From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Savannah

Savannah After spending the day stuck in the sands of South Georgia and staying late with Jackie Carter, I arrived in Savannah very late and very hungry. I asked the desk clerk for a restaurant recommendation. She replied, “All the restaurants have closed their kitchens by now, but I bet you can find a bar down the street that will serve you something.” A real expectation-lowering response. I nodded and turned to Water Street, the street along the Savannah River. It doubles as the entertainment district of Savannah, a small city of 135,000 people. The bartender at the very first place I reached said that the kitchen was open and he’d recommend the “low-country boil.” The low-country boil consisted of boiled shrimp or crawfish with potatoes and corn on the cob. It sounded a lot like the meals that the Zaunbrechers sold at their crawfish boil stand in the Cajun Prairie. I said, “Great. Gimme some of that please.” The bartender followed up by asking if I wanted a “half and half,” shrimp and crawfish. Even though it was a little early in the year for crawfish, I stayed with the all-crawfish boil. I hadn’t seen any boiled crawfish for a long time. Peeling crawfish must be like riding a bicycle— or John Zaunbrecher Jr. taught me well. I’m sure anyone watching was impressed with how deft I was at crawfish-peeling. Having ordered, I turned to the people next to me, self-described “tourists” from Waycross, Georgia. Waycross is on the western side of the Okefenokee Swamp directly across from Folkston and 125 miles from 378 Savannah. They laughed as they called themselves tourists, saying they came to the city once or twice a month to enjoy themselves. Since I was fresh from Folkston, we swapped alligator stories. My tourist friends relayed theirs about the little four-foot alligator in their pond. Rather than call a trapper, they fished it out of the pond with a strong line on a fishing pole. Since the gator was hooked well, the husband led it toward his wife. The critter began to chase her while carrying a hook in its mouth. He said that alligator “shore was mad, but not as mad as the Missus was.” His wife, “the Missus,” laughed and noted that he may have had fun at the time, but she was headed to the front door of the house to get a shotgun “to shoot them both.” Unfortunately it was locked, so she’d had to humor her husband until he led the beast away. She added that if she had been able to escape to the back door and get her hands on that gun, she might be in jail right now for manslaughter. They continued the story, adding that they killed the gator and called their son to come and take the tail for a barbecue. They cut off its head so they could have some fun with the skull and a University of Florida fan. One thing that I found on the Journey was that humidity is always relative . I asked the Waycrossers about Savannah’s summer humidity. In a great South Georgia drawl that knows no r’s, my new friends allowed, “Its humidity ain’t too bad; least ways, it ain’t as bad as Waycross.” (I realize that there are no r’s in that quote—just pronounce slowly the name of their home state without using the r and you’ll get the idea of how they spoke.) Another person, who’d lived mostly in Charleston, chimed in, noting that Savannah’s humidity was beastly and much worse than Charleston’s because Savannah is so far inland, a solid sixteen miles from the Atlantic Ocean. As we said good-bye, the folks from Waycross assured me that I would enjoy Savannah because the to-go cup was invented here. Later, in a local Savannah bookstore, a book tote reflected the same sentiment: IN ATLANTA They ask what you do for a living IN CHARLESTON They ask who your grandmother was IN MACON They ask what church you go to 379 BUT IN SAVANNAH THEY ASK WHAT YOU WANT TO DRINK Savannah was established in 1733. Some say it was a utopian experiment through which England sent “white trash”—they called them paupers—to the New World, perhaps to see if they...