Impressions of Savannah [Bryan]

I just got back from Savannah, GA. It is a beautiful city, a place that, without the tourists and modern hotels, would almost be frozen in time. The city is interspersed with dozens of garden blocks. Some of these blocks have fountains, others have monuments, almost all of them surrounded by stately homes or soaring white churches. The city has been left as it was, not resculpted to fit modern convenience. In downtown Savannah there is little parking, no fast-food restaurants, uneven staircases, and streets that are better for walking than driving. Indeed, I have never seen a place with so many historical markers. I saw Flannery O'Connor's childhood home and read about the contributions of the South to the Revolutionary War. The city bears the cracks and tarnish of an old city. Some of it seems in disrepair, but it is loved all the more because of it. The city boasts a charming (if touristy) riverfront, loaded with restaurants and fun shops that now inhabit the old cotton wearhouses. The river front is a gathering place for musicians, dancers, and (on Halloween at least) slightly intoxicated partiers. In short, Savannah has almost everything that Columbus lacks: a lively water front, a physically embodied sense of place and history, and so forth. Where Columbus rips everything down (even its treasures) and starts over, I get the impression that nothing is ever changed in Savannah.

This brings up a sense of vague disquiet that I felt walking the lovely streets of Savannah. It is almost a dream-like place, a place uncomfortable with what the world has become. There was much discussion, for example, of the cotton trade on the historical plaques that explained the role of Savannah as a key port city. But it was also a major unloading place for African slaves, who had been ripped from their homes and packed into grotesque ships. There is almost no mention of this anywhere. There was only one marker I could find in Savannah that dealt with the slave trade -- a fairly lonely bronze statue of a black family surrounded by broken chains, with a Maya Angelou inscription:

We were stolen, sold and bought together from the African continent. We got on the slave ships together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships together in each other's excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown overboard together....

While recognizing slave suffering, it offered no explanation of the major role of Savannah (or American at large) in that suffering. As a city, it hides from the condemnation of the modern world. Like other places, I suppose, it tries to pretend that its "best face" is its only face. It is a beautiful city, with nightmares in the shadows.