Author’s Note: This is another piece of the Going Native puzzle. Please suggest any desired editorial changes regarding poor grammar, triggering phrases, unknown-to-me hidden meanings that might offend, and micro-assaultive words I may errantly have used to the Corrections Staff in care of Socotra House, LLC.
Humbly yours,
-Marlow
The Extravagant Old Soul of Savannah
The magnificence of Savannah began soon after its 1733 founding. Its splendor has lasted and grown throughout these many years that saw this seaport town spread and darken into a city.
Our white picket fenced house was built on a double lot in 1881 along a raised sand covered street that formed the bitter lower end of Forsyth Park. Along its northside-of-the-street sidewalk, newly freed men and their families lived, if they could afford it. All other races and parvenues dwelled along its southern sidewalks in this recently built Victorian era neighborhood.
Ladies dressed in starched fine cotton clothes, should they pass ladies dressed in silk and velvet, would not make eye contact or greet each other. In Savannah during those days, women who wore silk or velvet recognized and smiled only at other women who wore silk or velvet.
An ornate horse-and-carriage often stopped across the street in front of the grand old mansion built on four lots that housed a future mayor of the city. This conveyance’s occupants dressed in silk and velvet would wave to the ladies on their side of Park Avenue and these ladies would wave back to the carriage’s occupants.
Everybody here knew everybody else’s family horse-and-carriages.
A mule appeared daily in the late afternoon on the opposite side of the street tired from its day pulling a city streetcar — an upper window of our house opened, the lady of the house whistled, shut the window and disappeared as her son lead the mule to a stop. He waited patiently as he smoked his pipe, strolling around the animal, inspecting her for any problems. His mother came out of the house with pocketbook added to her costume. She made small talk with her son and pocketed the animal’s wages for the day. He led the animal out back for some grooming care, water, and feed.
The city’s only public conveyances at the time were streetcars. In the residential sections, both men and women would whistle from windows and the car would halt at once and wait while windows were closed, hats and coats put on, and out the front door riders went onto an empty cushy trolley seats. Men would always vacate theirs for women if all seats were filled. At least this was true for the velvet-dressed set. Not so for the northside-of-the-streeters. They had to be curbside, hop aboard as the car started and hang from the rear hand holds if space permitted. Otherwise, they would wait for the next car or walked. These public accommodations would soon disappear.
Sometimes these streetcars would jolt, lurch, tilt and jump off the track. Passengers got off and pushed them back on. Curious, eh, how we’ve changed in a century and a half? This is way too slow for us today. The faster we’re carried about now, the less time we have to spare. In those days of toil, disease, shorter lifespans, they had time for everything and to help one another get to where they were going.
Their extravagance still renders me silent.
—–
There are memories from both sides of these Savannah streets in family journals of the most romantic of vanished customs — the serenade. On summer nights, young men would bring a small orchestra under a pretty girl’s window (almost always on the south side of the street). Flute, harp, fiddle, cello, cornet and base viol would softly release enchanting melodies upwards towards the honeyed full moon above.
Faded photos from these times show rigid, silk stove-pipe hats for men, and bustles and hoop skirts for women. They wore such ungainly, uncomfortable things without a second thought.
Soon came derbies and spoon hats that freed the men for their high-top-hatted restraints. The women would have to wait many, many years to be emancipated from their fashion imprisonment.
Trousers worn on the southside sidewalks were uncreased – in other words bespoke, while the Northsiders’ garment lines revealed they had lain folded upon a shelf and were “ready-made.”
In their evening dress, Southsider gents wore tan overcoats, Northsiders saw no need for another layer that would heat them up in Savannah’s sticky summer evenings.
Southsiders chased fashion at great cost — short overcoats one year, long charcoal grey ones the next, tight pants in vogue for a season then baggy, blousy ones the next. Then came the mixing of middle and low brow with high-brow fashion like straw hat topped heads and bamboo canes matched with tuxedo evening wear.
Southsider yards sported croquet game lawns and little houses for their paid-good-money-for pets while vegetable gardens, mongrels, alley cats and small smithy sheds were seen across the street.
Still, these street siders lived in peaceful but separate harmony.
Before he died, the grandson of our original house owner said in a whisper to me that the two street sides conversed and at times offered advice and help, but only out of the public eye.
Talk about devotion to straightjacketing fashion trends.
Journals show most of these people were thrifty because they were the sons and grandsons of the “early settlers” or slaves, who had opened this wilderness with back breaking labor and guns, but with no money at all.
Had they not been so thrifty and prepared, they would have perished. On the northside, in particular, they had to store away food for the winter, or goods to trade for food, and many feared they had not stored enough. This sentiment was passed down generation to generation. For most, thriftiness was next to godliness.
Lord, they were all magnificent.
—–
Intermezzo — a song for today . . .
