Savannah, Day 3

Yesterday's crisis now diverted. I desperately wanted to blog about it, which was the reason that I alluded to it, but felt that I was treading too closely to violating certain agreements about privacy. No one was beaten down, and the conflict went back to where it belongs.

Moving on to the third day in Savannah. This was the day that I had been waiting for: the day Annette Gordon-Reed spoke:


That's not me in the picture, getting my book signed. I have the hardback from when it first came out. My copy also has about a thousand sticky tabs poking out of the side. When I got to the front of the line, I was like, "OMGOMGOMG! Annette Gordon-Reed! OMG! I LURVED this book! OMG!" It was embarrassing.

She, of course, spoke about women and slavery, specifically The Hemings of Monticello, which won a gazillion awards. Her talk actually turned into a lively conversation that I could not even begin to summarize, but I'll write down some of the points from my notes:

She spoke of the difficulties in getting at the women in slavery and the power of law in creating a reality for those women. She also spoke of the political difficulty of writing about a family in which the majority of liaisons between men and women were the result of rape, and yet people also made connections one way or another. In regard to the difficulty of sources, she said that she balks at the idea that "we can't say that because we don't have the complete story" because subscribing to that idea means "we can't say anything at all."

Her next book will be the Hemings story after Monticello and their struggle to attain "respectability." Indeed, one branch of the family had trouble acknowledging Sally Hemings partly because of the stigma of illegitimacy that would have been attached to Hemings children. I asked about the types of sources she uses to find the lives of the women during freedom, and she agreed that black women in freedom are sometimes more difficult to find than black women under slavery because, under slavery, they are more likely to appear in the plantation records. In freedom, especially before the 1850 census, they appear only here and there, if at all. I'm having that trouble with Anna Murray, Douglass's wife, before they married.

She also said something about the Hemings that made me think of the way Douglass treated Anna and his daughter, Rosetta. She said that Jefferson took the Hemings women out of the fields and turned them into model European women in the domestic sphere. I wondered about Douglass and his demands of Anna and his aspirations for Rosetta. With Rosetta, of course he would want his daughter to have a better life than his; but with Anna, he wanted to turn her into a model bourgeois wife. She may not have wanted to identify herself in just that way. Right now, this is a half-baked idea, and of course the slave master/slave relationship makes Jefferson's relationship to Hemings quite different from Frederick and Anna's relationship. Her phrasing, however, made me wonder about the ways that patriarchy worked in the Douglass marriage, and what Anna may have lost or fought against because Douglass defined the identity of their family. But that's all for another time. It need much more time in the oven!

Gordon-Reed had to leave right after our visit. Since her talk had been held in a museum, we got a tour of the museum and saw a presentation about folk art around Savannah. I thought it was all kinda cool, these people turning their yards into these fabulous displays made of all sorts of trash and cast-off items. Mine was not the consensus opinion.

We adjourned for lunch, with plans to meet at another location later in the day. A bunch of people ran off to Mrs. Wilkes Boarding House. I'm not really a restaurant type of person, and the heat made me not so hungry, so I went on a mission to get a picture and a tchotchke of the Pirate's House for the Gentleman Caller.

You see, the Pirate's House has a connection to Treasure Island. I had never read the book because, you know, it was about dudes and therefore did not interest me. Gentleman Caller, however, loves the book and told me that the Pirate's House was supposed to be where this one guy died and left the treasure map to the treasure island to this other dude who ended up dieing in an inn in England, and this kid and his mother find the map and go searching for the treasure. Something like that.

Anyway, I walked and walked and walked, in the steaming heat, toward the river. Speaking of which, did you know that this guy lived in Savannah?:

That's Johnny Mercer. Mercer, of course, is an old southern name, so that makes sense. As I remembered from The Book, Mercer wrote that song from Breakfast at Tiffany's about the Savannah River:

"Moooon River, wider than a mile..."


"I'm crossing you in style, some daaaaaay!"

Yeah, that song got stuck in my head every damn time I saw any river anywhere all week. You will notice, however, that a huge tanker is sailing along, which tells you how big the river actually is. Of course, I was told the next day, when we passed over another river closer to Pin Point, that that river was the moon river, not this one. Whatever.

Once I got to the river, moon or not, I turned right and went to the end of the street. There I found the Pirate's House:

Another name for it could be the Tourist Trap. The building actually is old, but it now houses a burger joint. I thought the gift shop might be an awesome array of kitsch, but it was simply plain ole pirate crap of plastic eye patches and doubloons, and only a display case, not even a shop. So, I took my picture for Gentleman Caller and headed for our afternoon meeting place.

Then, passing another tchotchke shop, I saw the perfect item in the window: a wooden cutout of the Pirate's House. That became the perfect present for the Gentleman Caller, and he now has it sitting on his shelf next to his Jane Austen Action Figure.

At our afternoon meeting, people asked where I had gone during lunch. When I said the Pirate's House, and no, I was not there to eat, I was there to take a picture for a friend, they said, "that must be one good friend to walk that far just for a picture!" Yes, he is a good friend.

Here is our meeting place for that afternoon:
The Crystal Beer Parlor. Stan, who was our fearless leader and eye-candy for the week, threw a lot of business toward this establishment, what with the four-week workshop prior to ours, our week-long workshop, and the week-long workshop following ours. That's six weeks of drunk scholars they got, and we had some of our best discussions here. I always thought that grad school seminars would have been much more productive if alcohol had been involved, and this seemed to prove true here.

Sadly, we all had to turn in early that night because we had to be up and ready to go at the crack of dawn the next day in order to catch the bus to Ossabaw Island. Ossabaw was a whole other adventure.