Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

  The librarian recited a list of Savannah’s historic highlights: America’s first Sunday school had been founded in Savannah in 1736, America’s first orphanage in 1740, America’s first black Baptist congregation in 1788, America’s first golf course in 1796. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had been the minister of Christ Church in Savannah in 1736, and during his tenure had written a book of hymns that became the first hymnal used in the Church of England. A Savannah merchant had bankrolled the first steamship ever to cross the Atlantic, the Savannah, which made its maiden ocean voyage from Savannah to Liverpool in 1819.

  The cumulative weight of all these historic firsts suggested that this sleepy city of 150,000 had once been more important in the general scheme of things than it was now. Sponsoring the world’s first oceangoing steamship in 1819, for instance, would have been the equivalent of launching the first space shuttle today. President James Monroe had made a special trip to Savannah in honor of the maiden voyage—a fair indication of its importance.

  I browsed among the books, prints, and maps in the society’s reading room, a spacious hall with a high ceiling and a double tier of bookshelves along the walls. The Civil War loomed large in this room, and Savannah’s role in it was a story that seemed to say a great deal about the city:

  At the outbreak of fighting, Savannah was the world’s leading cotton port. General William Tecumseh Sherman selected it as the climax for his triumphant march to the sea, bringing seventy thousand troops against Savannah’s ten thousand. Unlike their counterparts in Atlanta and Charleston, Savannah’s civic leaders were practical businessmen, and their secessionist passions were tempered by a sobering awareness of the devastation that was about to befall them. When Sherman drew near, the mayor of Savannah led a delegation out to meet him. They offered to surrender the city without a shot if Sherman promised not to burn it. Sherman accepted the offer and sent President Lincoln a famous telegram: I BEG TO PRESENT TO YOU, AS A CHRISTMAS GIFT, THE CITY OF SAVANNAH WITH ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY GUNS AND PLENTY OF AMMUNITION, ALSO ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND BALES OF COTTON. Sherman stayed a month and then marched to Columbia, South Carolina, and burned it to the ground.

  Savannah emerged from the war impoverished, but it recovered within a few years and prospered once again. By then, however, the city’s financial underpinnings had begun to erode. Rural labor was being drawn away to the industrialized North; years of growing nothing but cotton had leached the soil of nutrients, and the center of the Cotton Belt had moved westward. In the financial panic of 1892, the price of a pound of cotton dropped from a dollar to nine cents. By 1920, the boll weevil had wiped out what little cotton activity was left. From that time onward, Savannah slipped into decline. Many of its once-great houses fell into disrepair. Lady Astor, passing through in 1946, remarked that Savannah was like “a beautiful woman with a dirty face.” Stung by the criticism, a group of concerned citizens began in the 1950s to restore Savannah’s downtown. Their effort resulted in the preservation of Savannah’s historic district.

  Before leaving the reading room, I thought to look in the 1914 city directory for the name of Sadie Jefferson, the woman who had tangoed all the way to the police station. She was not listed. No Jeffersons were listed at all, in fact. The librarian looked at my old newspaper clipping and told me I had probably consulted the wrong part of the city directory.

  “You can tell from the wording of the news item that Sadie Jefferson was black,” she said, “because the courtesy title of ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Miss’ is omitted. That was the practice until integration. It was also the practice to list blacks in a separate section of the city directory. That’s probably why you didn’t find her.” Indeed, Sadie Jefferson was listed in the “Colored” section of the 1914 city directory—the wife of James E. Jefferson, a barber. She died in the 1970s.

  The story of blacks in Savannah was, of course, a very different one from that of whites. Slavery was forbidden in Georgia in 1735 (Oglethorpe called it “a horrid crime”), but in 1749 the colony’s Trustees gave in to pressure from the settlers and legalized it. Despite a long history of oppression, the 1960s civil rights movement in Savannah was almost entirely nonviolent. Civil rights leaders staged sit-ins at lunch counters, swim-ins at the beach, kneel-ins in churches, and a fifteen-month boycott of segregated stores. Tensions rose, but peace prevailed, largely because of the tireless efforts of a forward-thinking mayor, Malcolm Maclean, and a nonviolent strategy adopted by black leaders, notably W. W. Law, the head of the local branch of the NAACP. In 1964, Martin Luther King declared Savannah “the most desegregated city in the South.” In 1980, the population of Savannah was half white and half black.

