Once we were back in the boat, she lightened up. “I’ll leave him lay there for a while,” she said. “Let him worry he missed his chance to git raised up into heaven. Next time I come he’ll be glad to see me. I’ll carry him some Wild Turkey and some devil’s shoestring, and I’ll give him another chance. Oh, he’ll back off Mr. Jim by and by. Uh-huh. Then I’ll raise him up, and he won’t laugh at me no more. You wait and see. Him and me is gonna be such good friends, he’ll be givin’ me numbers before long so I can play ’em and git me some money!”
Less than a month later, on the morning of January 14, 1990, Jim Williams came downstairs to feed the cat and make himself a cup of tea. After doing that, but before picking up the newspaper from the front stoop, he collapsed and died.
News of Williams’s sudden death at the age of fifty-nine immediately gave rise to speculation that he had been murdered or that he had taken an overdose of drugs. But the coroner announced that there had been no indication of foul play or drug abuse and that Williams appeared to have died of natural causes, most likely a heart attack. After an autopsy, the coroner was more specific: Williams had died of pneumonia. This started another rumor—that he might have died of AIDS. But Williams had shown no signs of being ill; in fact, only a few hours before dying he had attended a party where he had been in good spirits and in apparent good health.
Minerva, of course, had her own idea about what had happened. “It was the boy that done it,” she said. A little-noticed detail of Williams’s death lent an eerie ring of truth to her pronouncement. Williams had died in his study, in the same room where he had shot Danny Hansford. He had been found lying on the carpet behind the desk in the very spot where he would have fallen eight years earlier, if Danny Hansford had actually fired a gun and the shots had found their mark.
Chapter 30
AFTERWARD
Two days after Williams’s funeral, I paid my respects to his mother and sister at Mercer House. As I was leaving, a horse and carriage came clopping around the square and slowed to a stop in front of the house. From the sidewalk, I could hear the tour guide telling her three passengers that General Hugh Mercer had built the house during the Civil War, that the songwriter Johnny Mercer had grown up in it, and that Jacqueline Onassis had once offered to buy it for $2 million. To this by-now familiar routine, the tour guide added that filmmakers had used the house the previous spring to shoot scenes for the movie Glory. But she said nothing about Jim Williams or Danny Hansford or the sensational murder case that had captivated the city for so long. The tourists would leave Savannah in a few hours, enchanted by the elegance of this romantic garden city but none the wiser about the secrets that lay within the innermost glades of its secluded bower.
I, too, had become enchanted by Savannah. But after having lived there for eight years, off and on, I had come to understand something of its self-imposed estrangement from the outside world. Pride was part of it. Indifference was too, and so was arrogance. But underneath all that, Savannah had only one motive: to preserve a way of life it believed to be under siege from all sides. It was for this reason that Savannah had discouraged Prudential from establishing its regional headquarters in the city in the 1950s (and why Prudential ended up in Jacksonville instead). It was why Savannah had given Gian Carlo Menotti’s Spoleto U.S.A. Festival the cold shoulder in the 1970s (and why the festival finally settled in Charleston). Savannah was not much interested in what went on outside Savannah. It had little enthusiasm for the popular culture, as headline entertainers like Eric Clapton, Sting, George Carlin, and Gladys Knight and the Pips discovered when they brought their acts to Savannah and found themselves playing to half-empty auditoriums.
Savannah spurned all suitors—urban developers with grandiose plans and individuals (the “Gucci carpetbaggers,” as Mary Harty called them) who moved to Savannah and immediately began suggesting ways of improving the place. Savannah resisted every one of them as if they had been General William Tecumseh Sherman all over again. Sometimes that meant throwing up bureaucratic roadblocks; at other times it meant telling tourists only what was good for them to know. Savannah was invariably gracious to strangers, but it was immune to their charms. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone.
Time and again, I was reminded of what Mary Harty had told me on my first day in town: “We happen to like things just the way they are!” I had no idea how deeply that sentiment ran until a revealing incident occurred late in my stay. The Chamber of Commerce hired an outside team of urban consultants to study Savannah’s economic and social problems. When the consultants submitted their final report, they appended a note saying that in the course of their research they had asked twenty prominent Sa-vannahians where they thought the city should be in the next five, ten, and fifteen years. None of them had ever given the matter any thought.
For me, Savannah’s resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.
Author’s Note
All the characters in this book are real, but it bears mentioning that I have used pseudonyms for a number of them in order to protect their privacy. Though this is a work of nonfiction, I have taken certain storytelling liberties, particularly having to do with the timing of events. Where the narrative strays from strict nonfiction, my intention has been to remain faithful to the characters and to the essential drift of events as they really happened.
Acknowledgments
I owe a great debt of thanks to several dozen Savannahians who appear as characters in this book, some under their own names, some under pseudonyms.
In addition, a number of people in Savannah, who are not necessarily portrayed in these pages, were helpful to me in various ways: Mary B. Blun, John Aubrey Brown, Peter and Gail Crawford, Mrs. Garrard Haines, Walter and Connie Hartridge, Jack Kieffer, Mary Jane Pedrick, and Ronald J. Strahan.
Two people have won my everlasting affection and gratitude for their energy and enthusiasm in guiding this book into finished form: my agent, Suzanne Gluck, and my editor, Ann Godoff.
For critical readings of the manuscript and other forms of advice and counsel, I am also grateful to Stephen Brewer, Rachel Gallagher, Linda Hyman, Joan Kramer, Russell and Mildred Lynes, Carolyn Marsh, Alice K. Turner, and Hiram Williams.
Of all those who helped me, however, no one took a greater interest, nor followed the progress of this book more closely, than Bruce Kelly. A Georgian, a landscape architect of extraordinary genius, and a true friend, it was he who suggested I write this book in the first place and who, more than anyone else, remained supportive and encouraging throughout the long years I took to do it.
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 1999
Copyright © 1994 by John Berendt
All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York. Originally published in the United
States in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1994.
Vintage Books and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for
permission to reprint previously published material: Warner Bros.
Publications, Inc.: Excerpt from “Sentimental Gentlemen from
Georgia” by Mitchell Parish and Frank Perkins. Copyright ©
1932 (renewed) by EMI Mills Music, Inc. All rights reserved.
Made in USA. Reprinted by permission of Warner Bros.
Publications, Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
Warner/Chappell Music
, Inc.: Excerpt from “Summer Wind” by
Johnny Mercer, Henry Mayer, and Hans Bradtke.
Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House
edition as follows:
Berendt, John.
Midnight in the garden of good and evil: a Savannah story / John
Berendt.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-53837-6
1. Savannah (Ga.)—Tours. 2. Savannah (Ga.)—History.
3. Celebrities—Georgia—Savannah—History. I. Title.
F294.S2B48 1994 975.8′724—dc20 93-3955
www.vintagebooks.com
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John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
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