Savannah’s Other Cemetery

By Shari Randall

 

Ever since John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was published in 1986, many have fallen under the spell of hauntingly beautiful Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. Readers embraced Berendt’s exploration of Savannah’s mysterious dark side and the book was made into a film directed by Clint Eastwood. The iconic cover image from the book and film was The Bird Girl statue by Sylvia Shaw Judson, which had graced the cemetery but was moved to the Telfair Museum when fans trampled the graves at Bonaventure to get a closer look and selfie. 

 

On a recent trip, I discovered that Savannah has other intriguing cemeteries and one can be found just steps from Chippewa Square. 

 

Colonial Park Cemetery lies in the heart of Savannah’s historic district. Those interested in history will enjoy a stroll among the luminaries of Savannah’s colonial past. Those who enjoy a good spooky story will revel in a ghost tour of what’s been called Savannah’s most haunted cemetery.

The cemetery was established in 1750 and was known by several other names over the years, including the Old Brick Cemetery, South Broad Street Cemetery, Christ Church Cemetery, and simply, the Old Cemetery. Luminaries abound in Colonial Park, including military heroes, US Continental Congressmen, and the marvelously named Button Gwinnett, Georgia’s signer of the Declaration of Independence, who was killed in a duel just outside the gates of the cemetery.

 

I’ve found that writers have an affinity for graveyards. Cemeteries are a supermarket of names, especially for writers of historical fiction. From inscriptions, one can learn so much about a time period, including which names were popular. If I ever need to name a character with Southern charm and a Savannah pedigree, these names gleaned from the stones at Colonial Park Cemetery might turn up on the page: Patridge Adams, Preserved Alger, Oliver Anguheart,  Mary Ann Victoire Armaignac, Valeria Josephine Burroughs, Philura Paine Spalding Claghorn, Missouri Douglas.

 

Besides being a trove of interesting names, cemeteries are full of stories. 

 

In Colonial Park, historic plaques and markers stand by headstones and cenotaphs, offering silent history lessons, inspiration, and more mysteries. Especially evocative is the Duellist’s Grave, a memorial to Lieutenant James Wilde, who died on January 16, 1815 in a duel with Captain Roswell P. Johnson. The cause of the dispute in this “affair of honor” is undisclosed, but the disdain of Lt. Wilde’s brother for Captain Johnson is clear. What caused these officers of the same regiment to meet and exchange four rounds of gunfire? Only the ghosts know.

 

Do you enjoy a good stroll in a cemetery? Or is it just me?

Shari Randall is the author of the Agatha Award-winning Lobster Shack mystery series from St. Martin's Press. You can see her travel photos and learn more about her books on her Facebook page, Shari Randall Author.

 

 

Walking Among the Graves of Laurel Grove

My Google map incorrectly identified the place I was standing as Bowels Ford Park. I did a doubletake, then clicked on the website link and saw that the entry was supposed to read BOWLES park. I also found an article from the Savannah Morning News about the troubles here, how for a while it had indeed smelled like something bowel-centric. But the city had cleaned up the algae that clotted the water, and now people reportedly pull fish from the still flat pond, big ones, bream and catfish.

 

I had not come here for the park, however. I was here for the graveyard that bordered it, the two places separated by a metal fence and a thick line of trees and foliage. Laurel Grove Cemetery has two sections: Laurel Grove North, the whites only section, and Laurel Grove South, which was the final resting place for hundreds of Savannah's black residents starting in 1853. I was exploring as an author, which meant that in this particular case, I was most concerned about whether or not a person of ill intent could flee from park to graveyard over the boundary fence.

It was quiet that day, not surprising for a Tuesday morning. A cool breeze came in over the water, rustling the azaleas and the last of the camellias, making the bachelor buttons bob their heads. The landscape was green with spruce and cypress, live oaks and sweetgum, glossy magnolias four stories high. Beyond the fence where the water lay, an egret came in like a hang glider, and across the wide grass, a pack of turkey buzzards circled high and distant, their shadows crossing my path. A woman with midnight black hair and studded goth jeans walked a dog as fluffy and insubstantial as a pocket of dryer lint. And even though the day was ripe with sunshine and mild as milk, not a single car was on the road

Laurel Grove remains an active cemetery, recent burials scattered with the graves of slaves and freedmen, many of them alive and thriving long before the Civil War. Some graves were decorated with Italian marble angels weeping across the tombs; other resting places were marked by only crumbling brick and rusted pipe rail. The pauper's field had no marked graves whatsoever, only a sign. And everywhere there was shade—the laurels, of course, but also the wide cool laps of live oaks, gray and green and dappled.

It was lovely. But I was not here as a tourist, or even as a resident enjoying one of Savannah's historical gems. I was a mystery author sizing up a setting. So I noticed the emptiness and seclusion, the many places where one could lurk or hide or duck out of sight. I tried to imagine the place in October, which is when my story takes place. I tried to think like a criminal.

I made my notes, took my photos. I did my research. But one day I want to return—no notebook, no camera—simply to wander and ponder. Beginnings and endings, loss and memory, history and imagination. They say in Savannah that every step you take, you take with the dead beneath you. They are correct. And for taphophiles (cemetery lovers) like me, that makes Savannah an excellent place to live. And write.

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Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver mysteries. The sixth book in this Atlanta-based series—Necessary Ends—is available now. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and has served as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.

