalent of Savannah’s other famous inventor, Eli Whitney. As it happened, neither man had made a dime from his invention. Eli Whitney had carefully kept the cotton gin under wraps while he applied for a patent, but he made a tactical error when he allowed women to have a look at it, assuming that they would not understand what they were looking at. A male entrepreneur put on a dress one day and slipped in with a group of women visitors, then went home and made his own cotton gin.

It was while nursing a bruised shin suffered from a fall over the false step that Luther went one afternoon to the Wright Square post office to check the weight of a pound of marijuana he was about to buy. He wanted to make sure he was not being cheated. To his amazement, he was stopped at the door, his package was seized, and he was arrested. As the Savannah Evening Press explained in its coverage of the event, the post office had received a bomb threat only minutes before. The story said Luther’s parcel contained “slightly less than a pound of marijuana.” Luther would have been short-changed, just as he’d feared.

Savannahians drove fast. They also liked to carry their cocktails with them when they drove. According to the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, more than 8 percent of Savannah’s adults were “known alcoholics,” which may have accounted for the disturbing tendency of motorists to run up over the curb and collide with trees. The trunks of all but one of the twenty-seven oaks that lined the edge of Forsyth Park on Whitaker Street, for instance, had deep scars at fender level. One tree had been hit so many times it had a sizable hollow scooped out of its trunk. The hollow was filled with pea-size crystals of headlight glass that glittered like a bowl of diamonds. The palm trees in the center of Victory Drive had the same sort of scars, and so did the oaks on Abercorn.

perspiration. Two boys sat on the curb, watching him work on the car. “That’s my boyfriend,” said Chablis. “That’s Jeff. He’s the hunk I told you about. Come, I want you to meet him.” This, then, was the one who, as Chablis had put it, satisfied her every need. It was hard to imagine exactly what those needs might be, harder still to envision what sort of person would satisfy them.

“He’s straight, you know. He’s not gay. He attracts both men and women, but he’s only into women. ‘Course, my friends say, Well, how can he be straight if he goes with you? And I say, As long as I’m gettin’ my fair share, I ain’t gonna be askin’ why.”

“So you never can tell, child. You never know. When I see a gorgeous hunk, honey, I don’t assume nothin’. More men are into dresses than you think. Us upfront drag queens is just the tip of the iceberg. Just the teeniest tip!”

“I’ve gone as far as taken off my shoe and hit people over the head. To prove to them that, you know, don’t let this dress fool you. Last weekend in Valdosta, a girl was talkin’ real loud, and when I started in on her, she threw a beer at me. She was one of those real mean lesbians, honey; she was a pit-bull dyke. But what she failed to realize was that there was a whole pitcher of beer sittin’ on her table. I baptized the bitch, honey! I baptized the bitch!”

“If you liked the show,” she said, “thank you from the bottom of my heart and just remember my name, The Lady Chablis. If you did not like the show, honey, my name is Nancy Reagan and go fuck yourself.”

“Did he show you how to play Psycho Dice? … No? Ah! Then allow me!” He took Corinne over to the backgammon table and sat her down. He explained the rules of the game and said that by concentrating on the dice, a person could improve the odds. He told Corinne about the scientists at Duke University and how their experiment had proved that if you really focused your mental energy you could make things happen—in dice or in just about anything.

“I’m sure he doesn’t actually think of himself as a Nazi,” said Joseph Killorin, an English professor at Armstrong State College. “But come on, Nazi symbols are not totally bereft of meaning. They still carry a very clear message, even if they’re displayed under the guise of ‘historic relics.’ The message is superiority, and don’t think for a minute Jim Williams isn’t aware of it. He’s too smart not to be. In the South, among extreme chauvinists, you sometimes find a strange affinity for Nazi regalia. It has to do with a sense of once having been treated for what one was worth and now being treated merely as an equal. There is a terribly social gentleman here in Savannah who sometimes wears Nazi uniforms to costume parties—anyone can tell you who I’m talking about; he’s known for it—and he says he does it for shock value, but the deeper meaning is still there. In Jim’s case, it may not be anything more than apolitical arrogance. If a man lives in the grandest house in town and gives the most extravagant parties, he could easily come to believe he was superior. He might also think the rules for ordinary people no longer applied to him. Displaying a Nazi flag would be one way of demonstrating that.”

“Oh, Jim Williams will probably get off,” said Prentiss Crowe, a Savannah aristocrat, “but he’ll still face a few problems. There is bound to be a certain resentment about his having killed that boy—that boy in particular, I mean. Danny Hansford was a very accomplished hustler, from all accounts, very good at his trade, and very much appreciated by both men and women. The trouble is he hadn’t quite finished making the rounds. A fair number of men and women were looking forward to having their turn with him. Of course, now that Jim’s shot him they never will. Naturally, they’ll hold this against Jim, and that’s what I mean when I say ‘resentment.’ Danny Hansford was known to be a good time … but a good time not yet had by all.”

“Well, as we all know, Doc, juries in Savannah don’t seem to mind seeing homosexuals get killed. I mean, you can stomp a homosexual to death in our community, and that doesn’t seem to make a difference.”

“I swear Joe Odom is going to drive me into being a feminist,” she said. “Two years ago if anybody had told me that, I’d a died.” But Mandy began to display a new assertiveness.

