Boring But Lovely Savannah

Sometimes what you want to say is too ambitious for spontaneous journal entires. Not that I let that stop me, nor should anyone. I was wondering how much growing up in Savannah Georgia made me different from people who grew up elsewhere. My mind wandered. Four Live Journal entries taped together.

A turn in the South

One of the books I'm reading is V.S. Naipaul's Turn in the South. I read his India, a Million Mutinies Now last year. Neither are books that I'd ordinarily read. But when I discover a novelist I enjoy I try their journalism and essays. Naipaul won my admiration in the latter book with his visible sympathy and transparency he gives to the places people. All the jointures are seamless. Crosby said the best singing sounds like anybody could do it. Naipaul's travel books flow along effortlessly giving the illusion that anybody could write them. The sympathy is surprising coming from someone best known as a cold egoist.

And that the sympathy never falls into sloppiness is much of what appeals to me in his books. I know there are fine folks of tender temperament. But rationalist that I am (or maybe only a wannabe) seeing compassion degenerate into mawkishness makes me flinch; in responses to the world at large, not in personal things. When I used to watch the political infotainment shows with Gordon it really pissed me off that the people whose goals I shared were mostly blatherers while many of their opponents could at least work cleanly from premises. That does give some conservatives a treat: wave the red flag and watch the left snort, lower his head and charge.

This wasn't the entry that I mean to write. So I'll start again. But the Economist Theory of writing says never throw anything way.

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Savannah's Public Squares

Now to see if I can get back on track.

I've never read a book on the South. Never wanted to. I've never thought of myself as a Southerner nor a Georgian. Being an American doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy but it has proved pretty agreeable. The obvious examples of where you don't want to be born are places like Cambodia and Bangladesh. Less obviously you could've been a white person in South African during apartheid.

But I do think of myself as a Savannah boy. (Caveat: everything I'm going to say about Savannah may no longer true, likely much of it was never true.)

Savannah was one of the original colonial settlements; one of the details that funds its great self-love. Lots of American towns and cities are conspicuous in their self-admiration: San Francisco and New York for reasons I'd never fuss about. The men of Houston much love themselves for their manliness and oil money. Los Angeles is likely illimitably proud of its role as the major supplier of American tackiness and prepackaged, just add water pap. I wouldn't argue with them either. Somebody gets to be the source of 'national character' - why not them?

In the 7th grade I was dragooned into the required Georgia History course. The teacher sure had an easy time of it. Most days all she did was show us tapes about Georgia history. A dim recollection of seeing a list of Georgia's colonial exports is the only recollection that survives. I think she may have actually loved the subject but had no gift for imparting it. Which would be a real challenge with an audience of thirteen year olds.

Having passed their statues often I know that General Oglethorpe founded the colony. It was his kindly way of getting lots of people out of debtor's prison. And he got John Wesley to come over. Wesley didn't have a happy stay but all of the Methodist churches in the South show that he had more influence than he could've ever guessed. And people never tired of saying that before the War Between the States (better known as the Civil War, when I was little I didn't know they were the same war) Savannah's port was as busy as New York City's.

That exhausts the bulk of what I know about Savannah's past. Thanks to the signs that little the downtown Colonial District I learned that George Washington really did sleep somewhere thereabouts, Flannery O'Connor had been around and that the oldest church organ in America is sitting in one of the local churches.

During my early elementary school years I lived across from an old colonial cemetery. The plaque above his grave was a regular reminder that Button Gwinnette signed the Declaration of Independence.

That really does sum up all I know about Savannah's history. Not having been there in almost twenty years the only thing I know about its present is that the elementary school

I'll add one bit of trivia. Long years ago Victor's wife, Nancy mentioned that her uncle was Johnny Mercer. That he'd founded Capitol Records meant nothing to me. Had she told me he'd written Moon River I'd have been impressed. Now I enjoy him both as a singer and a lyricist. His old Savannah home is maintained by a determined fan.

I'd been going to is now The Savannah College of Art & Design.

As I entered my teenage years I grew increasingly impatient to be out of Savannah. I was looking forward to my days at Caltech or MIT (no kidding, gang aft agley and all that stuff). Learning that I'd like to get naked with a skinny, winsome boy, getting out grew to a necessity of daily sanity. So, at eighteen, I left.

