Snippets from Savannah

I’m in an airport lounge, again. It’s a familiar pattern in this trip, but I have the ‘take my shoes off, unpack the laptop, remove hat’ routine down pat now. I don’t even leave my passport at the security counter anymore, like I did that one time at O’Hare, ooops.

So I’m waiting at Savannah airport for my flight to Georgia for a world-record flight change of thirty minutes before my connecting flight to Washington DC leaves. Will my bags change flights too? Do I jinx the situation by even typing this?

Savannah is a great slice of the deep South, and a good slice of Key Lime Pie and Peach Cobbler to boot. MMMM. Take everything you’ve ever heard about Savannah. Then double it. Add whipped cream and a cherry on top and that’s how beautiful Savannah really is. It’s a ‘wow’ city. It really is. Between the beauty of the city and the room in my B and B, I started to get the feeling like I had stowed away on someone’s honeymoon. It was just too cute to be true.

The people are friendly, the city is easy to navigate and so long as you stay away from River Street where all the tourists hang out, the food is great.

I ate my body weight twice over in good, southern food while I was in town, and today I am waddling. Yesterday after touring the Mercer Williams house, the one where Jim Williams from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fame, shot the kid in the study, I went to stand in line at Mrs Wilkes’. It’s a Savannah institution, originally a boarding house, it’s now famous as the place the locals go and stand in line for at least an hour, to share bowls of food and communal tables for lunch.

So I stood in line, and made some new friends from Georgia and Chicago. And we waited, and waited. Fortunately it was a lot cooler today as I think it would have been tough going if it was in the 90s (Farenheit) that is. Finally it was our turn to walk into the basement of the row house on Jones Street for lunch. Nobody knew exactly what we’d find or how much it was going to cost – but they lined up down the street on reputation alone.

Once inside we were seated at big tables of ten. And then the food started rolling out, bowl by bowl.
Mashed potato, creamed corn, succotash, squash, collard greens, pickles, coleslaw, mashed sweet potato, black eyed peas, lima beans, rice, kidney beans, jumbalya, bbq pork, gravy, stuffing, and then they brought out the fried chicken. Mountains of it. Staff at Mrs Wilkes’ wear t-shirts that say, “If the Colonel’s chicken was this good, he wouldda been a General”. Oooooh that artery-clogging goodness. You couldn’t eat it everyday – but you know what they say at Paula Deen’s, ‘Get some South in your mouth’. On my way out I was tempted to tell the folks that had been waiting in line for more than a hour in the hotter part of the day that the kitchen had just run out of fried chicken – but I’m not that cruel. And they’re all bigger than me, and hungry.

On Sunday morning in Savannah, I rented a bike and within 10 minutes had ridden straight off the quaint pictorial tourist map. I later found out the word is, “don’t go west of Abercorn street”, ah, what you don’t know can’t hurt you, right? So I rode my bike straight into the black neighbourhood they don’t put on the Savannah postcards. It was Sunday morning so every now and then I’d ride past a church full of singing Baptists praising the lord on this fine morning. Every now and then, I’d catch the doors opening and a late arrival slipping into church in their finery. This was the Savannah I’d been hoping to see. The deep South unchanged in some ways over the last hundred years.

I rode along streets full of southern style houses that are of a similar style to those in the historical district, just smaller, in shabbier condition and without shiny cars parked on the curb. I got a lot of attention, a really white girl, riding through the ‘bad’ part of town on a Sunday morning in hot pink shorts. I waved to everyone I passed and got lots of “Good mornin’ Misses” and “Fine days” as I rode around the neighbourhood. I didn’t ride off the map intentionally, but in hindsight – I’m glad I did. It was a nice foil to the picture-perfect historic district downtown. At no time did I feel unsafe or uneasy – everyone was perfectly friendly and kind. Back at the B and B later, couples who were visiting were asking whether it was safe to ride a bicycle around Savannah – they were planning on driving their car. Sheesh people, why don’t you see if the Pope-mobile is free this weekend. People from the North seem to get scared in the South, but as Eric, the waiter at Lady and Sons explained, they’re not going to mug tourists – the whole town depends on them for income. They’re more likely to mug him.

A word on Eric. He was the fast-talking Georgia boy working the upstairs bar at Lady and Sons, Paula Deen’s famous restaurant downtown. If you’ve never heard of Paula Deen, don’t feel bad, I hadn’t either until I came to Savannah. She’s huge in the US and has her own cooking show and series of books etc, and shockingly white teeth. Eric was your regular wise-cracking bartender, who I bet does well for tips. Two women probably in their forties were also at the bar eating dinner while I scoffed my fried green tomatoes. They had been sharing banter with Eric during the meal and one joked that since they were both in town for the next few days, maybe they’d come round to Eric’s tomorrow night for dinner, what would he cook them. To which he replied, “Do yer like dawgs?” We all assumed he meant hot dogs and the ladies said, “yeah sure”. He replied, “good cause I’ve got two of them.” There was a pause and then we started laughing realising that he meant he has two pet dogs at home, not that he was going to cook hot dogs if we came around for dinner. Eric looked puzzled and the ladies explained the mix-up. There was some back and forth between Eric and the ladies along the lines of “well we are in the south, anything is possible down here”. To which Eric replied loud enough for the whole bar to hear, ‘I would maybe dayte ma sister but I would never cook a dawg.’ The rest of the bar hadn’t heard the first part of the story and out of context the bar full of tourists turned to stare at Eric. I laughed so hard I thought I might fall off the stool, and even now as I retype it, I’m still laughing.