by John Berendt
“Savannah’s a peculiar place, but if you just listen to your Cousin Joe you’ll get along fine. You need to know about a few basic rules though.
“Rule number one: Always stick around for one more drink. That’s when things happen. That’s when you find out everything you want to know.”
“I think I can live with that one,” I said.
“Rule number two: Never go south of Gaston Street. A true Savannahian is a NOG. NOG means ‘north of Gaston.’ We stay in the old part of town. We don’t do the Mall. We don’t do the southside unless we’re invited to a party for rich people out at The Landings. Everything south of Gaston Street is North Jacksonville to us, and ordinarily we leave it alone.
“Rule number three: Observe the high holidays—Saint Patrick’s Day and the day of the Georgia-Florida football game. Savannah has the third-biggest Saint Patrick’s Day parade in America. People come from all over the South to see it. Businesses close for the day, except for restaurants and bars, and the drinking starts at about six A.M. Liquor is a major feature of the Georgia-Florida game, too, but the similarity ends there. The game is nothing less than a war between the gentlemen of Georgia and the Florida barbarians. We get all keyed up for it a week ahead of time, and then afterwards it takes a week to ten days to deal with the emotional strain of having won or lost. Georgia men grow up understanding the seriousness of that one game.”
“Georgia women grow up understanding it too,” said Mandy. “Ask any girl in south Georgia. She’ll tell you flat out: You don’t start wearing panty hose until after the Georgia-Florida game.” I felt myself becoming a fast friend of Joe and Mandy.
“So, look here,” Joe said. “Now that you’ve come under our protective custody, we’ll be unhappy with you if you need anything and don’t ask for it, or if you get into trouble and don’t holler.”
Mandy climbed into Joe’s lap and nuzzled his ear.
“Just make sure you put us in your book,” he said. “You understand, of course, that we’ll want to play ourselves in the movie version. Won’t we, Mandy?”
“Mm-hmmm,” she said.
Joe played a few bars of “Hooray for Hollywood” (another Johnny Mercer tune).
“In that book of yours,” he said, “you can use my real name if you want to. Or you can just call me the ‘Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia,’ because that’s pretty much who I am.
I’m just a sentimental gentleman from Georgia, Georgia,
Gentle to the ladies all the time.
And when it comes to lovin’ I’m a real professor,
Yes sir!
Just a Mason-Dixon valentine.
Oh, see those Georgia peaches
Hangin’ around me now.
’Cause what this baby teaches nobody else knows how.
This sentimental gentleman from Georgia, Georgia,
Gentle to the ladies all the time.
Joe sang with such winsome charm, I had to remind myself that he was the same person who had tapped into the electricity of the house next door and who was, by his own admission, dodging process servers for financial transgressions of God-knew-what proportion. His ingratiating manner made everything he did seem like good-natured fun. Later, as he saw me to the door, he joked and bantered with such easy grace that I did not fully realize until I got home that in the course of saying goodbye he had borrowed twenty dollars from me.
Chapter 4
SETTLING IN
Having made what I took to be a promising, if unorthodox, start on a social life, I set about arranging my apartment so I could live and work in it comfortably. For essential things like bookshelves, file cabinets, and reading lamps, I visited a junk shop on the edge of town. It was a cluttered, barnlike warehouse that extended back into a series of rooms filled with Formica dinette sets, sofas, office furniture, and all manner of machinery from washer-dryers to apple corers. The owner sat like a Buddha behind a desk, barking hellos to customers and instructions to his salesman.
The salesman was an expressionless man in his mid-thirties. He had mousy brown hair parted at the center, and his arms hung loosely at his sides. His clothes were clean but faded, like the suits and shirts on a rack in one corner of the store. I was immediately impressed by the man’s instant recall of the store’s vast inventory. “We have seven of that type item,” he would say. “One’s like new, four work pretty good, one’s broke but could be fixed, and the other’s on lay-away.” In addition to having a mental catalog of the place, the salesman was a virtuoso on the strengths and weaknesses of practically any brand of appliance, particularly brands no longer in existence. “Kelvinator made a good one in the early fifties,” he’d say. “It had five speeds. It was real easy to clean, and you could get replacement parts right quick.”
