don't eat alone

I spent the better part of today walking with nowhere to go. It was a gift.I looked at houses, talked to dogs (and some people), found a bookstore, stopped for coffee, got lost without having to worry about it, read a bunch of historical markers, and saw a bunch of memorial statues.

The heart or the city of Savannah is built around squares–twenty-three of them. They are beautifully cared for parks with giant shade trees and benches. Each one is named after a man who was significant to the city in some fashion (and it was all men) and most of them had some sort of monument or memorial to another man; I couldn’t find much connection. The Pulaski monument, for example, was not in Pulaski Square.

The first one I came upon was a large granite platform that held five figures who represented the Chausseurs Volontaire de Saint-Domingues–the voluntary soldiers of St. Dominic–who were gens de coleurs (men of color) from what we know as Haiti. They came with the French to fight alongside the American colonists against the British, who held the city in the Revolutionary War. The battle was known as the Siege of Savannah in 1779. They were free men for the most part; some enslaved men volunteered as well with the promise of being freed after the battle.

But they lost. The combined forces suffered heavy casualties.

As I moved from square to square, I found other monuments that centered around the same battle: William Jasper, Casimir Pulaski (who both died in the battle), and John Oglethorpe, who lived. Again and again, I saw ways in which this town defines itself by defeat–that defeat in particular. The statue of William Jasper has him posing with his hand against the mortal wound in his side. Though he is still fighting, it is not a victorious posture. The cost of the siege was enormous: almost 250 soldiers killed, 600 wounded, and 120 taken prisoner.

The defeat was not the last word of the war, I know. But there are not a lot of places with monuments to the victory, perhaps because what happened here was such a profound loss.

I am not one who finds much value in war, or war as a metaphor, so I see a whole other rabbit to chase when it comes to finding our identity in conflict, but I was moved today by the imprint of defeat on our lives, both individually and collectively.

I have never lived in an active war zone. I read about what is happening in Ukraine, or think about what has gone on in Iraq or Afghanistan, and I don’t know how to really imagine it. I look at the number of casualties and imagine the palpable absence that hung in the air like Spanish moss after the siege ended.

In a couple of the parks, I sat and watched people interact with the monuments. Some stopped and read, others took pictures. Most walked by carrying food, following pets, of talking to a companion. Even the largest of them is diminished in scale by the giant oaks that surround them.

Later in the day, Ginger and I walked to Whitefield Square, built in 1851 to honor the minister George Whitefield who founded the oldest orphanage in America. The main reason we were there is the First Congregational Church sits on one side of the square. It was built in 1895 and it was a Black church. The center of the square holds a beautiful gazebo surrounded by azalea bushes. There are markers about Whitefield, but there are none that tell that land was a burial ground for enslaved people. Andrew Bryan, the founder of the First African Baptist Church is buried there. I could not find a marker.

The same white people who so intently defined themselves by defeat were not as quick to put up monuments to their conquest and oppression. Those whose graves were erased left a legacy that became the struggle for Civil Rights, which has been fed by an enduring defeat in its push for equity and beloved community: We shall overcome . . . someday.

Hope lies in trusting that defeat is not the last word. The white colonists in Savannah used the defeat to define themselves as people who were determined to gain their freedom, even as they blinded themselves to the myriad ways they were refusing freedom to and inflicting defeat on an almost equal number of the population.

How we are defined by our defeat is not an easy question to answer.

Peace,
Milton

Today Ginger and I walked all over downtown Savannah and its nearby surroundings. And I mean all over–as of this writing, I have 17,019 steps. I also ate well and had some great conversations.

We walked first to Forsyth Park, which is six blocks long and two blocks wide and lies south of downtown. Beautiful moss-covered oaks line the walks, and there’s an iconic fountain at the northern end that dates back to 1858. My favorite story about the fountain is what happened on the day it was dedicated. The city had just installed new waterworks and no one had thought to test the water pressure. Dignitaries and the wealthy white folks that lived around the park had gathered to see the new fountain. Everyone got soaked when they turned the water on.

