Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

“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.”