Since the publication in 1994 of John Berendt's bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the tranquillity of Savannah has been shattered.
The Taxi driver continued clipping his toenails while he drove us to the Howard Johnson Motel. One little finger on the steering wheel was just plenty. "Y'all staying at the Ho Jo? I know where that's at." he assured us in his southern drawl as he drove that bashed up machine; the same speed at which people in Savannah talk. The speed of growing moss. Every syllable is drawn out to its maximum extension and hangs in the still air. Every sentence in tune with the kind of soporific blanket of heat and humidity which lies over the town's squares.
All over Savannah, people are standing on corners, sitting on benches in the elegant parks, talking and fanning themselves. The scent of azaleas slows everything down even more. Cars seem to drive around on tip-toes, whispering. The balmy breeze is about all that keeps you awake in this town where the squares, draped in Spanish moss hanging heavily from the ancient oaks, look more like quiet, sleepy back-room cafes.
Inside the hotels, things are even less rushed. Black waiters dressed in white starched jackets - the lingering culture of deep south, colonialism and cotton fields - express no surprise that you use the menu as a fan. The Irish have been here since the very beginning in 1733, according to the legendary O'Connell's Irish pub on East Broad Street, and Savannah hosts what is said to be the second largest St Patrick's Day parade in the US, with over half a million people in attendance. The sleepy town, with some 10 per cent of the population claiming Irish descent, wakes up for a party that goes on days around the waterfront.
Savannah takes its time emerging from the era of white supremacy. Tourists hang on to the lingering Gone with the Wind atmosphere and the romanticism of the cotton industry. Each leafy square is surrounded by beautifully renovated townhouses built by cotton barons and shipping magnates. The jalousied porches, colonnades, cantilevered staircases and ornate grill work rival the houses of New Orleans.
Savannah. . .spoken in that langourous southern drawl, it has the immediate effect of slowing the pulse down a beat or two. Songwriter Johnny Mercer called it a "sweet, indolent place for a boy to grow up in". With such ornate moss curtained streets everywhere, it seems impossible to rouse this semidormant, Georgian town out of it's hot, baking sleep. But since the publication in 1994 of John Berendt's bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (in some ways it's like what Ulysses was to Dublin), the tranquillity of Savannah has been shattered. "That book", the inhabitants now call it with great disdain. This 265year-old town has taken on another layer of history to cover the relics of black slavery. It is now besieged, winter and summer, by mesmerised tourists who arrive to gape at the house where a wealthy antique dealer named Jim Williams shot and killed his male lover in 1981. Right now, Savannah leaps even further into the spotlight with the release of the movie of the book, directed by Clint Eastwood. This follows in the footsteps of Forrest Gump, which was also filmed there and which has already turned the park bench where Tom Hanks spouted his syrupy, philosophy of "life is a box of chocolates" into a shrine for "gumpers".
The antagonism towards Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil comes mostly from the landed gentry, Savannah blue-bloods voicing their animosity at the publication of the machinations of Savannah society. The book focuses on a homosexual protagonist and features a drag queen, which you don't expect to find in Savannah. New Yorker John Berendt, who spent seven years in Savannah researching the book, has been accused of giving away all of the secrets of the town and exposing its mysteries to the world.
"The worst thing you can say about people is the truth and the book is all about the truth," says historian John Duncan who runs an antique shop on beautiful Monterey Square. "John Berendt came to town with his tape recorder and let everyone hang themselves. Until then Savannah had been a town dying on the vine." Savannah has become a beautiful, sleepy town with a secret, sleazy world behind those mossy drapes. The winner is undoubtedly tourism, and the industry has ballooned since the publication of the book, raking in an extra $100 million so far.
But no amount of gawking tourists, or what some local residents are calling the "circus atmosphere", can take away from the romance that is Savannah, which remains "luscious" in Berendt's own words. The hypnotic appeal of the city lies around its gridlike foundation of 21 squares, sleepy green spaces with monuments and fountains. Savannah is also fringed by marshes where alligators bask in the sun. Okefenokee Swamp Park, which the native indians called "the land of trembling earth" is an hour's drive away, while Charleston is two hours to the north. It's an 18-mile drive to the Atlantic coast which has many small and exclusive holiday islands. Jekyll Island was summer home to the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and other wealthy and powerful families in the early 1900s. Its majestic houses, built with painstaking attention to detail, are almost oppressively ornate. To buy a house on some of these islands you still have to be voted in by the islanders.
One thing you can have anywhere around Savannah is grits, a corn-type porridge. The cotton warehouses along the river have been restored and turned into restaurants and shops. Here you can experiment on real southern cooking - hush puppies and grits, biscuits with gravy. The fish is fantastic - yellow-finned tuna, red snapper and blackened grouper. Outside on the streets the balmy air will carry the scent of tropical blossoms, occasionally blotted out by the sweetly pungent fumes of the wood pulp factory outside town.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt is published by Vintage.