The park is beautiful and well-used. We strolled along the walkways and then we saw a huge monument-forty–eight feet tall–at the other end of the park. Apple Maps told me it was the Confederate Memorial. I took a moment to search for more information and learned it was erected in 1875, just a decade after the war had ended, unlike many of the monuments that went up across the South in the 1920s along with Jim Crow laws. That doesn’t justify the monument, but I found it significant that it was an expression of grief.

After white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, the town questioned what to do about the memorial. A local tour guide and blogger, and a native of Savannah, wrote:

Savannah began it’s own introspection and realized, perhaps with some relief, that we hardly have any offending statues to fret about. We really love to avoid unpleasant conversations and difficult decisions in this city. But what to do about the one really big statue in Forsyth Park?

The city changed the name to the Civil War Memorial and replaced the plaque so it now reads:

This memorial was originally erected in 1875 to the Confederate dead, redesigned in 1879, and rededicated in 2018 to all the dead of the American Civil War.

The Georgia legislature and the governor passed laws that made it illegal to do much more.

I started to write that it feels like a lot simmers under the surface in this town, but simmer is too strong a verb. Walking underneath the moss-bearing oaks and down the brick sidewalks in the Historic Section, you can feel the stories, but it is hard to find folks who want to tell them–or even know them.

We ate lunch at the Crystal Beer Parlor, the oldest continuously running restaurant in Savannah, which opened in 1933, and was one of the first places that served alcohol after Prohibition. The place stays busy and never takes reservations. We sat at a bar that ran the full distance of the large rectangular room that was the main dining area. One of the servers was stocking glasses at the bar and Ginger asked a couple of questions. He told us he moved from Houston about fifteen years ago. When we compared notes on our times in South Texas, I found out he went to the high school nearest the one from which I graduated.

We were going back down to the river and walked past The Grey and one of the people that worked there was spot cleaning the windows. He said hello and I told him that my secret hope was Chef Mashama would be in the window and I would get to say hi. He smiled and said she was in Africa this month, but if we came back right at five we could get a seat at the first-come-first-serve diner bar. His name was Laron. As the conversation continued, I told him how I had been inspired by the book and he said, “You gotta come back. I love working here.”

Since it was not yet four, we walked down to the river to check out the JW Marriott because the wonderful desk person at our hotel had said it was worth seeing because of the art and mineral collections there. The hotel is more of an events center that encompasses four or five buildings along the waterfront. As we approached the entrance, a man greeted us and Ginger stopped to ask a few questions. His name was Demetery. That turned into him giving us about a fifteen minute orientation to what was there.

As we talked, he told us he was a science major at Savannah State and planned to go to medical school. He works part time at the hotel. When Ginger talked about our trip and asked about local activists we might contact, he said he was a part of the Savannah chapter of 100 Black Men, and then told us about what they did. Ginger asked him if he would talk to our group and he agreed.

On the river walk in front of the hotel we found a kiosk and in it was Amelia, a local artist who is chasing her dream–no, she’s making it happen. Her artwork is whimsical and enchanting; her personality was engaging. I bought a sticker for my journal that reads

Normalize being a kind human being.

Then we went back to The Grey. I didn’t see Laron, but we did get seats at the bar, which had been the segregated lunch counter in the old Greyhound Bus Station. The room filled up as soon as the doors opened. The menu was one page and was made up of descriptions so brief that they bordered on ingredient lists. We had planned to just get drinks and appetizers, so Ginger found a cheese plate and I perused the menu trying to figure out what one thing would be my culinary souvenir. I chose

Trotter Toast
chicken liver mousse, dates, aspic

That’s all it said. The dish arrived with more description: sourdough toast spread with chicken liver mousse, crispy pig’s trotter meat, dates, and sherry aspic (a jelly made from the trotter stock). I didn’t order it because I eat those things all the time. I ordered it because I loved the way Chef Mashama had talked about her food and I wanted to try something unfamiliar. I wanted to trust that she knew what she was doing and would make it worth the trip.

She did. It was one of the best things I have ever tasted.

It was a fitting close to our purposeful meanderings, and a good metaphor of a day made up of some ingredients we knew well and some that caught us by surprise. All together they became a day of hope and sustenance. I would order a day like this any time.

