Oh the people that you meet.....

Apologies for this piece switching tenses and moving in and out of 1st person!

I have had a large dinner of Fired Green Tomatoes (should have added that movie to my list!) Alaskan Snow Crab and Shrimp and feel a sweeping generalization coming on to help settle my stomach – its a shame they don't sell my favoured digestif; Fernet Branca here or I would have to purchase the whole bottle.

Southern hospitality and culture – I can safely say I have met some real locals here and they don't like to leave the South, don't seem to travel too far from home, have big families and love their southern cooking. Fried chicken and grits seems to be the staple. They are fiercely loyal to Georgia, welcoming of strangers and very open to talk about their personal lives.

Donald, and old man I met on the train from Orlando was the only boy in his family with 11 older sisters. He was on his way up to Charleston to visit his eldest sister (74) who had just had a stroke. I chatted with him for 2 hours over dinner on the train. His mother was one of 18 children, to which I nearly choked on my iced-tea trying to do the numbers on how many nieces and nephews and cousins there were. He asked why I was visiting Savannah and I said I was interested in visiting the old 18th Century cotton plantations to which he laughed and said to let him know if I found any of his slave ancestors still working there - mental note to self to be careful what I say in future!

Anne the barmaid who has served me the Snow Crabs is 23 and from a family of 5, lives at home with mum whom she supports financially and emotionally, whilst the elder brothers and sisters have moved away and don't seem to want to help out and don't understand that she is too young to be looking after her mother and needs to live her own life, she feels guilty about wanting to leave her mother and move away. This sounds sad, I know, but I am not used to people coming straight out and telling me their biggest fears and worries when I hardly know them and have crab juice dribbling down my chin and haven't even finished my 1st Heineken!

Mickey a 24 year old student at the Art College in Savannah but originally from Arkensaw, Kansas, a film major working hard to pay off his student loans. He is fiercely independent, strong minded and very articulate for his age. He lured me into political conversations about Blair and Bush and I found myself struggling for opinions on topics I have avoided for many years. My circle of friends never discuss politics or religion, but here I was sat outside a cafe sipping Macchiato, on a stunning winters afternoon on a tree lined street and this guy strikes up a conversation with me about Thatcherism, socialist healthcare reforms and asks my opinion on the immigration problems in the UK with the influx of East Europeans. (I am afraid my response was that I thought it was great as you can get some decking laid much cheaper now than if you used local labour.) Thankfully he thought I was joking. Then he accused Tony of being Bush's puppet – I was trying hard not to gag on my biscotti at the time and realised this guy had never even been to the UK and turns out had only left Kansas once before. I was staggered by his awareness and knowledge and resolved to learn more about US politics and at least have some clever responses to the war that would keep me out of trouble.

In the evening I am having a healthy chat with an elderly lady about the state of the white wine and inquiring after her oysters 'Bloodymary' and find out she is here in Savannah on her 20th anniversary with her husband. She wanted to talk all night to me about the Deep South and the antebellum South of yesteryear and ignore her husband completely, she was pretty half-cut (after 6 Oysters steeped in six shots of Vodka so would I!) and so I told her what was what and and said that after 20 years she should be paying her husband more attention. She was put out by this and didn't say another word me all evening.

Almost immediately as they left for their table, a tall blind black man arrived and shook his stick at the waitress to seat him at the bar. The restaurant went quiet as he stumbled through the tables. Fortunately the only empty seat was next to me and he sat himself down and shook off the arm of the waitress, “Are you blind?” he shouted at her, she responded “No!” defensively, “Then why are you still holding on to me?” he snorted.

I muttered under my breath “Hooh-Hahh” to show him I knew where he stole the line from (Al Pacino, Scent of Woman) but he didn't take the bait. I changed tack quickly and for the sake of a quiet life and to spare the waitress any further embarrassment, I explained to her that I would look after him (realizing that I had a great opportunity to meet an obvious character and forget that I had just upset an old lady).

As soon as I asked “What are you drinking?” he opened with “What sort of Englishman do I have the pleasure of being sat next to?” He tells me his name Eugene Silas Carver jr. and that he is a minister at the African Baptist Church in SV, he immediately tells me his life story which was filled with struggle and hardship and I sat opened mouthed at the poverty he had experienced before he had found God, he went on to explain that now he was a rich man. He then asked me quite plainly what sort of pain I had had in my life, not wanting to spill the beans just yet, I flippantly retorted that the 7:32am from Bracknell to Waterloo was frequently late and you couldn't always get a seat. To which he roared with laughter and spat some of his lime-and-ginger-sour-spritzer in my eye and the restaurant went quiet again.

