Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (50 page)

Downtown residents did not respond happily to Rowan’s announcement. While the students did contribute something to the local economy, and they did bring a little life to the otherwise empty streets, they were becoming in the eyes of some people a blight on the landscape with their green hair, their odd clothes, their skateboards, and their tendency to play loud music on their stereos well into the night. In reaction, a group of downtown
residents formed a Quality of Life Committee to deal with the situation. Joe Webster, who headed the committee, could be seen each day at noontime walking stiffly with the aid of a cane from his office in the C&S Bank building to the Oglethorpe Club for lunch. His route took him down Bull Street past the main entrance of SCAD, where he would invariably make his way through a small cluster of students and point silently with his cane at some offending object—a crumpled candy wrapper or a motorcycle idling noisily at the curb. On one occasion, Mr. Webster and his committee stopped in to see Richard Rowan in his office to express their concern that the fragile human ecology of downtown Savannah might not survive two thousand students. The total population of the historic district was, after all, only about ten thousand. Rowan told the committee that he would see what he could do about the loud music and that, by the by, he had recently revised his goal from two thousand students to
four
thousand.

However disruptive the college might have been to Savannah’s peace and quiet, it did nothing to harm the city’s physical beauty. The college restored each building it bought with taste and authenticity, and Savannah continued to receive compliments from its far-flung admirers.
Le Monde
called Savannah “la plus belle des villes d’Amerique du Nord.” The National Trust for Historic Preservation focused a flattering spotlight on the city when it bestowed its highest honor—the Louise Crowninshield Award—on Lee Adler for his contribution to Savannah’s restoration. Adler went to Washington to accept the award, and upon his return his fellow citizens rallied around him in customary fashion: They congratulated him for winning yet another great honor, and as soon as his back was turned, they bitterly denounced him for once again hogging sole credit for a job done by many.

While Savannah had grown accustomed to receiving compliments for its good looks, the city was thoroughly unprepared for a shockingly negative piece of news about itself that came howling out of the FBI in Washington and resounded around the
world. Savannah had achieved the highest per-capita murder rate in the United States the previous year—54 murders, or 22.6 murders per 100,000 people. Savannah had become the murder capital of the United States! A stunned Mayor John Rousakis looked at the figures and complained that Savannah had been the victim of a statistical fluke. The numbers reflected murder rates in
metropolitan
areas. Unlike most cities, Savannah did not have vast outlying suburbs with thousands of untroubled suburbanites to dilute its murder rate. When the murder rate was confined to actual city limits, Savannah ranked fifteenth in the nation, which was still a troubling distinction for a city that was not even among the country’s hundred largest cities.

Intending to clarify the matter, the city manager, Don Mendonsa, announced that a breakdown of police figures showed that crime in Savannah “is a black problem.” Nearly half of Savannah’s population was black, he said, but 91 percent of the murderers were black, and 85 percent of the victims were also black. The same was true for rape (89 percent of the offenders and 87 percent of the victims were black). Ninety-four percent of assaults and 95 percent of robberies involved black offenders. The city manager was not a racist. He expressed a compassionate concern for dealing with the root causes—12.1 percent unemployment among blacks, compared with 4.7 for whites, and similar disparities in school-dropout rates, teenage pregnancies, unwed mothers, and family income.

Although racial inequalities were, if anything, greater in Savannah than in other southern cities, Savannah’s blacks displayed surprisingly little hostility toward whites. On the surface, at least, a remarkable civility prevailed. A black man passing a white stranger on the street would be likely to nod and say, “Good morning,” “How y’doing?” or simply “Hey.” Outwardly, little seemed to have changed since William Makepeace Thackeray visited Savannah in 1848 and described it as a tranquil old city with wide, tree-planted streets and “a few happy Negroes sauntering here and there.” Thackeray was not the only person to notice that slaves had smiles on their faces. W. H.
Pierson wrote in
The Water Witch
in 1863: “[The slaves] are, by all odds, the happiest-looking folks in the Confederacy. They sing, while the whites curse and pray.” During slavery, it was thought by some observers that the apparent good cheer of the slaves had something to do with their expectation that the roles would be reversed in the hereafter: They would be the masters, and whites would be their slaves. In the 1960s, the civil rights struggle put a temporary strain on relations, but integration was peaceful on the whole. Since then, Savannah had been governed largely by moderate whites who made it their business to stay on good terms with the black community. As a result, racial peace was maintained, and blacks remained politically conservative, which is to say, passive. There was no discernible black activism in Savannah. But it was evident that underneath their apparent complacency, Savannah’s blacks were beset by an anguish and despair that ran so deep and expressed itself with such violence that it had made Savannah the murder capital of America.

