Thursday, November 11 to Friday, November 12, 2021
Well, now you know that we did make it under the McKinley Washington Bridge and didn’t go aground at any of the shoaled areas. Thank you, Mr. Wentworth, for teaching me how to do word problems.
We spent Thursday night at Isle of Hope Marina in Savannah and met up with Gary and Leslie from Happy Together, another Bahamas boat from last spring, for a delicious dinner out. They’ve been ahead of us on the ICW since October but will leave their boat in Savannah for the holidays and then head east in January like so many of us. Finding a place to keep our New England boats in Florida for a while has been more challenging this year. The marinas were quieter last year with fewer people traveling due to Covid. We expect the Bahamas to be way more crowded, too.
After we visited Savannah last December we both read John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the “non-fiction novel” that follows the early 1980s murder and subsequent legal trials of wealthy antiques dealer Jim Williams who shot his young lover, Danny Hansford, a volatile “handyman” in his employ. The book is populated with a gallery of remarkably eccentric characters, including Minerva, a voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight—specifically, Bonaventure Cemetery. Visitors in search of the special “grave dirt” that Minerva used and/or to view the Bird Girl statue featured on the front cover of the book, have turned Bonaventure into the #2 top tourist attraction in Savannah according to TripAdvisor! Driven by FOMO, last spring we borrowed the Isle of Hope “Mercedes” loaner car and booked a tour.
Who knew a cemetery would be so fascinating!! We had a fabulous tour guide who explained that the cemetery stands on about 100 acres that were originally part of a large plantation owned by the Mullryne family before the Revolution. British sympathizers, their property was repatriated and they fled to Nassau. (Is there a theme here?) Subsequent owners of the plantation used part of it as a private family burial area until 1868 when one of them formed the Evergreen Cemetery Company. During the Victorian era, prominent families of Savannah began to purchase plots and erected elaborate monuments, commissioned statues, and created gated gardens in the new, private cemetery on the shores of the Wilmington River. With its curving pathways, cool breezes off the water, and its “natural cathedral of live oaks,” it was common for families to meet and picnic in the hauntingly beautiful and peaceful cemetery all the while providing a place of comfort and solace to bereaved friends and relatives.
But what makes the cemetery fascinating is the unraveling of all the symbolism of the monuments, statues, gates and gardens.
This plot contains a tall columned monument in the center. The columns announce that this family is a “pillar of Savannah society” yet the urn they surround is symbolic of the belief that our earthly lives exist only from “ashes to ashes.”
This statue marks the grave of a young girl. The bouquet of rose buds indicate that she “never had a chance to bloom.”
During the Victorian era, the open area below the cross would have been a bed of flowers, each with its own special meaning. Note the infant “bed” on the left.
Like the GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) insignia at my great-grandfather’s grave in West Boxford, Southern veterans of the Civil War have this CSA (Confederate Soldiers of America) memorial marking their graves.
The statuary is really quite remarkable and often contains clues about the deceased. For example, an open book indicates a teacher or preacher; a lily indicates belief in the Resurrection; a rose on a woman’s grave means she died while “still beautiful.”
Johnny Mercer, lyricist, songwriter, singer and co-founder of Capitol Records, grew up in Savannah and is buried in the family plot. Our tour guide explained that where you are buried in Bonaventure Cemetery also says a lot about you and your family. Savannah’s most prominent 19th century families have plots in the center circle called Plantation Square. The Mercers are off to the side. Way off.
Even the shrubbery has meaning. Note the Sego Palms planted around their plot—indicating the family’s “rags to riches” history. The granite bench is inscribed with some of Johnny Mercer’s most famous songs: Moon River, Days of Wine and Roses, Skylark, You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby, Autumn Leaves, etc.—a tremendous contributor to the American songbook.
The most eerie grave we saw has to be the one pictured below.
It is difficult for us to imagine what it must have been like to live with the scourge of yellow fever during the 1800’s in Savannah. Three outbreaks ravaged the city and many of the hundreds who died in the 1876 epidemic are buried at Bonaventure. It’s a dreadful disease and back then no one realized how it was contracted (mosquitos) so no one wanted to touch the body of the deceased out of fear of becoming infected themselves. Horrifying as it seems, doctors sometimes mistook patients experiencing comas as having died. They were quickly buried—alive! It became common practice to tie a string on the wrist of the deceased and attach it to a bell outside the grave so that if they awoke, they could ring for help and be “saved by the bell,” according to our guide. I thought she was perpetrating an urban legend until I saw the bell next to the granite stone at the base. Shudder. Shiver.
No wonder Savannah is known as the most haunted city in America.