I did think about using my friend Matt's line about how real long term pain is being a lifetime supporter of Birmingham City FC – but didn't think he would get the joke and as soon as you bring up soccer over here people just want to go on about why Beckham is worth $250 million and he's only got 2 legs and nobody is worth that much and then you have to explain why you didn't play soccer at school as you went to a rugby school and then you just want to have a go at them about how Rugby is American Football for real men and Baseball is a lesser derivative of Cricket.......I hadn't had enough bloody-mary oysters to go that far and we were already drawing a crowd.

He then tried to sell me his book about his life for $40 and I could only buy it from him directly, I would have to give him the cash now, and then he would drop it round to my hotel in the morning....this I didn't believe. I started thinking on several occasions whether this guy was really blind and that somehow word had finally got around that a gullible Brit was in town and that all the tricksters would visit me to see if they could snaffle my money – 1776 all over again, the colonies rebelling against the British Empire!

Thankfully he took his leave shortly after I said I would come and pick the book up myself from the church the following morning as I would like to hear his sermon – he was much flattered by this and left.....leaving me to pick up his drink bill! As soon as he had gone there was an audible sigh of relief in the restaurant and the manager came upto me and shook my hand for some reason – probably for entertaining this chap and not being rude and causing a scene.....I explained that the pleasure had been mine in meeting such a character and I was given a 12 year old Macallan for my trouble.

I didn't manage to get up that early the following day, and so missed his sermon, to my loss as I later found out that his church was where Martin Luther King gave his first ever rendition of the speech “I have a dream”, later to be given at the march on Washington in '63.

Candra the taxi driver who picked me up from the station and subsequently became my tour guide, asked me what I did for a living – not having worked out exactly how to answer this question yet, as I will soon be unemployed. I said that I was in the software business. This immediately spawned a litany of questions about the problems she had been having with her computer at home, amusingly she owned up to the fact that she had been surfing inappropriate websites and now had a Trojan virus that was automatically opening 100's of other inappropriate websites every time she switched on her computer. She offered me free taxi journeys and her special southern fried chicken for dinner for two at her house if I would come round and help......I managed to quickly write down what she had to do to fix the problem and declared myself a vegetarian and so declined politely on the chicken supper without causing offense!

That will have to do for colorful characters from the deep south fr now.

Why Savannah?

Since announcing my trip to Savannah, everyone has more or less asked "Why do you want to go there?" With a quizzical look of incomprehension, "What's there to visit?" is the general follow up.

I have been here 3 days now and despite having arrived in a blackout, where I thought rioting and looting were about to start, I have completely fallen for this town.

I have worked out that there are 2 types of people who know about Savannah - the first have never been here and therefore are talking shite based their ignorance no doubt based on some preconception they have about the deep south generally and are minded of the stories of cotton plantations, deep fried chicken, collared greens, Amistad and slavery etc. The other group have been here and have fallen in love with the place and do not want anyone else to discover this hidden treasure - and are so dismissive about it, to hopefully put you off visiting the place.

It is rare that I have stayed somewhere that I don't want to leave - Christchurch, NZ or Boulder, Colorado and of course the Dolomites, Italy (my favorite place thus yet discovered) are the ones that instantly spring to mind. Savannah, Georgia is now on that list. It is difficult to describe why it appeals to me so, but it is somewhere I will have to come back to.

In summary it is steeped in history and in 1733 a philanthropic Englishman named Oglethorpe founded a colony to mainly grow silk to relieve the UK's reliance on imports from India and Italy (there is a lot more to the story but its not for me to tell - if you are interested its here on Wikipedia). The architecture is very similar to that of my Home town Bath (which I also have strong feelings for) and above all else the people are incredibly friendly.

I have been trying to work out now for a few days why it is I wanted to come here. Well my interest has not been with just Savannah but the whole of the Deep South, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and of course Alabama. I loved Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer when I was a kid and remember being fascinated & horrified about the stories of slavery. As I know relatively little about the area or its history before I came, I have reached back and tried to recall where the influences might have come from.

