Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt Read Free Book Online Page B

did notice that none of them rang the bell or knocked. They just pushed the door open and walked in. Unlocked doors were highly unusual, even in Savannah. I assumed that eventually all of this would explain itself, and in the meantime I set about becoming acquainted with my new surroundings.
    The garden part of the city with its geometrical arrangement of squares encompassed the three-square-mile historic district, which was built before the Civil War. City fathers abandoned the squares later on when the city expanded southward. Immediately south of the historic district lay a wide swath of Victorian gingerbread houses. These gave way to Ardsley Park, an enclave of early twentieth-century houses with proud façades that featured columns, pediments, porticoes, and terraces. South of Ardsley Park, the scale of the houses diminished. There were bungalows built in the thirties and forties, then ranch houses of the fifties and sixties, and finally the southside, a flat semirural terrain thatcould have been anywhere in America except for occasional echoes of Dixie such as the Twelve Oaks Shopping Plaza and the Tara Cinemas.
    At the Georgia Historical Society, an obliging librarian clarified a few matters for me. No, she said, there had never been any such woman as Hard-hearted Hannah. The librarian suspected that Hannah had simply been the product of a songwriter needing a rhyme. She added with a sigh that sometimes she wished Hannah had been the vamp of Montana instead. 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 special trip to Savannah in honor of the maiden voyage—a fair indication of its importance.
    I browsed among the books, prints, and maps in the society’s reading room, a spacious hall with a high ceiling and a double tier of bookshelves along the walls. The Civil War loomed largein this room, and Savannah’s role in it was a story that seemed to say a great deal about the city:
    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