Peace,
Milton

We could not have asked for a more beautiful day in Savannah. The high temperature was in the upper seventies, there was a consistent breeze, and very little humidity. We walked from our hotel down to Bay Street, one block up and parallel to River Street, to find a place to eat lunch and then to traverse the Historic District to get our bearings as we prepare for the rest of the group to arrive in a few days.

The downtown area of Savannah is built around twenty-two squares, which are beautiful block-sized parks with giant oak trees whose branches are hung with Spanish moss the way my mom used to hang icicles on our Christmas tree. We probably saw seven or eight of them, each with at least one historical marker. In between we passed other buildings that had significance in Savannah’s story, and we began to recognize names: Oglethorpe, Greene, Wesley, to name a few.

We ate lunch at Treylor Park–because of the name, mostly–and had good food. Then we followed the cobblestones down to River Street, passing all kinds of tourist shops, and found the Waving Girl statue built to commemorate Florence Martus who greeted the ships entering the harbor by waving a cloth from the lighthouse on Cockspur Island in search of her lost lover–and she did it from 1887 to 1931, so I don’t think she was a girl.

Another marker in front of Independent Presbyterian Church honored Lowell Mason, a sacred music composer from New England who lived in Savannah for a time. He wrote, among other things, the hymn “My Faith Looks Up to Thee,” which we sang in church last Sunday.

We walked and read and walked and read and found nothing that spoke about the city’s history with slavery, or its history with civil rights. I learned tonight that there is an African American monument that was erected in 2002 (2002!) down by River Street, but we didn’t see it or any signs pointing to it.

We walked up Bull Street and came to Johnson Square, which holds a giant granite obelisk commemorating Nathaniel Greene along with eight markers that tell about Washington’s Southern tour, Christ Episcopal Church, John Oglethorpe, John Hearndon Mercer, the city plan of Savannah, and the Historic District itself.
But here’s the thing: Johnson Square was the site of the largest sale of human beings in the history of our country that took place in March of 1857. Over four hundred enslaved people were sold for a cumulative cost of $303,850, which would be about $10 million today. They called it “The Weeping Time.”

A hundred and sixty-six years later, we stood in the place where it happened–in a city built by enslaved people–and found no mention of it.

One of the enduring stories for me in the Hebrew Bible is that of Joshua telling the people to build an altar after God had delivered them. “Stack up the stones,” he said, “so that when the children ask why they are there you can tell them the story.”

Savannah is full of monuments and markers, stones stacked up to tell the stories of white people who founded the colony, who fought in wars, who built churches, and pretty much all of them owned slaves, though that part of the story is not repeated. None of the stones we saw were stacked up so the stories of enslaved people would be remembered, even though the city–hell, our country–would not exist without them. Instead, people walked through a beautiful park on their way home from work or to do something fun, because this is a fun town. They hid the story so well they have almost forgotten it.

A big part of there reason Ginger leads these trips is to remind us that the stories we learn as we travel are much like some of the stories that are closer to home that we have not told well. Connecticut was essential to the success of the slave trade, and a number of people were enslaved in the state. Eighty were enslaved in Guilford, one of them owned by a Congregational minister.

It’s hard to write about this without sounding sanctimonious. I know I am not saying anything new, or even saying it better than it has already been said. But walking across land that holds such a heinous and invisible history I saw that whether we tell the stories or not, we live with the consequences. Then again, if we don’t tell the stories, we will continue to magnify the consequences because we aren’t telling the truth. Until we do, we will live in the weeping time.

Peace,
Milton

We flew to Savannah today.

This coming weekend is the annual Civil Rights History Trip that Ginger leads with a group from our church. In past years we have gone to Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery; Richmond; Durham and Greensboro; Memphis; last year to Hartford and Boston; and this year to Savannah. Each year, Ginger and I go a day or two early to make sure all the details are in place. Since Avelo Airlines only flies from New Haven to Savannah on Mondays and Fridays, we have a bit more time.

