HOWLING GROUNDS AND SCORCHED EARTH, Part 2: Following Sherman’s March To Savannah, Georgia

 “Who Was We?”:  Doubts and Redoubts in Savannah

 More mounds heaped at the edge of central Savannah, hosting more  tales of battle, Southern defiance and ultimate surrender. A grassy hillock was upraised, earthen, and obviously handmade, like the Great Temple Mound we’d just climbed in Ocmulgee.  Puzzled, George and I studied the Spring Hill Redoubt, a reconstruction of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Savannah.  The 234-year old battlefield seemed strangely spiffy, and no wonder:  archeologists did not unearth evidence of the original until 2005, and the city created this park a year later.

I groaned inwardly.  Too many layers of history had upended themselves, as if from quaking tectonic plates, in too few days–a brute, European-style pile-up of wars ancient and medieval and modern, blood gushing again and again into the same contested soil.

Here in Savannah, I absorbed the tale of this 1779 Revolutionary War battle, another layer of mounding Southern history I hadn’t much considered.  Our just-born nation, fighting to cut its cord to Britain, suffered its second-bloodiest battle here.  French, Haitian, Swedish, Irish, and Polish fighters joined the local colonists against the Brits.  Hundreds of slaves worked twenty-hour days building trenches and redoubts to hold off the British, but by the second wave of attacks, those trenches were crammed with 800 coalition corpses.  “So, the British forces held on to their colony,” I summarized from a laminated historical marker at the site, “and we retreated.”

“We?” George asked, his eyebrows raised. “Who was we?”

Okay, okay.  The pronoun confusion wasn’t just about the 1779 mash-up of those foreign allies, or the still-undefined status of separate American colonies into a unified nation-state, but of course the “we” of that corps of slaves.  The Coastal Heritage Society presented Battlefield Park as a memorial to those “who died for freedom” from “the clutches of the crown.”  The Society clearly did not have any doubts about who “we” were.

As we left Battlefield Park, I kept company with my own doubts and re-doubts, even about my country’s sacrosanct origin story.  The American colonies’ secession from Britain seemed remarkably like the Confederate succession from “us,” and just as ill-considered.  Premature, hot-headed and blithe at once.  I was royally sick of hearing that our soldiers always “die for freedom” without ever questioning what this freedom really is, who gets it, and why killing is the only way to obtain it.

Savannah’s extensive historic neighborhoods stretch back the centuries intact, though the port city was the very object of Sherman’s March to the Sea, which scorched the earth across most of Georgia to capture it.  To a city already weakened in years of Union blockade, its forts already bombed and seized, its fields flooded, Sherman issued a threat to burn and ravage the whole gorgeous caboodle.  Savannah remains the Savannah we treasure today only because it escaped direct fire eighty-two years after the Spring Hill battle, during the last autumn of the Civil War.

George and I crossed Martin Luther King Boulevard into the center of town, looking forward to learning more about a paradigm-shifting episode in Savannah’s history, one that wasn’t about violence and threats of destruction.  This little-celebrated event brought lasting change through the hard work of unity and non-violent resistance.  The Savannah Boycott had ended in success in October 1961.

I had targeted the city’s Civil Rights Museum as a key Savannah destination, so I was a little disconcerted that the staff member at the city visitor’s center didn’t seem quite sure where the museum was.

George and I easily found it, though, in a neighborhood on the edge of Savannah’s historic district. Occupying a former bank that served African-Americans during segregation, the small museum was big and bold in its approach to hands-on history. With displays of Savannah’s African-American past going back to slavery days, it concentrated most of its space to the Savannah Boycott of the early 1960’s.  A lunch counter was faithfully reproduced in its entirety, with an audio feed that scolded the visitor for even trying to get service.  A first-rate film unreeled personal narratives of many living legends of the city’s civil rights struggles, some of whom rose to prominence in the national movement.  Together, their narrative history weaved together the whole tale, how Savannah’s black community mobilized early in the South’s commercial boycott movement and soon became among the most successful.  The boycott successfully drove segregated businesses into bankruptcy and quickly “enlightened” white Savannah about black political and economic prowess.

Soon after, Martin Luther King, Jr. anointed Savannah “the most desegregated city south of the Mason-Dixon line,” but despite that early and lasting success, Savannah’s pioneering civil rights victories are seldom recognized and often forgotten in the roll-call of the struggle.  Even the King Institute’s own website, touting Greensboro and Nashville in its wrap-up of the early sit-in and boycotts, failed to mention Savannah.

Old Savannah’s mass-tourist mob scene intensified down on the riverfront, full of bustle, buskers, and festive evening lights.  Competing with working, industrial freighters, cruise ships emptied more visitors onto the quay, adding to the party-time mix.  Under the Sheraton Hotel, sculptor Dorothy Radley Spradley’s memorial to the black family, depicted a father, mother, and two children and bore an inscription by Maya Angelou:

“We were stolen, sold and bought together from the African Continent. We got on the slave ship together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships in each others excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown overboard together. Today, we are standing up together, with faith and even some joy…”



George and I wandered away from yelling tipplers and back to the river, where, as if on cue, an extended African-American family emerged from a dockside excursion boat in the throes of reunion festivities.  The clash of Angelou’s agonized yet understated expression of black experience amid the riverside party addled my brain, and I found myself staring at the water.  My earlier misgivings haunted me; I felt myself a disconnected Westerner with no hope of penetrating the real South.  Other Savannah visitors seamlessly joined the good time atmosphere around the bars and craft markets.  Why wasn’t I just as content to line up for the next Garden of Good and Evil cemetery tour or the Haunted House Scare or Paula Deen’s next serving of Authentic Southern Cookin’?  Why was I so bugged that the Civil Rights Museum was empty during the crowded high season? We built National Monuments around any bloody battleground but didn’t commemorate nonviolent change.  Even where human rights won unqualified victory, we forgot to remember.  Across the river, a convention center business reception was underway, spotlights revealing people in evening clothes wandering with goblets on the opposite shore.

George said he wouldn’t mind leaving Savannah soon.   “Even though the city has a black majority, I didn’t see many African Americans living in the older central parts of the area we walked through.  I kept thinking that black people helped build the city and its plazas.  But I didn’t see many blacks owning those properties.” Though the charming, spooky city made me ache to discover ever more of it, I didn’t protest.