Impressed as I was by all of that, I was struck even more by something else—a carefully applied arc of purple eye shadow that blazed like a lurid sunset on his left eyelid.
At first I found it difficult to listen to what he was saying, distracted as I was by the eye shadow. I wondered what nocturnal transformation was built around this painted eye. I envisioned a tiara and a strapless gown, a fluttering ostrich fan at the end of a long white glove. Or was this something quite different? Was it, perhaps, the war paint of punk? Did this mild-mannered man spend his secret hours in jackboots, ripped T-shirts, and spiked hair?
Eventually, my attention wandered back to what the man was saying, and I bought what it was he was showing me. The next week, I dropped in at the shop again, and this time I tried very hard not to stare at the purple eye shadow on the man’s left eye.
From time to time, while he was waiting on me, the boss would shout questions from his desk about whether such-and-such an item was in stock. The salesman would cock an ear and call out the answer over his shoulder without looking directly at his boss. After one such exchange, the salesman said in a low voice, “What the boss don’t know won’t hurt him.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“He didn’t like this,” the salesman said, pointing to his left eye. “I don’t do drag or anything sick like that. I just do my eyes. I used to do my other eye the same way too. The boss told me to stop, and I was all set to walk out the door and never come back. But then I figured, ‘Wait a minute. He never gets out of that chair, see, and my desk is over by his left side. If I only do the eye away from him, maybe he’ll never notice.’ That was two years ago and he ain’t said nothin’ about it since.”
On my next visit to the shop, the salesman was out to lunch but due back soon. The boss and I chatted. “Jack’s a good man,” he said, speaking of his salesman. “Best I’ve ever seen. He’s a strange one, though. He’s a loner. This shop and everything in it is his whole life. I call him ‘Jack the One-eyed Jill’—not to his face, of course. He used to put that eye makeup on both eyes, you know. God, it looked awful. I told him, ‘I can’t have this in my shop! No more or you’re out!’ So what did he do? Came in the next day not wearin’ any eye makeup at all as far as I could tell. But he was walkin’ sideways around the store like a damned crab, twistin’ this way and that. Then he went past a mirrored wardrobe, and I saw it plain as day: He’d put the makeup on the other eye.
“I was ready to kick his butt clear out the door, then and there. But he’s good at what he does, and it doesn’t seem to bother the customers. So I kept my mouth shut. And from that day to this, he’s kept that eye turned away from me. He must take me for blind or some kind of idiot, but that’s okay with me. He pretends he’s not wearing makeup, and I pretend I don’t know he’s ignored my wishes. Meanwhile, he keeps walkin’ sideways, twistin’ around, speakin’ outta the corner of his mouth, and hopin’ I won’t notice. And I make out like I don’t. I don’t know who’s crazier, Jack the One-eyed Jill or me. But we get along just fine.”
Before long, I found myself settling into a pattern of daily routines: an early-morning jog around Forsyth Park, breakfast at Clary’s drugstore, a late-afternoon walk along Bull Street
. I discovered that my activities coincided with the daily rituals of certain other people. No matter how widely our paths may have diverged for the rest of the day, we overlapped again and again at our appointed hour and place. The black man who jogged around Forsyth Park at the same hour I did was one such person.
He was lean, very dark, and a little over six feet tall. When I fell in behind him the first time, I noticed he was carrying a short blue leather strap. Most of it was wound around his hand; eight or ten inches of it protruded. He snapped the free end against his thigh every other step, producing a rhythmic whap that forced me to run in step or very much out of step. I ran in step; it was easier. As he turned the corner at the south end of the park that first day, he looked back in my direction but not quite at me, a little behind me. I looked over my shoulder. About fifty yards back, there was a blond woman jogging with a little terrier romping beside her.
The next time I started my run, the blond woman and her dog were running ahead of me. The dog would dart into the park and then double back to join her. As I drew near, she turned her head to look across the park toward Drayton Street on the other side. The black man was jogging along Drayton, having already made both turns at the far end. He looked back at her.