There's nostalgia for a few things back home. I don't know that Oglethorpe really formed Savannah's original layout after Beijing's. Or even some eighteenth century British imagining of it. The twenty-four squares in what has come to be known since I left as the Victorian District are what I miss most. Some of the squares are like tiny parks. All of them have one or more neat things: statues of people, the huge rock atop the grave of Tomochichi, an 18th century Indian chief. Some of the parks have merely wooden benches, other have impressively long stone benches any one of which could hold the congregation of many a small church.

Growing up with hundreds of old houses (a few very old) you don't regard them much. There's a dense stretch of them back in Savannah. Now all annoyingly tourist attractions; when I was a little kid people still lived in them.

Savannah's downtown wasn't lovely. Regrettably it grew less so. The ten-story bank my momma worked in was just a big building with a stone façade, pretty common among the old buildings of Manhattan. When they replaced it the surprisingly powerful Savannah Historic Preservation Society forced them to replace it with a building only four stories tall. But they did let them build something that looks like a giant Kleenex box that would be more comfortable in San Jose.

The Riverfront District was becoming commercial as I was growing up. When I was small there was only the Confederate Museum, a public library branch (I remember checking out Asimov's robot stories there) and a couple of law offices. Otherwise the old cotton warehouses were deserted. You could walk down the cobblestone street to the river and you wouldn't see much aside from the statue of the Waving Girl (A woman who waved a towel at passing ships, the statue is a reproduction of one in Italy. Victor's mother was a pal of hers and in her last years when she was broke sold copies of an old picture of the Waving Girl to tourist shops.)

Even before I left shops like one called Untiques had sprung up. On a much later trip I discovered a gay club had been opened down there. I didn't go in but it had to be better than the old Basement that was nothing more than its name implies.

Living in Durham whose greatest architectural glory is probably nothing more than an old Woolworth's I miss the old surface splendors and charms of my hometown. But not enough to ever consider living there again.

It is still a backwater. And it stinks. When Gordon came to visit me he complained about the odor. I hadn't a clue. Later when I'd left and returned home I learned what he meant. Savannah's most important employer was the Union Camp plant that was, perhaps is, the world's largest supplier of paper bags. Downtown smelled like the world's largest collection of rotten eggs. Nothing like the smell Durham had before the tobacco companies moved out, the scent of freshly harvested, unsmoked tobacco.

No harm that I've divagated down memory lane but I didn't intend to. Funnily enough I still haven't written the journal entry I'd intended. So I'm going to chop this off and try for a third time or spend my time trying to achieve some more readily achieved goal

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Politeness & Racism

My third attempt to say something about a possible quality that was induced or more likely defined by my hometown. This time the point is finally made. Then reduced to doubt. As it should be.

Savannah fancied itself. Did it have reason to? It was the oldest town, the closest kin to civilization amid an agglomeration of wretched redneck towns.

I'm glad that I was born there instead of hideopolises like Macon and Columbus, GA. Blind, manly ugliness held reign there.

When I became conscious of where I was born and raised I felt that it was in a time warp. Savannah hadn't left the 19th century without ever agreeing to be in the 20th (It is such a nuisance to have moved on to another century. I keep starting to type 'this century' but that one recently retired.)

I'm not sure what the racial politics of Savannah were. As a little boy I was awakened on night by noisy people marching down the street (something I later realized must've been an early civil rights march). The schools were integrated when I turned thirteen. Three years later I'd enter high school and we'd every now and then evacuate the school for a bomb threat.

But by that time nobody demonstrated, black or white. I'm not sure which was my first exposure to racism. When J.B. Stoner ran for governor. I was pretty weirded out by his TV commercial. In front of the Confederate Flag with Dixie playing in the background he swore to clean out the 'jungle bunny' schools by shipping all of 'them' back to Africa. The TV station and Savannah Morning News ran disclaimers that election laws required them to run his ads. Only a few morons voted to have him become governor. The black Alabama church had long ago been bombed so it was actually satisfying when he was put in jail for his part.

Thinking back I saw his newspaper, The Thunderbolt, before the commercials. But crazy crap about Jewish bankers controlling the world and attempt to prove that Africans had evolved from chickens (with photos!) impressed my young self with nothing more than their eerie craziness. (The paper had been left on our lawn after we'd moved from a white trash housing project to a suburban neighborhood.)

In an earlier entry I mentioned going to the public library with my friend Larry Williams. Later I realized that I also remember Glenn Kersey*. He introduced me to the term 'darkies' who'd been doing something he didn't like. He was probably the first racist I'd ever met.