  There was ample evidence in the records of the historical society that in Savannah’s palmier days it had been a cosmopolitan city and its citizens an unusually worldly sort. Mayor Richard Arnold, the man who had sweet-talked General Sherman in and out of town during the Civil War, was typical of the breed. He was a physician, a scholar, an epicure, a connoisseur of fine wines, and a gentleman who took his social obligations seriously. He wrote in one letter, “Yesterday, I entertained the Hon. How ell Cobb at a sociable dinner party. We sat down at 3 o’clock and got up at half past nine.” Mayor Arnold’s six-and-a-half-hour dinner lent weight to what I had been told about Savannah’s fondness for parties, and it put me in mind of the genteel merriment going on nonstop in the townhouse down the street from me at 16 East Jones Street.

  My casual surveillance of the house paid off one day at noontime. A car drew up to the curb and screeched to a jolting stop. At the wheel was a neatly dressed elderly lady with white hair as neat as pie crust. She had made no attempt to parallel park but had instead pulled into the space front end first as if tethering a horse to a hitching post. She got out and marched to the front door, took a ball-peen hammer out of her purse and methodically smashed all the little panes of glass around the door. Then she put the hammer back in her purse and walked back to her car. The incident did not seem to make any difference to the people in the house. The piano went right on playing, and the voices kept on laughing. The panes of glass were replaced, but not until several days later.

  As I expected, it all became perfectly clear soon enough. One night after dinner, I heard the click of spike heels coming up the steps followed by a gentle knock on the door. I opened it to behold a beautiful woman standing in the moonlight. Her head was tucked into a platinum cloud of cotton-candy hair. She wore a low-cut pink dress, which she filled voluptuously, and she was giggling.

  “Wouldn’t you know,” she said, “they’ve gone and turned off Joe’s electricity again.”

  “They have?” I answered. “Who is Joe?”

  She was momentarily confused. “You don’t know Joe? I thought everybody knew Joe. He’s your neighbor. I mean, he’s almost your neighbor. Joe Odom.” She waved in a westerly direction. “He lives a couple of houses down that way.”

  “Not the house with the piano?”

  This comment sent the woman into gales of pretty laughter. “Uh-huh. You got it.”

  “And is Joe Odom the one who plays the piano?”

  “He sure is,” she said, “and I’m Mandy. Mandy Nichols. I don’t mean to disturb you or anything, but I saw your light on. Anyway, we’ve run out of ice, and I was sort of hoping you could spare some.”

  I invited her in. As she brushed by me I breathed the essence of gardenia. I recognized her now as one of the many people I had seen going into the house down the street. There was no way I could possibly have forgotten her. She was a statuesque beauty with not a single angular contour on her soft and lovely body. Her blue eyes were set off by a bright framework of lavishly applied cosmetics. I took four ice trays out of the freezer and emptied them into an ice bucket. I told her I had been wondering who lived in that house.

  “Officially, it’s just Joe,” she said, “but sometimes it’s hard to tell, with so many people spending the night, or the week, or a few months. I live in Waycross, and I drive in
to Savannah six days a week to sing at the clubs here in town. If I’m too tired to drive home at night, I just stay at Joe’s.”

  Mandy said she had gone to the University of Tennessee on a half-scholarship for twirling. She also said she had been crowned Miss BBW in Las Vegas a year before.

  “Miss BBW?”

  “That stands for Miss Big Beautiful Woman,” she said. “It’s a beauty contest for large women. They put out a magazine and a line of clothing—the whole nine yards. I didn’t really plan on entering the pageant, though. My friends sent in the application.”

  I gave her the ice bucket.

  “Hey,” she said, “why don’t you come on over and join us for a drink.”

  I had been about to suggest that very thing myself, so I accepted without hesitation and followed her down the stairs and into the lane. Mandy walked gingerly; the pebbles clicked and skittered under her spike heels.