After this, I never saw one of them without also seeing the other. He always carried the little blue leather strap. She always had her dog with her. Sometimes he was in the lead; sometimes she was. They were always separated by at least a hundred yards.
One day I saw the man at the M&M supermarket pushing a shopping cart. Another time I caught sight of him getting into a late-model green Lincoln on Wright Square. But no blue strap and no blond woman. A few days later, I saw the blond woman coming out of a bank. She was unaccompanied except for her terrier, who trotted along beside her. He was straining at the end of a blue leather leash.
“We don’t do black-on-white in Savannah,” Joe Odom told me when I mentioned having seen this couple. “Especially black male on white female. A lot may have changed here in the last twenty years, but not that. Badness is the only woman I know of who had a black lover and got away with it. Badness was the wife of an influential Savannah businessman, and she had lovers during most of their marriage. That was all perfectly acceptable. Savannah will put up with public infidelity no matter how flagrant it is. Savannah loves it. Can’t get enough of it. But even Badness knew enough to leave Savannah and go to Atlanta when she felt the urge to have an affair with a black man.”
I understood all that, but I still wondered about certain small details concerning my jogging companions. Why, for instance, did he carry the leash? And when and where did they get close enough for her to give it to him? The whole point, I finally realized, was that I would never know.
If I happened to be walking along Bull Street in the late afternoon, I would invariably see a very old and very dignified black man. He always wore a suit and tie, a starched white shirt, and a fedora. His ties were muted paisleys and regimental stripes, and his suits were fine and well tailored, though apparently made for a slightly larger person.
Every day at the same time, the old man walked through the cast-iron gates of the grandiose Armstrong House at the north end of Forsyth Park. He turned left and proceeded up Bull Street all the way to City Hall and back. He was very much a gentleman. He tipped his hat and bowed in greeting. But I noticed that he and the people he spoke with—usually well-dressed businessmen—played a very odd game. The men would ask him, “Still walking the dog?” It was perfectly clear that the old man was not walking a dog, but he would respond by saying, “Oh, yes. Still walking the dog.” Then he would look over his shoulder and say to the air behind him, “Come on, Patrick!” And off he would go.
One day, as I came through Madison Square, I saw him standing by the monument facing a semicircle of tourists. He was singing. I could not make out the words, but I could hear his reedy tenor voice. The tourists applauded when he was done, and one of the lady tour guides slipped something into his hand. He bowed and left them. We approached the crosswalk at the same time.
“That was very nice,” I said.
“Why, thank you kindly,” he replied in his courtly way. “My name is William Simon Glover.”
I introduced myself and told Mr. Glover that it seemed we often took the same walk at the same hour. I said nothing about the dog, figuring that the subject would come up on its own.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m eighty-six years old, and I’m downtown at seven o’clock every morning. I’m retired, but I don’t stay still. I work as a porter for the law firm of Bouhan, Williams and Levy.” Mr. Glover’s voice had a bounce to it. He pronounced the name of the law firm as if an exclamation mark followed each of the partners’ names.
“I’m a porter, but everybody knows me as a singer,” he said as we started to cross the street. “I learned to sing in church when I was twelve. I pumped the organ for a quarter while one lady played and another lady sang. I didn’t know nothing about no German, French, or Italian, but by me hearing the lady sing so much, I learned to say the words whether I knew what they was or not. One Sunday morning, the lady didn’t sing, so I sang instead. And I sang in Italian. I sang ‘Hallelujah.’”
“How did it go?” I asked him.
Mr. Glover stopped and faced me. He opened his mouth wide and drew a deep breath. From the back of his throat came a high, croaking sound, “Aaaaa lay loooo-yah! A-layyyy-loo yah!” He had abandoned his tenor and was singing in a wavering falsetto. Forever in his mind, apparently, “Hallelujah” would be a soprano piece as sung by the lady in church so many years before. “Allay-loo-yah, a-lay-loo yah, a-lay-loo yah, a-lay-loo yah, a-lay-loo-yah, a-lay-loo-yah!” Mr. Glover stopped for a breath. “—And then the lady always finished by saying, ‘AAAAAAAAhhh lay looooooo yah!’”
