Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

“‘You mustn’t be taken in by the moonlight and magnolias. There’s more to Savannah than that. Things can get very murky.’” 

Tourists often see the “moonlight and magnolias” view of Savannah. They appreciate its beauty as well as the tour guides’ tales of the city’s history, but appearances can be deceptive, especially to a newcomer. Williams enjoys telling the Berendt about some of the ironic details of Savannah residents. For example, one of the richest people in the Southeast turns out to be the “the cheapest woman who ever lived”; he goes on to detail how she scammed her way into buying iron gates for her home, which should have cost $1,400, but she instead got them for $190. He discusses other residents, including a judge’s son whom a gangster murdered, although the newspapers reported the death as “Fall from Porch Proves Fatal” (11). Savannah wants to hide its unpleasantness, preferring to boast its beauty to the outside world. Williams’s warning to the author implies that it may take some digging to discover the truth about Savannah.

“I suspected that in Savannah I had stumbled on a rare vestige of the Old South. It seemed to me that Savannah was in some respects as remote as Pitcairn Island, that tiny rock in the middle of the Pacific where the descendants of the mutineers of the H.M.S Bounty had lived in inbred isolation since the eighteenth century. For about the same length of time, seven generations of 3-Savannahians had been marooned in their hushed and secluded bower of a city on the Georgia coast.” 

The author’s discovery of exotic Savannah stands in contrast to the sophisticated New York where he is from. While New York is international, open to influences from every part of the globe, Savannah has walled itself off from outside influences. While this makes Savannah provincial and full of snobbery, the author says that this same seclusion has allowed for a peculiar and rich environment to thrive, a place unlike anywhere else in the world.