On the flight down, I read a good chunk of Black, White, and the Grey: The Story of an Unexpected Friendship and a Beloved Restaurant. The book is written by the two co-owners, Mashama Bailey and John O. Morisano. She is the executive chef and he is the entrepreneur that bought the old Greyhound Station to turn it into a restaurant. She is Black and he is white. Their restaurant is closed on Monday and Tuesday. I will report on Wednesday, I hope.

Neither Mashama or Johnno, as he is called, are from Savannah but they found their way here to open The Grey. She had some family ties here and lived in the city for a short time as a kid. He came here as an adult. Both moved from New York. Part of their story, beyond their partnership and friendship, is about working to feel like they belonged here. In many ways, that has always been the story of those who came to this city.

I learned from the book that James Oglethorpe settled Savannah for King George II in 1733 with three distinct rules: no Jews, no Papists, and no slavery. For Oglethorpe and the other trustees of the colony of Georgia, these were prerequisites for the utopia they imagined they could create.

In the summer of that year, severe illness gripped the young settlement. Serendipitously, a ship carrying a group of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews landed seeking freedom to worship–and they had a doctor among them. Oglethorpe relented on the ban and welcomed the group. Congregation Mickve Israel is the third oldest synagogue in the US. However well-intentioned, the slavery ban was never enforced. About four hundred enslaved people lived in Savannah when it was founded and they were the ones who did the construction work to build the city and then were moved to work on farms. The Catholics were admitted because of General Casimir Pularski, a Polish Catholic soldier who fought against the British during the Siege at Savannah. Those who fought with him got to stay after independence. The Catholics and Jews assimilated into the city in ways the Black community did not, like most American cities regardless of location.

i put the book back in my bag as we landed. We got our luggage and found our way to the Rideshare Area where Muhammad, our Uber driver, picked us up to take us to our hotel. We shared the ride with a couple from our church who came early to have a few days to themselves, so I sat in the front seat on our ride, which meant I got to talk to Muhammad.

I learned he moved from Baltimore a couple of years ago and has traveled mostly up I-95 as far as Philadelphia, seeing Virginia and the Carolinas. He drives part-time and works in a lumber yard, but his main job is at Fort Benning, where he goes for two week stints with some regularity to teach troops about Islamic culture before they deploy to the Middle East. I asked if there was a significant Muslim community in Savannah and he said there were about 350 families and a mosque. I wondered what it was like to teach people about your culture and your homeland when you knew they were going there uninvited. I didn’t ask.

I was disquieted. I felt grateful for the conversation, and I was troubled to think he was being used by the military for his knowledge even as he lives in a country where many will assume he is nefarious because of his name.

When we pulled up to our hotel I realized it was almost next door to The Grey. The window facing the street is just as it was when people came to catch buses. In those days, you would have looked in on the segregated lunch counter. Today it is a beautiful bar where anyone can sit. Both the hotel and the restaurant sit on Martin Luther King Boulevard, which is the western border of the Historic District. The two establishments sit in a liminal space between the high end tourist area and the projects and a neighborhood, I assume, is inhabited by many who keep the Historic District humming for tourists but who do not reap many of the benefits of the wealth displayed there.

Let me be clear: We are not here to learn about Savannah because none of these disparities exist in Connecticut. The biggest difference between Guilford and Savannah’s Historic District is our restaurants don’t stay open as late. Well, that and the people who work in our town but can’t afford to live there have to travel farther than crossing MLK Blvd. The systems in our state that make sure we have “good schools” are well entrenched. We are here to learn more about who we are as we learn some of the stories of Savannah.

Disquietude is a good teacher.

Peace,
Milton

On Thursday morning I walk across the Green to meet my friend Peter for coffee at Cilantro, the one coffee shop that opens at 7. I follow the sidewalk down the center and then take the spoke that gets me to the crosswalk and then to coffee and friendship. Peter and I have been meeting for at least five years now, I think, and I’ve made the same walk there and back each week, with a few gaps in the calendar here and there.

This time of year, the days have gotten long enough where it is daylight while I walk–at least until Daylight Saving Time kicks in and I go back into the dark. I walk past the same light posts, past the monument to our soldiers who fought in the Civil War, past the town Christmas tree, and past a whole bunch of trees that line the sidewalks, some tall and old and others young and aspiring.

