(More than the) Second time around

Today I began my--and I'm guesstimating here--seventh reading of John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I came across it when I was twelve (not long after it was published, in 1994), and my mom watched wide-eyed as my little eyes soaked it up in a couple of sittings. Murders and the sultry heat of Savannah, cemeteries, hoodoo, prostitutes...basically, this novel is a late-twentieth century take on the Southern Gothic; that my twelve-year-old self was already processing the pitfalls of the southern myth versus the southern reality...well, I don't think it shocked anyone. Least of all my mom. My mind may have developed some of its social skills a little later than others in my cohort, but the literary chasms of my brain sprouted wings by the time I made it to the third grade. So we'd stroll through Barnes and Noble (still a haunt of mine) on Saturdays, and any book that struck mah fancy...well, she humored me.

This one stuck with me, through high school, then through college. I would have had no way of knowing the significant role it would play in my writing career and research. Kind of like the print that hung above my mother's desk while I was growing up; I didn't realize until last year, after I began my dissertation research on the Savannah paper industry, that it was of the Hermitage Plantation (the property that Union Bag and Paper built their mill on in 1936). The symbols of a New South built, literally, on the ashes of the Old...watching my mother work in her wood-panelled office all those years. Oh, irony. Now it's my bread and butter, unraveling the narrative of a modern southern economy whose denizens still hang so much of their symbolisms, their politics, and even their diets, on the images of an older order (that are simultaneously nasty and beauitfully mysterious). I've yet to decide if Savannah really is the hothouse that Berendt writes of; but my indecision tells me that it must be pretty damn close.

Maybe this seventh reading will open even more metaphorical windows and doors. I'll let ya know.