If Savannah’s spiritual, economic, artistic, architectural, and law-and-order concerns were not enough to keep people’s minds off Jim Williams, there were plenty of distractions on the social scene. There was talk, for instance, about a standoff at the Married Woman’s Card Club. Slots for membership had opened up, but competition to fill them had become so fierce that every candidate had been blackballed for two years running. No one had gotten into the club in all that time, and for the first time in memory, membership had slipped below the mandated sixteen. The stalemate was temporarily upstaged by a food-poisoning scare at one of the club’s get-togethers. The ladies were just heading home at six o’clock when they discovered the hostess’s cat lying dead on the front steps. Someone recalled having seen the cat nibbling a leftover portion of crab casserole only minutes before. The women thereupon trotted to their cars and drove in a swarm to Candler Hospital to have their stomachs pumped. The following morning, the next-door neighbor stopped by to say he was sorry he’d run over the cat.

Neither the Married Woman’s membership crisis nor the food
scare received any mention in the newspaper’s society column. It was, in fact, at about this time that the newspaper announced it was discontinuing its society column altogether. The column had never been much more than a bland recitation of guest lists, but its disappearance provoked a stinging rebuke from one of Savannah’s leading socialites, Mrs. Vera Dutton Strong. In her letter to the editor, which was one of the longest the newspaper had ever published, Mrs. Strong expressed “shocked disbelief” at the cancellation of the column, calling the paper’s social coverage a “genuine disgrace.” There was a certain irony in this, because the most compelling social gossip at the moment happened to be the test of wills currently being waged by Mrs. Strong and her rebellious daughter, Dutton.

Vera Dutton Strong was an heiress to the huge Dutton pulpwood fortune. An only child, she was a member of one of Savannah’s richest society families; her mother and father had always dressed for dinner—black tie and evening gown. Throughout her childhood she had been known as “The Princess,” a nickname that seemed only natural for her. She was Debutante of the Year, and at her wedding she wore an exact replica of the gown Queen Elizabeth II had worn at
her
wedding. Over the years, Mrs. Strong had shown herself to be good-humored, warm-hearted, and strong-willed. She was a founder of the Savannah Ballet Company and served as its hovering benefactress. Each year just before the Cotillion ball, society mothers would send their debutante daughters to Vera Strong so that she could teach them how to curtsy properly. A cloistered Savannahian of the purest sort, Mrs. Strong had never been to Europe, and she was past fifty when she visited Charleston for the first time.

Mrs. Strong’s own daughter, Dutton, was an angel-faced beauty with long red hair and not the slightest inclination to be a princess or a ballerina, both of which Mrs. Strong had set her heart on. Dutton obediently started ballet lessons at the age of four, and soon she was dancing with her mother’s ballet company. Dutton’s debutante party was the only one ever held at the
Telfair museum; Vera Strong hired Peter Duchin and his orchestra and commissioned a twelve-foot ice sculpture of the Eiffel Tower to highlight the “April in Paris” theme of the party. It was not until Dutton went away to school that a streak of independence began to assert itself. She skipped classes, stopped dancing, and finally dropped out of school. She came back home to Savannah, where she spent a year aimlessly hanging around the house and doing battle with her mother. “I never wanted to be a ballerina!” Dutton would bellow.
“You’re
the one who wanted to be a ballerina!” But Mrs. Strong would have none of it. “That’s nonsense! You loved dancing, or you never would have been so good at it!” After one especially energetic quarrel, Dutton stormed out of the house and moved into an apartment with an older woman who had been her mother’s poodle breeder. Dutton cut her long hair short, took to wearing jeans instead of skirts, put on weight, and stopped wearing lipstick. Then one afternoon she came to see her mother to announce that she had at long last decided on a career. She would go to the police academy and become a Savannah cop.