  “It’s a long drive from Waycross to Savannah, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “About an hour and a half,” she said, “each way.”

  “Doesn’t that get a little boring, day after day?”

  “Not really. It gives me a chance to do my nails.”

  “Your nails?”

  “Of course,” she giggled. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It just sounds a little complicated,” I said. “Doing your nails and driving at the same time.”

  “It’s real easy once you get the hang of it,” she said. “I drive with my knees.”

  “Your knees!”

  “Uh-huh. Actually, I save my nails for last. I do my makeup first and then my hair.”

  I looked at the brilliant palette of colors on Mandy’s smiling face. This was no simple application of lipstick and mascara. It was a complex composition that involved the blending of many hues and tints. There were pinks and blues and umber, topped by the platinum-blond nimbus of her hair.

  “I back-comb my hair,” she said.

  “You must attract a lot of attention on the road,” I said, “doing all that.”

  “Yeah, sometimes,” she said. “Yesterday, I pulled into a gas station, and this truck driver followed right behind me and pulled up alongside. He said, ‘Ma’am, I have been driving behind you for the last forty-five minutes, and I’ve been watching. First you did your makeup. Then you did your hair. Then you did your nails. I just wanted to get up close and see what you looked like.’ He gave me a big wink and told me I was right pretty. But then he said, ‘Let me ask you something. I noticed every couple of minutes you’ve been reaching over and foolin’ with something on the seat next to you. Whatcha got over there?’ ‘That’s my TV,’ I told him. ‘I can’t miss my soaps!’”

  We walked from the lane into Joe Odom’s garden. Candlelight flickered in the windows of the darkened house. Two men crouched by the garden wall. One held a flashlight while the other knelt in front of the electric meter. The kneeling man wore big rubber gloves with which he gripped a large pair of pliers. He appeared to be splicing two cables together.

  “Careful, Joe,” the man with the flashlight said.

  A shower of sparks jumped from the cable, and the lights in the house next door dimmed for a moment. As they came back up to full strength, the lights in Joe’s house blinked on. Cheers came from inside. Joe stood up.

  “Well, I guess I didn’t get electrocuted this time,” he said. “Maybe next time.” He bowed silently to the neighboring house.

  Joe Odom had a mustache and graying blond hair. He wore a light blue shirt open at the neck, chinos, and brown-and-white saddle shoes. He was about thirty-five and looked remarkably calm, I thought, for someone who had just pulled off a life-threatening, high-voltage act of larceny.

  “I’ve got ice,” said Mandy.

  “And an ice man too, I see.” Joe flashed a bright smile. “I don’t usually putter around in the garden this late at night,” he said, “but, well … we had a few problems out here that needed tending to.”

  He took off the rubber gloves. “I reckon I’m getting pretty good at this. I can turn water and gas back on too. Remember that. Someday you may need my services. I’m only fair at telephones, though. I can reconnect a phone that’s been cut off, but I can’t make it do anything but receive incoming calls. No outgoing.”

  Somewhere under the steps an air-conditioning condenser clicked on.

  “Lovely sound, isn’t it!” said Joe. “Why don’t we all go inside and drink a toast to it—and to the lights, and the dishwasher, and the microwave, and the refrigerator, and the Savannah Electric and Power Company. And to …” He raised an imaginary glass in the direction of the house next door. “Whoever.”

  Joe Odom’s townhouse was furnished in a manner I would not have expected for the home of a utilities deadbeat. On the parlor floor I saw a fine English sideboard, several good eighteenth-century oil portraits, a pair of antique silver sconces, a Steinway grand piano, and two or three impressive oriental carpets. There were people in every room, it seemed—not quite a party, more an open house.

  “I’m a tax lawyer,” said Joe, “and a real estate broker and a piano player. I used to be a partner in a law firm, but a couple of years ago I quit and moved my office into this house so I could mix business and pleasure in whatever proportion I wanted. That’s when my third wife left me.”