“So that was your debut,” I said.
“That’s right! That’s how I started. That lady learned me to sing in German, French, and Italian! Oh, yes! And I’ve been musical director of the First African Baptist Church since 1916. I directed a chorus of five hundred voices for Franklin D. Roosevelt when he visited Savannah on November 18, 1933. I remember the date, because that was the very day my daughter was born. I named her Eleanor Roosevelt Glover. I can remember the song we sang too: ‘Come By Here.’ The doctor sent word up to me, ‘Tell Glover he can sing “Come By Here” for the president all he damn pleases, but I just come by his house and left a baby girl and I want him to come by my office and pay me fifteen dollars.’”
When we parted at the corner of Oglethorpe Avenue, I realized I was still in the dark about the imaginary dog, Patrick. A week or so later, when I next fell in step with Mr. Glover, I made a mental note to bring the subject around to it. But Mr. Glover had other things to talk about first.
“You know about psychology,” he said. “You learn that in school. You learn people-ology on the Pullman. I was a porter for the Pullman during the war. You had to keep the passengers well satisfied for ’em to tip you fifty cents or a dollar. You say, ‘Wait a minute, sir. You going up to the club car? Your tie is crooked.’ Now, his tie is really straight as an arrow, but you pull it crooked and then you pull it straight again, and he likes it. That’s people-ology!
“Keep a whisk broom in your pocket, and brush him off! He don’t need no brushing off, but he don’t know it! Brush him off anyhow, and straighten his collar. Pull it crooked and straighten it again. Miss Mamie don’t need a box for her hat, but you be sure and put her hat in a box! If you sit and don’t do nothin’, you won’t get nothin’!
“Another thing I learned: Don’t ever ask a man, ‘How is Mrs. Brown?’ You ask him, ‘How is Miss Julia? Tell her I ask about her.’ I never did ask Mr. Bouhan about Mrs. Bouhan. I ask him, ‘How is Miss Helen? Tell Miss Helen I ask about her.’ He liked it and she liked it. Mr. Bouhan gave me his old clothes and shoes. Miss Helen gave me records from her collection, all kinds of records. I got records I don’t even know I got. I even got records of that great opera sing
er … Henry Coca-ruso!
“I keep busy,” Mr. Glover said. “I don’t sit down and hold my hand. I got five hundred dollars of life insurance, and it’s all paid up. I paid twenty-five cents a week for seventy years! And last week the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company sent me a check for one thousand dollars!”
Mr. Glover’s eyes were sparkling. “No, sir, I don’t sit down and hold my hand.”
“Glover!” came a booming voice from behind us. A tall white-haired man in a gray suit approached. “Still walking the dog?”
“Why, yes, sir, yes I am.” Mr. Glover did his little bow and tipped his hat and gestured to the invisible dog behind him. “I’m still walking Patrick.”
“Glad to hear it, Glover. Keep it up! Take care now.” With that, the man walked away.
“How long have you been walking Patrick?” I asked.
Mr. Glover straightened up. “Oh, for a long time. Patrick was Mr. Bouhan’s dog. Mr. Bouhan used to give him Chivas Regal scotch liquor to drink. I walked the dog, and I was the dog’s bartender too. Mr. Bouhan said that after he died I was to be paid ten dollars a week to take care of Patrick. He put that in his will. I had to walk him and buy his scotch liquor. When Patrick died, I went to see Judge Lawrence. The judge was Mr. Bouhan’s executor. I said, ‘Judge, you can stop paying me the ten dollars now, because Patrick is dead.’ And Judge Lawrence said, ‘What do you mean Patrick is dead? How could he be? I see him right there! Right there on the carpet.’ I looked behind me, and I didn’t see no dog. But then I thought a minute and I said, ‘Oh! I think I see him too, Judge!’ And the judge said, ‘Good. So you just keep walking him and we’ll keep paying you.’ The dog is dead twenty years now, but I still walk him. I walk up and down Bull Street and look over my shoulder and say, ‘Come on, Patrick!’”