Haunted and Haunting

For Christmas, my family gave me a special treat—the book Dreadful Places by Aaron Mahnke, the creator of Lore, one of my favorite podcasts. I am entranced by Mahnke’s stories, spun at a molasses pace, as if he were telling tales around a midnight campfire. Every account is true…as true as ghost stories and monster stories and mysterious-killer-with-an-ax stories can be, which is to say, as true as the person telling the tale believes it to be.

His book is just as spine-tingling. Dreadful Places focuses on—you guessed it—the folklore of mysterious locations, places of heinous crimes or spectral sightings or unexplained phenomena. Mahnke quotes H. P. Lovecraft in the opening epigraph: “Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.” And he does explore the usual points of interest on any haunted history tour: Salem, New Orleans, Civil War battlefields. But his opening essay is on a subject very close to home for me. In fact, it is home—Savannah, Georgia. And it is strange, yes, but in no way far.

I have recently moved back to Savannah full-time, having spent two decades inland, on the edge of the Lowcounty. Reacquainting myself with this expanse of marsh and wetland is an organic process; it requires getting personal with tides and mud and a backyard that reverts to its feral ways after any rainfall. I had forgotten how close this place holds its secrets, how its stories are written in blood and brack water, changing each time they are told. The darkness is thick here. It has weight and presence. And some nights, when I am alone with that darkness, I would bet that it also has sentience.

Even the crows speak a different language here, a wild trilling tongue like something out of a Tarzan movie, at least until they catch me spying on them. And then they revert right back to their ordinary caw-caw-cawing. Just us birds here, they seem to be saying. Carry on.

My series protagonist is from Savannah. Unlike me, a daughter of the flatlands, she was born in Savannah. Like the crows, she speaks a wilder language than I do. But we both share an attraction to between-places, especially those that lie between worlds. The veil is thin here in the Lowcountry, they say, and our history layered, the past and present permeable. Mahnke agrees. He says there is something in Savannah “lurking at the edges like a shadowy figure, waiting to reveal itself. Maybe it's those shady squares or the tangle of Spanish moss that hangs upon so many of the trees like the web of some unnatural spider. Savannah has just as much darkness as it does beauty.”

Savannah doesn’t feel like home. Home is supposed to be cozy and comfortable, a place to let down your guard. That's not Savannah. It doesn’t put me at ease. But it does feel fertile. Lush. Seductive. And really, what better setting could a writer ask for?

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Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver mysteries. The sixth book in this Atlanta-based series—Necessary Ends—is available now. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and has served as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.

Where We Begin

“All writers are local somewhere.” – Flannery O’Connor

I have always been fascinated with writerly spaces. Mine is my office, which is filled with things that inspire me to be creative: a comfy loveseat with a view of dogwoods and azaleas, shelves lined with my most cherished books, bowls of crystals and stones to run my fingers through. When I enter this room and sit down, my brain recognizes the cue and shifts into appropriate gear.

I have toured Ernest Hemingway’s Key West home, where I laid eyes upon his desk and petted his six-toed cats. I have knelt in wet grass and smelled the daffodils that inspired William Wordsworth. And last month, I stood by the window where the young Flannery O’Connor first gazed at Savannah and began to write about the South that she saw through that wavy glass.

The Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home sits on Lafayette Square, one of Savannah’s twenty-four downtown mini-parks arranged in a neat grid pattern. It is grassy and shaded with live oaks, the murmur of traffic mingling with the burble of a fountain. Much about it has changed since Flannery lived there in the early decades of the twentieth century, but one thing has remained the same: it provides a stunning view of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, the Mother Church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Savannah.

Flannery attended mass at that cathedral every single morning, along with her mother. It was one of the first things she ever saw as a baby, its spires dominating the landscape just outside the window next to her bassinet. In a similar fashion, her Catholicism would loom large in her writings, though not always as obviously or picturesquely. As Flannery herself explained, “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

The rest of the home was equally revealing, richly restored with help from the Savannah College of Art and Design, whose students researched and replicated the décor as closely as possible, from the colors of the paint to the gilded gold trim that runs along the top of the walls, an opulent touch in an otherwise modest dwelling.

We saw the bathroom where young Flannery would hold “reading salons” with her friends, arranging pillows in the bathtub and decorating the toilet with fresh flowers (she would get in trouble many times for flushing those flowers, and also for featuring Grimm’s Fairy Tales in her readings—the violence and bloodshed in those stories delighted the precocious Flannery but terrified her more sheltered playmates). We saw the yard where she taught her chicken to walk backwards, which so startled her aunt that she called in a film crew (you can watch that video of Flannery and her amazing chickens, for even though the fowl refused to perform its trick for the camera, the director managed to fix the problem just fine, as you can see for yourself here).

We also saw her library, which is filled with Flannery’s books. Some of them contain what amounts to one-star reviews written in her elementary school handwriting. She was a harsh critic—“I didn’t like this book very much,” reads one summation—but she obviously loved the concept of books as much as she loved language and words and stories. Her devotion shows everywhere you look.

I look now at my own writing space with fresh eyes. Though I do not think my childhood home will be immortalized, I do think I can learn a great deal about my writerly self by pondering the view from my bedroom window. Scuppernong vines planted by my father stretch along the edge of dense woods, a liminal zone where wildness meets civilization. It looks safe out there, but the lush grass grows tall in the spring and hides rattlesnakes and cottonmouths. The train no longer runs behind those trees, so I no longer hear that lonesome call in the night.

Except that I do, no matter where I live and write. Just like I imagine Flannery always saw those elegant French Gothic spires, even on her farm, even on her sick bed, even with her eyes shut. 

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Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph mysteries for Poisoned Pen Press. The sixth book in this Atlanta-based series—Necessary Ends—is available now. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and serves as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.