Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Read Online Free PDF

prices of entrées on the menu—$19, $29, $39, $49—and it occurred to me that I had seen that very same column of figures earlier in the day. But where? It suddenly came to me. I had seen it in a newspaper ad for supersaver airfares from New York to cities all across America.As I recall, the veal-and-radicchio entrée cost as much as a flight from New York to Louisville or any of six equidistant cities. With everything included—drinks, dessert, coffee, and tip—the bill for each person that night came to what it would have cost to spend a three-day weekend in another town.
    A week later I passed up the veal and radicchio and flew to New Orleans.
    After that, every five or six weeks I took advantage of the newly deregulated airfares and flew out of New York in the company of a small group of friends interested in a change of scene. One of those weekend jaunts took us to Charleston, South Carolina. We drove around in a rented car with a map lying open on the front seat. At the bottom of the map, about a hundred miles down the coast, lay Savannah.
    I had never been to Savannah, but I had a vivid image of it anyway. Several images, in fact. The most memorable, because it was formed in my childhood, was one associated with
Treasure Island
, which I had read at the age of ten. In
Treasure Island
, Savannah is the place where Captain John Flint, the murderous pirate with the blue face, has died of rum before the story begins. It is on his deathbed in Savannah that Flint bellows his last command—
“Fetch aft the rum, Darby!”
—and hands Billy Bones a map of Treasure Island. “He gave it me at Savannah,” says Bones, “when he lay a-dying.” The book had a drawing of Flint’s map in it with an X marking the location of his buried treasure. I turned to the map again and again as I read, and every time I did I was reminded of Savannah, for there at the bottom was Billy Bones’s scrawled notation, “Given by above JF to Mr W. Bones. Savannah this twenty July 1754.”
    I next came across Savannah in
Gone with the Wind
, which was set a century later. By 1860, Savannah was no longer the pirates’ rendezvous I’d pictured. It had become, in Margaret Mitchell’s words, “that gently mannered city by the sea.” Savannah was an offstage presence in
Gone with the Wind
, just as it had been in
Treasure Island.
It stood aloof on the Georgia coast—dignified, sedate, refined—looking down its nose at Atlanta,which was then a twenty-year-old frontier town three hundred miles inland. From Atlanta’s point of view, specifically through the eyes of the young Scarlett O’Hara, Savannah and Charleston were “like aged grandmothers fanning themselves placidly in the sun.”
    My third impression of Savannah was somewhat quirkier. I got it from the yellowed pages of an old newspaper that had been used to line the inside of an antique wooden chest that I kept at the foot of my bed. It was from the
Savannah Morning News
, April 2, 1914. Whenever I lifted the lid of the chest, I was confronted by a brief story that read as follows:
TANGO IS NO SIGN OF INSANITY, HOLDS JURY
    DECIDES THAT SADIE JEFFERSON IS NOT INSANE
    It is no indication of insanity to tango. This was settled yesterday by a lunacy commission which decided that Sadie Jefferson is sane. It was alleged the woman tangoed all the way to police headquarters recently when she was arrested.
    That was the story in its entirety. Sadie Jefferson was not further identified, and nothing was said about why she had been arrested in the first place. I imagined she had drunk more than her share of the rum left over from Captain Flint. Whatever it was, Sadie Jefferson seemed to be cut from the same cloth as the heroine of the song “Hard-hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah.” Those two women lent an exotic dimension to the picture of Savannah that was forming in my mind.
    Then Johnny Mercer died in the mid-1970s, and I read that he had been born and raised in Savannah. Mercer had