An excerpt from Spirit Willing: A Savannah Haunting

by Susan B. Johnson
Hard Cover - June 2007
Bonaventture Books ; ISBN 10:0-9724224-6-3; ISBN 13: 978-0-9724224-6-8

Why Olivia had donned her prettiest blue dress and come to Bonaventure Cemetery with Charlotte and her deaf-as-a-stone father-in-law, Harold Horner, was a mystery. He had immediately embarrassed her by kissing her hand like some aging Lancelot and presenting her with an enormous Easter lily in a pink-foiled pot. Between them on the back seat had ridden its twin, ready to be placed beside Mary Horner’s headstone. Identical lilies for two old fossils, thought Olivia. She regarded Easter lilies with the same loathing she reserved for all large, dramatic flora—amaryllis, birds of paradise, flamingo flowers, cannas. Only day lilies and poinsettias were exempt as they seemed not so egocentric. Give me a bed of pansies any day, thank you very much, she thought, issuing Harold a wooden smile. Buoyed by an audience, he held forth throughout the entire trip recounting his heroism in the last hours of Mary’s life.

“I gave her a pint of my own blood,” he shouted amicably. “I’d have given her a gallon if they had let me, but she was too far gone. The doctor said her heart couldn’t take the strain, just couldn’t take the strain.”

“Perhaps it was her patience that couldn’t take the strain,” suggested Olivia in a tone too muted for his hearing aid to register. She rolled down the window to renew the air supply.

Charlotte had parked midway between the Horner and Thornheart burial plots. When Harold began helping his daughter-in-law unload a small spade and some bedding plants from the trunk, Olivia decided to spend a few private moments by Carter’s grave. It was easy enough to find.  How beautiful the statue of the “Melancholy Angel” was—just as lovely as the day twenty-nine years ago when she began her vigil.  Only now mosses and lichen adorned her hair and her dress in delicate shades of rust and green. The figure stood atop a marble base with a simple inscription:

MY HUSBAND

CARTER BISBY THORNHEART

1923 - 1975

She supposed she, too, should have thought of flowers, but somehow it seemed redundant. Carter had died on just such an April day as this, a highly inappropriate season for mourning. Now, as then, the old cemetery was lush with the new green of spring, its quiet avenues festive with white, red, and salmon azaleas. Spring beauties carpeted the copses, and nearby, wisteria spiraled up a dogwood, complementing its lace. She agreed with an exuberant mockingbird trilling overhead—the day was much too “vivibund” (as Cyrus would say) for entertaining somber thoughts. So she had wandered away to the riverbank to sit and watch the Wilmington River wending its way to the Atlantic.

An excerpt from Savannah's Little Crooked Houses: If These Walls Could Talk

by Susan B. Johnson
Paperback - February 2007
The History Press; ISBN 978-1596292260

Imagine.

It is July 3, 1802, and you stand in the open doorway listening to the night sounds—the whimper of a child up in the sleeping loft, the rumble of distant thunder, the whinny of a horse from the stable down the street. Your hand rests on the door frame of the house you have occupied for the last four years, a sturdy cottage built of local heart-of-pine. Again you hear thunder and are glad for the promise of rain. Too many people, especially children, have fallen ill from the heat. You step out onto the low stoop, hoping for a breeze, but not a leaf stirs, and the dust from the street hangs in the motionless air. In the neighboring houses—four-room cottages like yours—all lanterns have been extinguished for the night. Of the several thousand people in Savannah, it seems you alone are awake.

Tomorrow you will join your neighbors on the common to celebrate America's 26th year of independence from British rule. You look forward to the pageantry—the fifes and drums, the military parades, and even, it is rumored, the flight of a hot air balloon. Your mouth waters in anticipation of wild pig roasted on a spit, steamed oysters, and Indian pudding. You are proud of your thriving city and hope that soon your new President, Thomas Jefferson, will visit Savannah just as President Washington did in 1791.

With a sudden crack of thunder, the sky opens, and the torrent pounds on the wooden shingles, gullies the rutted street. No houses will be ravaged by fire tonight, you think, grateful that your own family sleeps safely on their straw-filled mattresses. And with luck the rain will quell the pestilence that invites summer’s dreaded Yellow Fever. You take one step forward, breathe deeply of the new-washed air, and lift your face to the rain.

_______________

Although over the last 270 years many of Savannah's early wooden buildings have been lost, a great number of stalwart eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century structures still stand in proud testament to her history. Included among these are some of Savannah's smallest dwellings--the antebellum cottages of Washington, Warren, Greene, and Chatham Wards. All are one- or one-and-a-half-story houses of 1,200 square feet or less. Each is still home to a Savannah family.

But who were the first to own them, to raise their children beneath their shingled roofs, to watch from their windows the dust rising on an August afternoon? What frightened families huddled inside them during the great Yellow Fever epidemics of 1820 and 1876? Who were the women who tended their hearths while their menfolk fought at Gettysburg? They were brave and cowardly, faithless and true, selfish and selfless--in other words, men and women just like you and me.

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