Ghosts

Having spent a decade in Europe, I am no stranger to cities of great charm and colorful history. But last week, I traveled to Savannah with an old friend of fifty plus years. And I feel I was treated to an extraordinary American experience — a city vibrant as the third most active port in the nation, but richly exotic and teeming with fine monuments and lovingly preserved architectural relics.

Savannah has an aura of almost alien mystery, with its exquisitely detailed wrought iron window grills and gates, its tropical courtyard plantings and its verdant park squares. Southern live oak trees sport graceful clumps of diaphanous Spanish Moss everywhere, creating an unearthly atmosphere on late summer evenings.

The city takes full advantage of its hauntingly romantic atmosphere by offering tourists late night spectre hunting tours. We took one of these walking tours and I am proud to say that photographing through the gates of the Colonial Park Cemetery, I seem to have captured what is referred to (by those who study Savannah’s restless afterlife) as a "white orb." I was assured that it was a good spirit. Phew!

Savannah, the reader probably knows, has a troubled and bloody history. Significant Revolutionary War slaughters took place there, and the city was besieged during the Civil War. (General Sherman, thankfully, saved the town from total destruction because he needed its port for bringing supplies to the Union Army.) The city was twice ravaged by fire. And of course there were the multiple Yellow Fever epidemics, not to mention a few hurricanes. One is tempted to attribute at least some of these disasters to the karma of an active 18th and 19th century slave trade.

But Savannah’s story is not all cruelty and suffering. It boasts some happy events and sweet serendipities. For example, its beginnings in the 1730s were marked by an unusually cordial relationship between the city’s founder, James Oglethorpe, and the chieftain of the Yamacraw Indian tribe, Tomochichi, who was instrumental in helping General Oglethorpe to create a flourishing first British settlement on the Savannah River. The city also curiously hosts what is probably the only neo-Gothic synagogue in the world — built a century and a half ago by an Irishman who evidently was not familiar with the more typical forms of Jewish houses of worship. In fact, there is a huge organ in that place, apparently installed in 1878 by descendents of the Orthodox Sephardi families who were still leaders of the Jewish community. (The Portuguese Jewish community, like the English, traced its settlement in Savannah to the 1730s.)

I don't suppose there is anything to remind one more starkly of the swift and relentless passage of time than to travel to a self-consciously old city as an older woman in the company of an old friend from college. My friend and I are both still physically fit and determined to march relentlessly forward in our lives --pursuing old passions and fresh interests. But our stay in Savannah put into stark relief for us that our pasts are far longer than our futures. Hardly a wonder, then, that a lot of our conversation centered on change, for good and ill; on friends and relatives who had passed; and on shared memories of our college time that were at times vague and incomplete.

Indeed, it struck me, during that Savannah visit, that only in collaboration were we able to piece together some of the shakier recollections of our college years. But I think we left each other’s company feeling we had achieved some mastery over memory. Our youths, we concluded, were mostly happy. But we also had some old ghosts to put to rest.