Let’s bury past times softly in a tomb
They gave this good part to you and me
Let sand rain down and here let us sit
Laying the spring’s rarest flowers on this tomb, in bloom
Let it stay — way down in a hole
Be sure knowing our present can be saved
See into our hearts, as we decorate the past in its grave
We’ll never understand who they thought
We were ever gonna be
Look at us now men and women
Let the past be
Down in a hole, the past is so small
Down in that hole, don’t be losin’ our soul
Let’s fly
Don’t let our wings be denied
Stop eating the sun so our tongues
Are not being burned of the taste
No more kicking ourselves in the teeth
Stop speaking of our smallnesses beneath
Down in a hole, the past is so small
Down in that hole, don’t be losin’ our soul
Let’s fly
Don’t let our wings be denied
——-
Forty plus years later Park Avenue sidewalks are paved, and its children from both sidewalks are attending colleges — Southsiders up in the northeast while Northsiders down here in the south in those “for their kind.”
Both sides’ young ‘uns have a good time at their schools, with, boys being boys, some having a bit of trouble with the faculty and being sent home early for their wild, dervish-like prancings.
It must be wonderful. It must be important, I mean.
What must be wonderful is that this extravagance is so important to these frugal folks to plan for and afford.
Maybe it isn’t “important.” Anybody who really is anybody ought to be able to do about as they like on their own, they rightly think.
These weren’t foolish longings of lofty people. More like those of families possessed with great vision. I see thoughts behind these smooth, triumphal young faces: “Oh, I’m going to catch that ring.”
Sadly, life had a special walloping for every mother’s son of ‘em just around the corner.
Times changed. The coming age of trouble and bank failures put lines on the older Park Avenue faces. It sure wasn’t wisdom that did it. Lack of work and poor rations put lines on the faces of the street’s young. Yet only the loss of faith in themselves and the future could furrow faces with the deepest and longest lasting wrinkles. That wasn’t going to happen.
These people weren’t prone to foolishness, Satan-like pride, or woe-is-me off-putting drawing-room manners. Good old times? Not a bit! There weren’t any old times for them. Those were dead. There aren’t any times but new times.
——
It wasn’t always sunshiny, but the air wasn’t like the air anywhere else. Savannah and its people would come back. As they remember it in the journals, there always seemed to be gold dust in the air just out beyond.
During these years Park Avenue folks no longer dressed for the evening like their grandparents, uncles, aunts and guests always used to. Now that style was only seen on silver screens and in the magazines.
——
Park Avenue’s siders, North and South, found small quiet happiness in knowing what new book the library just got, being surprised and pleased what was on the dinner table no matter how humble, and just having everyone to table as the summer sun set. Just like summer’s heat eventually dying and how quickly it goes once it begins to die, they knew things would improve.
(Using words like “die” and “dying” made their eventual triumph and return to the days of wine and roses all that more certain and them patient in their waiting and endless hard work to make ends meet.)
They knew that everything which had worried or delighted them of their families many generations between way back when and their present — all the digging, cutting, growing, hauling, buying, building, trading and banking were trifling and waste beside what concerned them now — getting through that day and waking up to the next one.
Instinctively they lived life with the simple attitude towards their new times — current reality’s never fatal till it’s denied.
——–
The state of Park Avenue’s bustitude slowly waned as the depressed times disappeared in the Hostess City’s rearview mirror.
Eighty more years passed with people and their fortunes behaving less and less like loose quicksilver over a nest of cracks. The streets of today’s new old Savannah are growing and changing as it never had grown and changed before. It isheaving up in the close-in middle and the far outer areas incredibly; its renewal is spreading at a rapid pace; and, contrary to its past growth spurts as the city heaved and spread, it no longer befouls itself or darkens the sky above.
Former shabby looking, wide-clapboarded houses from the Victorian periods behind their original low cast iron fences and their double front doors of carved hardwoods now glossily varnished, have been painted like they were in their glory days as painted ladies.
There are no longer stag hotels with their sagging front porches full of laughing, unshaven men as the old gingerbread molded unpainted above their heads.
Other grand Federal era brick houses that had become sizeable boarding houses during those depressed times are now sought-after condo-ized second homes to those who crave to live close to new old Savannah. The relics of old iron picket fences are made grand once again with new paint and planted jasmine vines.
Old stone-trimmed bay windows long ago for commercial display of suspended petticoats now house fabulous sitting parlor furniture and baby grand pianos that play during spring evenings to the sidewalks just below.
Savannah got its comeuppances — three times or more filled up and running over. But most of those who had so longed for these justice moments were never there to see them, let alone to celebrate them. The ones, who were still living, had forgotten all about it. They only had the present to live in and focus upon.
Massive grand old houses no longer look gaunt with their windows staring out with the skulled emptiness. Gone are trouble-making boys breaking these haggard neighborhood home windows.
My diary ruinations must pause here — my arthritis is acting up again.
Old derelict house in the historic district before the Great Savannah Renewal
PS: Our home’s original owner’s descendants are all wildly successful, college educated, deeply committed towards societal progress and harmony. The grand Southside mansion across the street has been divided into two luxurious row houses. One of its long-ago city mayor’s descendants, is a restoration house painter (interior and exterior). He painted ours last year and will paint his old family mansion this year.
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