Sightseeing and Soundhearing

I love the sight of Live Oaks here in Savannah. They're not purely native to the area, but they come from hereabouts; huge pines were the original vegetation up here on the bluff.

Last night we heard a choral service by candlelight at Christ Church, and walked back through darkened streets made even more atmospheric, if not spooky, by the sight of Live Oaks hung with Spanish Moss.

But what I notice most, and what I will always now associate with Savannah, is the sound of acorns dropping on pavements and other hard surfaces and the crunch of them underfoot. America is a country rich in sound.

Sister cities?

I'm fascinated by the contrasts and similarities between Savannah and Charleston, southern cities only two hours apart. Both are immensely walkable. People walk the battery in Charleston or sunbathe in Marion Park. Yet Savannah's broader footpaths are easier to walk abreast on and their 22 squares draw the neighbours in. We've noticed people meeting in the middle for a glass of wine of an evening, weddings taking place, the odd strolling guitar player, and then, on Saturday morning, of course there are the exercise classes...

These squares, whether they were designed by Oglethorpe in 1733 as rallying points for militia or not, really invite 'use'.

In many respects both cities support our contention that university towns are best. Charleston has the Medical University of South Carolina, College of Charleston (est.1770), Charleston School of Law and Virginia College of Charleston. In Savannah, SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design is the big juggernaut, owning a building on just about every street it seems, and certainly the old movie houses, which it operates as live theaters. We saw Audra McDonald at the SCAD Theater last Wednesday night and she was a revelation, not only for what she revealed of a repertoire I thought I knew well (songs from shows like Fiorello and Do-Re-Mi, for example), but for the way she could 'tell' a song. And then when we thought she couldn't be any more talented she sat down and accompanied herself on the piano in a song by Adam Guettel, Richard Rodgers' grandson...

But Charleston and Savannah's charms are longstanding. They were lovely towns 15 years ago, before we noticed any university presence. They both have interesting similarities - their share of Revolutionary history (patriots died over by what you can see over your left shoulder if you turn around), their respective chapters in the history of slavery, their own memorials to 'our Confederate dead', the presence of voodoo. I notice a little more Savannah's association with piracy. Well, Treasure Island's Captain Flint is supposed to have died in Savannah. Charleston has Porgy and Bess of course (how fantastic to have an iconic show associated with your town). But I notice here a slightly higher historical presence of the Creek Indians. Tomochichi's grave is in town. And Samuel Wesley spent two years here in the 1730s and credited Savannah as being the locale of one of two revelations which led to his creation of Methodism (the other revelation took place in Oxford).

But what I notice here also is the fullness of cultural life that exists in a city this size. It doesn't have a first-run cinema downtown (it's miles away in the malls), I really feel the lack of a nearby pool, and it doesn't have an opera company (though somebody is working on that). But it has that sense of 'something on every night if you want it' which I've noticed in similar sized towns before. Let's see: last Monday if we had wanted to we could have gone to hear Tim Drake of Clemson University talk about Death and Burial Customs in the 19th Century at the Kennedy Pharmacy. On Wednesday, Dr Martha Keber spoke at the Savannah History Museum about The burning of 'La Francaise' and 'La Vengeance' by a Savannah mob in Nov 1811 as part of 'The War of 1812 Lecture Series', and the next night Prof. Christopher Baker at First Baptist Church talked on The King James Bible: Four Centuries of Influence. There's no excuse to be bored.

You can also dig endlessly into the architectural history of both cities too. But it looks to me that Savannah's architectural periods extended later. There was a real extension of prosperity into the Victorian era (after the Civil War?). There is even a Victorian District. Forsythe Park sits in it.

My strongest impression of Charleston architecture I suppose is of wood. Savannah is to a far greater extent built of brick.

Savannah, 9 November 2011

On our walk to the supermarket...