Embarrassingly the Dukes of Hazard has some resonance with me, Bo and Luke tearing up the countryside in their Dodge Charger and crossing the Hazard County line escaping from the Sheriff just in time. While probably fictitious I believe the county was meant to be in Georgia. Also how can any impressionable prepubescent boy not have had the hots for Daisy Duke! Other influences have been:

Book: Barbara Kingsolver; Prodigal Summer - life in southern Appalachia (an amazing book)
Book: A walk in the woods - Bill Bryson
Film: Forest Gump - 'Greenboro Alabama'
Film: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
Film: Legend of Bagger Vance, Will Smith and Charlieze Theron (there is an interesting anecdote about the meaning behind this movie - I am so shallow I just thought it was about golf but actually a parody on Bhagavad Gita)
Film: The gift - Cate Blanchet
Film: The Patriot, Mel Gibson wading through marsh swamps with atrocious acting.
People: Anybody I have met with a melodic Sawthern Draawl

Lastly and probably the most important is Spanish Moss - it warrants an entry on its own but I have a strange interest in this plant (geeky I know!) and along with the melodic accent of this place it impresses upon me.

Oaks bent double and dripping with Spanish Moss, overgrown porches and rocking chairs, whiskered gentlemen sneaking a glance at a ladies ankle (in 1750 if you saw a Ladies ankle you had to marry her!), plantation houses, ironclads busting through the Union Navy, gumbo and shrimp boats, Victorian parlours and of course Rhett Butler calling out for Scarlett. A romantic era where men were gentlemen and all women were ladies. Hmmm this explains a lot!


The photo I took yesterday on the Wormsloe Plantation about 10 miles south of SV - typifies the look of this area.

The Bird Girl

I think an entry on the Bird Girl is justified on this Blog as its imagery seems to permeate the whole of the town. In 1936 Sylvia Shaw Judson sculpted the now famous "Bird Girl" statue from bronze. One of the four commissioned sculptures stood in Savannah, Georgia in the Bonaventure Cemetery until 1994 when a photo of "The Bird Girl" appeared on the cover of the best selling novel, "Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil" by John Berendt. The statue now resides in the Telfair Museum and in no way evokes the same feelings that the statue on the cover of the book does.

The book had quite an impact on me when I read it a few years ago and the movie (directed by Clint Eastwood) solidified my interest in Savannah and the South of America. The film and no doubt the book started a landslide in tourism and the whole town seems to have prospered on the back it. The movie is a dramatized version of a true story based on the book by John Berendt that was published in 1994, it is about a wealthy art dealer’s mysterious killing of his homosexual companion and the scenes from the book i.e. Mercer House have become some of the most visited places in the city’s Historic District. I read the book a few years ago and then recently saw the movie which did an excellent job of visualising the strong scenes. portrayed in the book.

Ironically the guy that took the photo for the cover of the book [Jack Leigh] is buried at the cemetery where he took the shot 10 years before he died. His plot is quite hard to find and the kind lady who tends the cemetery museum (who put down her fillet-o-fish lunch to tell me the history of the place for 10 minutes) told me a white lie as to his whereabouts, as I stumbled across it in a completely different part of the grounds (I think I am getting a bit geeky as I didn't intend my trip to be a pilgrimage to the MITGOGAE book and film....enough said on the matter!)

More information on the book is here
Photo taken 27th Jan 07 outside Telphair Museum

Spanish Moss

Spanish Moss is that grey/silvery looking lichen that hangs from trees in hot and humid climes, and is very identifiable with the deep South East of the US. Just watch movies like Forest Gump or the Patriot and you 'll understand. It looks a lot like Old Mans Beard in at home, actually it is not a moss at all but an airborne plant (part of the bromeliad family) and strangely has no roots (so I was told on my trolly bus tour....don't laugh!) It is everywhere here in Savannah and gives the place a ghostly and mysterious feel.

Anecdotally, when the colonists arrived in 1733, they used it to stuff mattress and pillows, but after a while they realised the moss carried a small beetle which bites and gives a horrid rash - hence the term "don't let the bed bugs bite" - not sure how accurate it is but the Savannahians seem to be mighty proud of the saying!

Photo taken yesterday on Oglethorpe Ave.