  Joe nodded toward a young man asleep on a couch in the living room. “That’s Clint. If you ever need a ride to Atlanta, Clint will be happy to take you. He drives trailer trucks back and forth, and he likes to have company in the cab. I should warn you, though, he makes the trip in just under three hours. Nobody who’s ever been on one of those wild rides has ever gone back for a second one.”

  A girl with a red ponytail was talking on the telephone in the kitchen. Joe told me she was a disk jockey for one of Savannah’s Top 40 radio stations. He added that a man she was dating had just been arrested for dealing cocaine and for making terroristic threats against the police. In the dining room, a blond man dressed in a white shirt and white slacks was cutting a woman’s hair. “That’s Jerry Spence,” said Joe. “He cuts all our hair, and right now he’s doing Ann, my first and second wife. Ann and I were childhood sweethearts. We got married the first time while I was in law school and the second time on the anniversary of our first divorce. And, of course, you’ve met Mandy here. She’s my fourth wife-in-waiting.”

  “What’s she waiting for?” I asked.

  “For her divorce to come through,” said Joe. “There’s no telling when that will happen, because her attorney’s a lazy cuss who hasn’t gotten around to filing the papers yet. I guess we can’t complain about it, though, because I’m her attorney.”

  The social center of the house was the kitchen, which overlooked the garden. It had a piano in it, and it was from this room that the music and laughter spilled out over the garden walls up and down the street.

  “I notice you leave your front door unlocked,” I said.

  “That’s right. It got to be too much trouble going down to answer it all the time. That was one of my third wife’s grievances.” Odom laughed.

  “Well, the front door happens to be one of my grievances too,” said Mandy. “Especially since the burglary last week. Joe says it wasn’t a burglary, but I say it was. It was four o’clock in the morning, and we were both in bed. I woke up and heard noises downstairs, and I shook Joe. ‘Joe, we got burglars,’ I said. But he didn’t care. ‘Oh, it could be anybody,’ he said. But I was sure it was burglars. They were opening cupboards and drawers and I don’t know what-all. So I shook him again and I said, ‘Joe, go down and see.’ Well, Mr. Cool just lifted his head a few inches off the pillow and hollered, ‘Angus? That you, Angus?’ There was total silence, of course. So Joe says to me, ‘Well, if we got a burglar, his name ain’t Angus.’ Then he went back to sleep. But it was a burglar, and we were lucky we weren’t murdered.”

  Joe started to play the piano in the middle of Mandy’s story. “In the morning,” he said, “three
bottles of liquor and a half dozen glasses were missing. That doesn’t sound like a burglary to me. It sounds like a party. And the only thing that annoys me about it is we weren’t invited.”

  Joe’s smile indicated that the matter was closed, at least as far as he was concerned. “Anyway, as I was saying, I originally left the door unlocked as a matter of convenience. But pretty soon I realized that whenever the doorbell did ring, it was someone I didn’t know. So the bell became a signal that a stranger was at the door. I’ve learned never to answer it myself when that happens, because it’s likely to be a deputy sheriff wanting to serve me with some kind of paper, and of course I don’t need to be home for that.”

  “Or for little old ladies with hammers in their hands,” I said.

  “Hammers? I don’t believe I know any old ladies who carry hammers.”

  “The one who punched out your windows certainly had a hammer.”

  “A little old lady did that?” Joe looked surprised. “I was wondering how that happened. We thought somebody slammed the door too hard. You mean you saw her do it?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, we’ve got our share of little old ladies here in Savannah,” said Joe, “and it looks like one of them’s unhappy with me.” He did not seem the least bit concerned. “Well, now you know something about us,” he said. “Tell us about yourself.”

  I said I was a writer from New York.

  “Ah, then you must be the new Yankee I’ve been hearing about. Nothing escapes our notice, you know. Savannah’s a real small town. It’s so small everybody knows everybody else’s business, which can be a pain, but it also means we know who all the undercover cops are, which can be a plus. Now, as for you, I should tell you that you’ve already aroused a fair amount of curiosity. People think you’re writing an exposé about Savannah, so they’re a little wary of you. You don’t need to fret about that, though. Secretly they all hope you’ll put them in your book.” Joe laughed and winked.