Multiple threads

Charleston, SC - Not just monumental shifts like the Fall colours but small details tell me when I'm somewhere different - the septuplet click of the wait signal at Richmond Virginia pedestrian lights; the acronyms in various places (like CARTA for Charleston Area Regional Transportation Authority); the names of people I wouldn't have heard of if I hadn't visited a place, like Ravenel or Manigault, big family names down here in Charleston, or artists like the blacksmith Philip Simmons whose work was so fine it's ended up in the Smithsonian.

Note here the rattlesnake motif in the gates he designed for the mansion that belonged to Gadsden who designed the 'Don't Tread on Me' flag from the War of Independence. Look close. Simmons prided himself on how he tapered the ends.

Then there is also Antwon Ford the master sweetgrass basket maker or 'spinner', or Charleston's early women artists like Henrietta de Beaulieu Dering Johnston.

You notice sounds too, not necessarily the chuck-chuck-chuck of woodpeckers such as you would hear around Falls Church, but the constant sound of fire engines in this wooden city - and their really ugly horns. You hear them several times a day.

Then there are the incredible sloping porches. Why? Do they get torrential rain here?

I notice little differences because I compare the swimming pools in the various places. They often have their own rules, which you don't know about until you've broken them. At the YMCA in Greenpoint (New York), the attendant yelled at me because I was keeping a circular motion around the centre line (as you would in Australia). 'No, no, no, straight up and down,' he yelled as if I was an idiot for not knowing. I also found out, after I'd arrived, that I was meant to have my own bathing cap. The public pools in NYC are free but they won't let you in without a padlock. The pool here at the Medical University of South Carolina is excellent, nice, clean, new, with a great weekly rate. There's an indoor running track above your head. It even has a spin drier for your swimmers. I could possibly write a book Pools I Have Known. It is definitely a theme running through my life.

The feeling in the streets

Going to see Dracula at the Dock Street Theatre and then walking back through the darkened, gaslit streets kind of gives a flavour to Charleston.

I was more impressed, however, by the fact that the first play produced here, at America's oldest theatre, was George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer. I read this on a sign further up Church Street the next day.

It says here (second paragraph) that one of the earliest occupants of this house had written the prologue for that Dock Street Theatre production.

Coincidentally, The Recruiting Officer was the first play produced (by a cast of convicts and guards) at Sydney Cove in 1789. How interesting that this play, a satire on authority, was such a favourite in both early colonies.

Does it say something about our common attitudes to authority? In both countries I think people would agree we have a common disrespect for power. But the circumstances suggest subtle differences too. Australia's production took place in the context of a penal colony, arguably a precarious situation for those in charge. Yet the governor, Capt. Phillip, was comfortable enough to let it take place. And to this day, Australia's leaders tolerate a very knockabout sort of, well, 'knocking'. Perhaps while Americans fear government (you get the impression sometimes that tyranny is only a president away; despotism always a possiblity; gotta keep a hold on our guns), Australians have a rougher, more familial disrespect for their leaders. Australian politicians will never be tyrants; but they'll always be 'slackarses who don't do what we pay 'em to do'.

Breaks to new mutiny?

 Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

 - Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: prologue

At Manassas, site of the first Civil War battle

we met a woman who said she reckons another Civil War is coming, 'the way this country's going. It's getting worse by the day.'

I didn't ask her to elaborate. I made certain assumptions. We were in Virginia, which has always resented the federal government. We were in an historic downtown which looked reasonably prosperous. When you run into someone in a CBD who says what she said, they're usually railing about federal taxes (well, taxes state and city as well, but the feds cop it). And we're in an environment where the other side's motives are always purely venal and evil ('the Tea Party are stupid'; 'the Occupy Wall Street people are a mob', although they're actually unhappy about many of the same things). This is a superstition maintained on both sides of politics of course - it is no longer the case that people can concede that both sides have something to offer and that each falls short - so I figured I didn't need to query further.

We are now in Charleston, nine hours away by train from 'Orange Cones; No Phones' and signs of Fall - changing colours, squirrels getting busy carrying oversized nuts, pumpkin lattes...

We've put away winter clothes for now

I wonder if the unhappiness that is expressed to us is at root a symptom of the tectonic plates of American tribalism shifting; the distrust and absolutist opinions a natural consequence of a society opening up its former divisions, an anxiety about the fact that new and more people are these days, as they once sang in the fields round here, 'gwine to sit down at de welcome table'.

Notes on the State of Virginia

Excuse the Jeffersonian title, but after a visit to Richmond, I am wondering what I might say in a modern-day version of the Notes.

Clearly the history of the place is overwhelming. Richmond is virtually the historical navel of the country. Go down to the water's edge (to the banks of the James) and, not only do you get a sense of the bridges that once carried Confederate troops over it, but you read that Richmond (Powhatan) was the navigable limit of the James reached by Captain John Smith in 1608.

Go out to Hanover Tavern, half an hour away - Hanover for George I, by the way - and you read how in 1781, Lord Cornwallis and General Washington missed each other here by a matter of days, only to turn east a mile south of here and meet for the final showdown at Yorktown. Stuart rode around McClellan's forces stationed here at Hanover Courthouse in 1862.


In Richmond, capital of the old Confederacy, I also get a sense of having stepped into the other side of the great debate (to coin a phrase for the Civil War). Am I imagining it, or do I now really get a sense of what the South must feel, just from wandering around, adopting an awed attitude to DC (the monolith up the road), or from walking along Monument Ave, that grand thoroughfare, and seeing the statues erected to J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson in the late 19th century?

It is hard to believe the South lost, or that these men were 'in rebellion', so highly are they honoured. And at first I thought it was sympathy for the underdog that had possessed me. 'He lost his life defending the South', read a headstone in Hollywood Cemetary, and I thought, 'That's it. You automatically admire those who are defending their land against the invader.' Except that, then I reminded myself that the South fired first. The strength and persuasiveness of this 'homage' says something about the power of the mere act of 'veneration'. You don't even have to agree with the honoree to be affected; the veil of romanticism has been created.

I kind of get it - States' Rights. If you think of the states as separate countries, it makes sense. No wonder so few Americans have passports - California, Maine, Louisiana, Wyoming... are sufficiently different to sustain interest. When Jefferson said, 'my country', he mostly meant 'Virginia'.

And this was the experiment in government the Virginians wanted to make - 'separate countries' loosely bound by a few, undeniable but limited, continental concerns. As a Virginian explained, to Virginians the federal government may only exercise the powers specifically delegated to it under the Constitution. (I haven't yet asked a Virginian why a Virginian, Washington, accepted Hamilton's definition of implied powers. And the John Marshall House was shut when we were there,

so I didn't get a chance to hear how the guides presented the longest-serving Chief Justice's work, which basically, in most of his judicial decisions, cemented a stronger union.) But the looser form of federalism is meant to work. Is it the case that it hasn't been allowed to? And is there a resentment that it was Virginia, so slighted, that produced four of the country's first five presidents? (In Fredericksburg, we saw James Monroe's 'town plot'.)

As I say, I kind of get it - States' Rights. 'So do I', said an African-American woman we met, 'but to me it means "Jim Crow".'

But yet, I liked Richmond. It has leafy, walkable suburbs, with cafes.

It has villages and cinemas. When we were here in 1996 the city seemed very run down, and yet there is renovation everywhere.

There is history galore.

Jefferson modelled this, the Capitol, on the Maison Carree. Here former vice president Aaron Burr was tried (by John Marshall) for treason. Here, Lee received his commission.

 Parts of it reminded me of Melbourne: Royal Parade...

or Sydney Road, Coburg or North Carlton. Perhaps it's not a superficial comparison. At first I put it down to the presence of a university. Find a nice village here in the States, and you're bound to find a university - Berkeley, San Luis Obispo, Princeton, Chapel Hill...But beyond that I put it down to old English ideals of town living - harmony, community...

Of course, as long as you weren't a slave. But visiting here has made me want to look deeper into this. What makes Richmond tick? And what is a true history? And now something else occurs to me. Jefferson, who owned property in slaves, specifically omitted 'property' when he copied George Mason's list of 'unalienable rights' into the Declaration.