Berendt, John. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
New York: Vintage Books. 1999
Wikipedia says
about Jim Williams: “James Arthur
Williams (or Jim Williams)
(December 11, 1930 - January 14, 1990) was the only person in the state of
Georgia ever to be tried four times for the same crime – the alleged murder of
his assistant, Danny Lewis Hansford, on May 2, 1981, in Williams's home, Mercer
House.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Arthur_Williams)
Tourists still stop at the Mercer House in Savannah, Georgia
to satisfy their prurient curiosity about the murder, asking guides where
exactly Danny Hansford and Jim Williams were standing when the fatal shots were
fired. Various reviews of the visit on TripAdvisor
mention that guides to Mercer House don't talk about the murder, possibly
because they've been ordered not to do so. Bummer.
John
Berendt's first book is about Jim Williams, an eccentric character credited
with much of the restoration of Historic Savannah. Told through the eyes of a
writer from New York who spends time in Savannah getting to know the memorable
characters that apparently inhabited that city in the 60s, 70s and 80s, this
extraordinary book treads the fine line between the novel and non-fiction
genres; it reads like a novel but all it's characters can be found in Wikipedia
(except for a few, we're told, whose names were changed for different reasons).
Take
Williams himself. He's invented a game called Psycho Dice, a game that
illustrates his belief that through the efforts of mind, he can improve his
odds in the great gamble that is his life:
“It's very simple. You take four
dice and call out four numbers between one and six—for example, a four, a
three, and two sixes. Then you throw the dice, and if any of your numbers come
up, you leave those dice standing on the board. You continue to roll the
remaining dice until all the dice are sitting on the board, showing your set of
numbers. You're eliminated if you roll three times in succession without getting
any of the numbers you need. The object is to get all four numbers in the
fewest rolls. (p. 21)”
The game foreshadows the bizarre
story of Jim Williams' four trials for the murder of Danny Hansford. So strong
is Williams' belief that the advantage he has will eventually free him from the
tentacles of the court that he wanders through this phase of his life nearly
oblivious to his peril, buying antiques by phone from his prison cell at one
point, carrying on with enormous Christmas parties at Mercer House when he's
out on bail waiting for yet another appeal.
After
a few convictions however, Williams sees fit to enlist the help of one Minerva,
a self-styled conjurer whose bag of tricks involves graveyard digs, roots,
herbs, hexes and blessings, none of which seem to have any affect on the train
of events:
“Thomas pulls to a stop at the
ship's bow, and Minerva lights the candle and begins to chant. With the red
pen, she scribbles phrases from the Bible onto the vellum. When she is done,
she cuts the vellum into small squares and sets them on fire one by one.
Glowing ashes float around like black snowflakes inside the car.
'Take
these three pieces I ain't burned,' she says to Thomas, 'and tell Mr. Jim to
put them in his shoes.' (p. 283)”
Minerva wears the purple glasses of
her deceased mentor in the occult arts, and is constantly trying to conjure him
for numbers to help her win the lottery. A fitting parallel plot to that of the
four-times tried, three-times convicted Jim Williams.
And
then there's The Lady Chablis, the colourful vaudeville transvestite whose self
confidence and sheer bravado as a performer in the transgendered night clubs of
Georgia remains a legend to this day.
She provides a counterpoint to Jim Williams and the rumours of liaisons with
male prostitutes that surround him (Danny Hansford is widely presumed to have
been one of them). Here is a character who makes no excuses for his/her sexual
uniqueness, in fact, is quoted on her website
to have said: “Oh SHIT . . . Land the Plane and Dock the boat, I am THE Lady
Chablis and I put Savannah on the map and then took over the world! You love
me, you CRAVE me and you LOVE to HATE me. . .” What he/she shares with Jim
Williams is the belief that each of them single-handedly “put Savannah on the
map.” One might wonder why he/she would be included in the book, but then, how could you leave him/her out??
Savannah
has a unique history as a southern city in that it escaped much of the
destruction visited upon most of Georgia by General William Sherman, who is
said to have accepted its surrender in November of 1864 and to have sent a telegram
to Abraham Lincoln as follows:
|
“I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of
Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns and plenty of ammunition, also
about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.”
|
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil persisted on the New York Times bestseller list for four years. It's a great read!
