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Midnight in the garden of college bars and bluesmen

Date 3/16/2000 12:00 AM | Topic: Features

When I travel, which, unfortunately is quite rare, I must stick out as the most gawk-eyed tourist with my camera in one hand, map in the other, carefully reading all of the "historical marker" plaques posted left and right. I tend to flock towards the things a tourist is supposed to, the museums and monuments, etc. I rarely feel I've even scratched the surface of the real culture I'm faced with.

On my recent trip to Savannah, Georgia, I made a conscious effort to blend in. In the Garden of Good and Evil, it's easy to get sucked in, to forget where you came from. During our first night in Savannah, Steve Markey ('01) and I walked, not knowing what exactly we were looking for -- a smoky blues bar, a nightclub, perhaps an all-night café. Nevertheless, we found ourselves walking through beautiful rows of colonial style homes and brownstones fronted by the oaks and Spanish moss lining the streets, the central squares with fountains and statues, a pre-Civil War graveyard with tombstones so old that the elements had worn the engraved dates and names away.

On a Thursday night the city seemed empty, but Steve and I sensed that there was a life pulsing underneath the surface undetectable by outsiders. After all, I had read "the book", John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Savannah was the home of voodoo priests and priestesses, piano playing con-artists and gamblers, flamboyant black drag queens. Savannah is the biggest small town in the south.

The town is thick with landmarks, but thicker with lush green magnolia trees and Spanish moss so that looking back you can't tell where you came from. As we made our way around the neighborhood we saw the same man several times. Walking down streets lined with SUV's, Cadillac's, and expensive looking homes, he was pushing a baby stroller filled with junk. The last time we saw him, he was standing between two buildings at a large green dumpster searching for treasures, maybe food, we didn't know and we didn't stop. Our first night in Savannah and we were both reminded that however magical and mysterious the city may be, it was still vulnerable to the poverty and economic and racial divides that every city experiences.

After taking an hour to find the bustle of Broughton Street with its shops, theaters, restaurants and bars, we settled for following the students of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and their hang-outs near the river. Instead of eccentric characters, Southern belles, and authentic live blues and jazz, we found places filled with Fratercrombie boys moving to Will Smith on the dance floor. I wondered if these students knew what kind of problems festered underneath.

During our second day, after attending convention speakers and presenting our papers, Steve and I were ready for another attempt at infiltrating the "real" Savannah culture. We found our way to the historic river district. Although it was lined with the typical gift shops and restaurants, we walked down a steep alleyway paved with jagged bumpy cobblestones. On our way down the hill, we heard the wailing, guttural sound of a man singing in a courtyard by the river. He was sitting on a bench, hammering away at a cheap guitar with curled strings hanging from the end of its neck, belting out "Red House" and "Down Home Blues" through toothless gums, stomping his feet with the torn and ragged cuffs of his pants bouncing around his dirty scuffed sneakers. His companion sat silently next to him, a black man with a long white beard, a black porkpie hat and leather pants. During the chorus of the songs he would call out the refrain, sometimes standing up and doing a little two-step twirl dance. Steve and I sat cross-legged on the wall surrounding them and listened until it was time for them to pack up. We threw a few dollars in their bucket and moved on.

Our daytime excursions through the city showed us one Savannah; the restored colonial courthouses and churches, the antiques shops and art galleries, one small piece of the city's identity. At night, a new side was shown to us, a side that contained homeless men searching dumpsters for food, men playing guitar in the parks for a living, and an entire class of white suburban college students that seem oblivious to what was happening three blocks away. I now wonder how much I know of my own surroundings. Am I as isolated and detached as the Savannah students are? Do I really see past the picturesque Decorah, with its cobblestone roads, historic buildings and eccentric characters, to see what types of poverty and social ills might be building underneath my eyes? Perhaps it took a few nights as an outsider in the Garden of Good and Evil to realize it.

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Peter Schletty
Chips Features Editor

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