We could find ourselves in Ware County.” He rolled his eyes. “All they got there are a bunch of damn rednecks. I mean, hell, people over there think it’s a sin to have sex with the lights on. They’d lynch Jim before they ever got around to convicting him. So I think we’re better off right here in Savannah. The D.A.’s case isn’t as strong as he makes it out to be, and it’s gettin’ weaker all the time.”

“Dr. Lindsley told me that an old house will defeat you if you try to restore it all at once—from roof to windows, weather-boarding, jacking it up, central heating, wiring. You must think of doing one thing at a time. First you say to yourself: Today I am going to think about leveling off the sills. And you get all the sills leveled. Then you turn your mind to the weatherboarding, and gradually you do all the weatherboarding. Then you consider the windows. Just one window at a time. That window right there. You ask yourself, ‘What’s wrong with that part of that window?’ You must do it in sections, because that’s the way it was built. And then suddenly you find the whole thing completed. Otherwise, it will defeat you.

witnesses. “I … I’ve been wondering,” she said. “All these things they’ve been saying about James … and that Hansford boy … and now these other boys.” Mrs. Williams gestured at the paper. “I try not to pay any mind. But I don’t know. Seems like I remember hearing people say the same thing about King James of England. You know, the King James that had them to write the King James Bible? Do you know if that’s true? Have you ever heard anybody say that about King James?” “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I have,” said Thomas. “King James did have favorites among the men at court, if that’s what you mean. He had his special friends. I think he had several.”

When the bad news reached Williams, he picked up the telephone and called Christie’s in Geneva to place a bid on a Fabergé cigarette case that had once belonged to Edward VII. “It cost me fifteen thousand dollars, which I can ill afford,” he said, “but it makes me feel better. I’m the only person in the world who’s ever bought Fabergé from a jail cell.”

“Blacks drink better whiskey than whites do. Dewar’s, Johnnie Walker, Seagram’s, Hennessy. All the high-priced brands. I have a theory about why that is.” The man cupped the elbow of his pipe-holding arm and rocked back on his heels, glancing to his right and left to satisfy himself that the people standing in his immediate vicinity were paying sufficient attention. He then delivered himself of a peculiarly home spun theory: “Remember when the black athletes at the Mexico City Olympics won a lot of medals and raised their fists in the black-power salute? Well, that’s when blacks in Savannah started drinking Dewar’s scotch, Seagram’s gin, and Smirnoff vodka. If you look at those bottles, you’ll notice that all the labels have medals on them. Blacks had suddenly begun to identify with medals because of the Olympics, and that’s why they bought those brands. At about the same time, they also started drinking Hennessy cognac. The Hennessy label has a picture of a hand holding a mace—something like the black-power salute. Johnnie Walker scotch has a man with riding breeches and a top hat, which represents the ‘good life.’ It all has to do with the symbol on the label. The best example of that was when school integration was taking place. That’s when blacks started drinking Teacher’s scotch, which has a label showing a professor wearing a mortarboard. They go for the symbol, y’see. At least that’s the way I figure it.”

morning she was dead. She had not died of starvation or committed suicide by any conventional means. She had simply willed herself to die, and being a strong-willed woman, she had succeeded. She had missed dying on her birthday by two days.

“Witches loves pork meat,” she said. “They loves rice and potatoes. They loves black-eyed peas and cornbread. Lima beans, too, and collard greens and cabbage, all cooked in pork fat. Witches is old folks, most of them. They don’t care none for low-cal. You pile that food on a paper plate, stick a plastic fork in it, and set it down by the side of a tree. And that feeds the witches.”

into the hole, then put the bottle to her lips and drank the rest. “You can drink all you want to when you’re at the grave of a person who loved to drink,” she said. “You’ll never get drunk, ’Cause the dead will take the fumes away from you. By the time you pull the top off the bottle, they done beat you to it. You can drink for hours. Mr. Jim told me the boy loved Wild Turkey, so I give him a little drink to get him in a better mood. Me, I like to dip snuff. When I die, you can carry me my favorite snuff. Peach or Honeybee. Put it under your lower lip when you sit by my grave.”

too, had become enchanted by Savannah. But after having lived there for eight years, off and on, I had come to understand something of its self-imposed estrangement from the outside world. Pride was part of it. Indifference was too, and so was arrogance. But underneath all that, Savannah had only one motive: to preserve a way of life it believed to be under siege from all sides. It was for this reason that Savannah had discouraged Prudential from establishing its regional headquarters in the city in the 1950s (and why Prudential ended up in Jacksonville instead). It was why Savannah had given Gian Carlo Menotti’s Spoleto U.S.A. Festival the cold shoulder in the 1970s (and why the festival finally settled in Charleston). Savannah was not much interested in what went on outside Savannah. It had little enthusiasm for the popular culture, as headline entertainers like Eric Clapton, Sting, George Carlin, and Gladys Knight and the Pips discovered when they brought their acts to Savannah and found themselves playing to half-empty auditoriums.

Savannah spurned all suitors—urban developers with grandiose plans and individuals (the “Gucci carpetbaggers,” as Mary Harty called them) who moved to Savannah and immediately began suggesting ways of improving the place. Savannah resisted every one of them as if they had been General William Tecumseh Sherman all over again. Sometimes that meant throwing up bureaucratic roadblocks; at other times it meant telling tourists only what was good for them to know. Savannah was invariably gracious to strangers, but it was immune to their charms. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone.