My wife and I were absolutely charmed by our first, too-short, two-day visit to Savannah, GA. The city has deep and fascinating history, a strong sense of place with a great story-telling tradition, lovely boulevards and manicured parks, trees covered with Spanish moss, and cemeteries filled with notable personages, spirits and ghost stories.
Video Clips: Harbor. Walking Around With Our Salukis.
Our tour-guide Sargon, along with Lucia and our Saluki, Zarafa (which means giraffe in Arabic) in front of the Green-Meldrim Mansion. Union General William T. Sherman used the house as his headquarters from Dec. 22, 1864 until Feb. 1, 1865. It is one of the South’s finest and most lavish examples of Gothic Revival architecture. This is where Sherman stayed upon capturing Savannah on his final march to the sea that vanquished the South and brought the civil war to a close in April 1865.
(This is part of my ongoing series — now 23 posts — on the American South, which partially explains the country’s identity and its political divisions.)
Sargon, our guide for a three-hour walking tour of Savannah’s under-represented history, made the experience of the city far richer than it would have been otherwise. “To me, Savannah’s history remains very much alive,” she says, “always revealing more about itself through new discoveries and deeper research, and continuously influencing our present. More than timelines and placards, history is the revelation of how every action and every event impacts what would follow.”
One of the most striking statues to me was one of an African American family approved by the Savannah City Council in 2002.
Mayor Floyd Adams Jr. and others initially cringed at black leaders’ insistence on engraving a graphic passage by poet Maya Angelou on the statue, but it is quite affecting, not bland nor easily forgettable:
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