Vera Strong took the news with uncharacteristic calm. “If that’s what you really want,” she said, “I pray it turns out to be everything you’re hoping for.” Mrs. Strong attended her daughter’s graduation at the police academy with a pasted-on smile. She wore the same smile at Christmas dinner when her daughter, the former ballerina-debutante, arrived wearing a navy-blue polyester pants suit with a .38 revolver on one hip and a Mace can and handcuffs on the other.

Refusing to admit defeat, Vera Strong decided to view her daughter’s choice of profession as a selfless gesture of civic-mindedness rather than a betrayal of the family heritage. In the spring, she called the Oglethorpe Club to reserve a table for Easter dinner, making a point of telling the club manager that Dutton would be going on duty immediately afterward and would therefore be in uniform. Sensing a crisis of protocol, the manager demurred and said he would have to confer with the board. Ten minutes later he called back with profound apologies:
The no-trousers rule for women had never been lifted before and the board dared not do it now. Mrs. Strong forthwith denounced the manager, the board, and the Oglethorpe Club as only she could do. She then slammed down the telephone and booked a table at the more amenable but less exclusive Chatham Club.

The
Savannah Morning News
proved to be more tractable than the Oglethorpe Club. Stung by Mrs. Strong’s vituperative letter, the paper reinstated its society gossip column. Understandably, the column never made reference to the red-headed ballerina and her astonishing leap from
Coppélia
to cop, or to the continuing anguish that it caused her mother.

While all this was going on, the controversy over Joe Odom and the Hamilton-Turner House continued unabated. Shortly after Joe set up the nonprofit “Hamilton-Turner Museum Foundation” to shield his illegal tour business, his neighbors countered by arguing before the Department of Inspections that, profit or nonprofit, the Hamilton-Turner House stood within one hundred yards of a school. This meant it was illegal for Joe to sell liquor at his luncheons and dinner parties. But Joe was not concerned. “The law says I can’t
sell
liquor,” he said. “It doesn’t say I can’t
serve
it.” Somewhere in the gray area between selling and serving, Joe knew how to make money giving liquor to his customers, and he went right on doing it.

Liquor also played a part in a small drama involving Serena Dawes. Serena and Luther Driggers had split up, and Serena had taken to cruising the docks late at night in an effort to pick up Greek sailors. One night the police spotted her driving erratically along River Street and stopped her. Serena opted for a pose of elegant femininity, which was a feat in itself since she was wearing a shortie nightgown and fluffy white rabbit-head slippers. She batted her eyelashes and exclaimed sweetly that she had gone out to move her “cah-wuh” and had gotten lost. When the policemen took her to the county jail and booked her for driving under the influence, she wanted to scream and scratch their faces, but instead she held herself in check and coyly thanked
them for coming to her rescue. She mentioned that her “great-granddaddy-in-law” had been Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s just to let them know they were dealing with a woman of quality. An hour later, Luther Driggers came down to bail her out, but by that time Serena had had enough of pretense. A fat black prison matron, who had taken Serena’s handbag and searched it, now handed it back to her.

“You can have it back,” the matron said. “It’s clean.”

“It is
not
clean anymore,” Serena snapped, snatching the purse out of the woman’s hands. “And if I
ever
catch you putting your filthy fucking hands on anything of mine again, you’ll be wearing your poon-tang for a turtleneck!”

These, then, were the matters of consuming interest in Savannah, the city
Le Monde
had called “la plus belle des villes” in North America. Beautiful it was, but still very isolated and, because of that, a bit too trusting. Police had recently circulated a warning about a pair of con men who were cashing checks drawn on a nonexistent company. The con men had given their victims a sporting chance by naming their bogus company “Fly By Night, Inc.,” but dozens of Savannah merchants had cashed the checks anyway. About the same time, it also came to light that the clerk in charge of handling the money in probate court did not know how to multiply and that one of the probate judges had taken advantage of the situation by dipping into the cash box. Life, in other words, went on. Savannah had community questions to resolve, such as: Should a second mall be built? Had Mr. Charles Hall ruined Whitfield Square by painting his gingerbread house a dozen shades of pink and purple? And, if so, did the city have the right to force him to repaint it in more acceptable colors?