It was years before I could place 'darkies' in its place in a nasty bit of American pop culture faux-sentimentality; the imagined happy life of black people living on a plantation. Old minstrel shows (I saw a very late one as kid in Savannah, far too young to grasp what I was watching) and popular songs well into the 1930s celebrated the happy, lazy days of the 'shiftless coon.' Can you imagine a similar detachment from actuality rhyming about the joys of life in prison? (Of course there was Hogan's Heroes.)

Being older, more polite, having more surface delight, Savannah had lots of illusions about itself: urbanity, civility and gentility. Or some people did. I suspect it would've sounded crazy to my parents.

I'm sure the illusion of gentility isn't uncommon in old Southern towns. Savannah's 'Sister City' Charleston has to be full of it. Probably the entire state of Virginia buys into the myth as well.

Off and on I've wondered how much it influenced me. Is asking a mall store clerk "I beg your pardon Miss, could you tell me the time?" odd? Victor found it embarrassing pretentious?

And when Gordon came for his visit I wondered if his seemingly 'brutal' way of talking wasn't because he was a Yankee. That is easily retracted. Gordon was unusually plainspoken. The double negatives of careful, defensive courtesy aren't anything that would've come naturally to him.

Moving to Boston I was almost shell-shocked by the rudeness. Or maybe the fear. The Boston Strangler had left his mark. Almost every apartment had a warning that if anybody comes to repair anything and you haven't called for him or been told by your apartment manager had sent for him to call the police. I didn't like it any more than I did their ugly voices.

Did I inherit some overly delicate notions of deportment from Savannah; from watching Donna Reed on TV?

The illusions and perhaps the reality of gentle behavior were there in Savannah. Not in my parents' house. I've called them white trash in some of my journal entries. That was unfair. They both had tight ideas of neatness and appropriateness. The grass was always cut (unlike 116 Davidson). Nothing was ever left to rust in the yard. They were just lower middleclass people trying to do the right thing: conforming. Being thought odd was likely their deepest fear.

Savannah's notions of 'high class' may have snuck in insensibly.

Those of us who think ourselves outsiders often place ourselves as aristocracy. However trashy and proletarian it imagined itself punk is a handy example of being better than conventional folks. If only by being 'worse.'

Maybe part of my personality took some of its color from my hometown. Or books, movies, TV shows framed my aspirations and Savannah supplied the fretwork.

I never grew to be rude. At least absently mindedly rude. Although, like most of us, I'd say my purposeful rudeness was proper wrath. But a solid sense of considerate soft-spoken words came to me in later years. And being a good neighbor. Soft-spoken I am by habit and upbringing. I'll always be an anonymous negligent neighbor.

I'm half-satisfied with this entry. I'm a little pissed at myself or letting Word talk me out of my beloved sentence fragments. And as weary as I am of people who fondle with their childhood my three attempts leave me annoyed with the details forgotten, the nuances neglected.

Of course, you poor folks who grew up elsewhere were just plain cursed with bad manners, weren't you?

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Being called racist

I rarely regret that I dash my entries off without holding them back. But my recent few about growing up in Savannah are an exception. I can't resist adding the kitchen sink.

The man who groped me was tall, strong and black. A few people in the hotel said that complained only because he was black. Because I was from Georgia. We all flounder helplessly at fall attributions but that hit me more deeply than most. Like most trivial brouhahas it was quickly forgotten. But my memory never will.

Everybody who was born down here know that many elsewhere regard the us as a category of American, more vicious and ignorant, really more racist than a Pittsburgh steelworker or a New York longshoreman. When the worst integration riots in the US hit Boston, a state that has prided itself on its liberality and urbanity for much of the countries history I couldn't help but sardonically smile to myself. I'd rather have not seen it happen anywhere but if the ugliness had to surface anywhere it might as well be 'up' there. It was the same when I read there were more Klansmen in Connecticut than in Georgia.

As I wrote earlier, I don't identify as a Southerner. The revival of satisfaction in having been born down here is sometimes distasteful, other times baffling. Distasteful because you know much of it is an attempt to hide from what the weak-minded find confusing in the present world. Some likely suffer from the almost inevitable identification with the happenstance of birth and fib to themselves. Sometimes they like to claim that Southerners understood black Americans better. There was greater contiguity perhaps, probably nothing more. Or the silly old canard that the antebellum elite were more cultured than their Yankee opposite numbers. The North produced most of the literati and intellectuals.

The wholly liberal Southerners that feel compelled to defend their homeland are the ones that baffle me. It might merely be that they know that they aren't racist, their friends aren't racist. They resent being reduced to a category. I guess my own sardonic smile is an instance of that even though laughing at the redneck ignorami is always a treat

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