I pay better attention on my walk home because I have been stirred to life by good coffee and conversation, and also because of The Art of Noticing, a book I first read two or three years ago that offers ways on paying better attention to the world around us. One of the exercises is to take the same walk several times and notice tree bark.

The first section of sidewalk is lined with big trees on one side and close to a giant weeping willow on the other. The first tree looked wounded, as though a large piece of bark had been stripped away. It left strata of shades of brown and green that ran vertically like a mine turned sideways. The array of colors looked like ages. The light section felt like new wood and little dimension. The darker ones felt deep and ancient, as though I was looking through a dimension into something more profound.

When I got to the second tree, my eye caught a painted stone lying at the base of the tree with the words “shine bright” written on its face. It was nestled in curve of the trunk where it entered the earth. A plant had begun to grow underneath the stone and a tuft of grass was growing next to it. I took a picture and then put my phone in my pocket and just stood and looked to see what I could see.

The scene turned into a tiny landscape. The bark to the right began to look like a dry waterfall that fed the vegetation and the flatter section dotted with lichen became a granite outcropping like those I see along the highway.

So much more is going on that what we see.

Sometime before the pandemic, Kindness Stones were a thing in Guilford, as I am sure they were in many other places. Brightly painted stones with gentle messages showed up all over town on doorsteps, along sidewalks, in trees, on window sills–all of them inviting the finder to carry it with them along with the message. They are rarer these days, so the tiny blue boulder of blessing stood out and also opened a mystery as to who put it at the base of a hundred year old tree and why.

I continued home in the dampness of yet another chilly and cloudy day, the mist attaching to my sweater as if to say I was not simply an observer; I, too, was part of the scene, part of what was worth noticing.

I went on about my day, first to the gym and then to church and then to visit some folks that can’t get to church right now for health reasons. I went so they would know we missed them. They welcomed me with pie and coffee, so I had a meal-sized piece of apple pie for lunch. The drive back to Guilford is mostly by interstate, the great highway of inattentiveness, where we fly by all sorts of things. When I got home, the same mist marked me once again as a part of the scene. Our waiting pups barked belonging from behind the gate–another bark worth noticing.

It was a good day, as far as I could see.

Peace,
Milton

I spent about an hour this afternoon talking to a couple who have been church members for a long time. For health reasons, they have not been able to attend church, but watch on our YouTube feed. They are both in their eighties and have been married over sixty years. I mostly asked questions and listened to stories about their lives and their life together.

The husband requires consistent care, so they have a caregiver who is at the house, and who happens to be from Ghana. I told him I had lived in Accra and we spent a few minutes connecting over our shared history, even though that was long ago for me.

I haven’t thought about Ghana in a long time.

We only lived in Accra for six months. While we were in Texas on furlough, my dad told us that the mission board had asked him to spend a year in Ghana on a special project. Instead of going back to Nairobi, where I had started high school, we moved to West Africa, leaving all our stuff at our house in Nairobi. After a year, we would go back there. Though it was still Africa, it was a different world from Kenya. The language was difficult, the heat was relentless, and the weather alternated between humid winds that blew off the ocean and the Harmattan, a dry, sandy wind that blew from the Sahara.

We did our best to settle into Accra. I began eleventh grade at Ghana International School, and was finding my way. Sometime in November, my parents greeted my brother and I with news that we were moving back to the US because my parents had decided to resign. Something had happened to cause the decision, but neither my brother nor I ever got the whole story, or even a significant part of it. We never went back to Nairobi. On December 12, 1972–my sixteenth birthday–we left Africa for good and moved to Houston, where I started my fourth high school in three years.

As I spoke to the Ghanaian man today and tried to remember life in Accra, I realized my memories are few. I can see the school building, which was walking distance from our house. I remember the intense traffic, all the drivers hitting their horns incessantly. I remember the movie theater, whose answer to not having air conditioning was to have walls but no roof. We entered the doors, but then watched under the stars. I remember the worship services and all the different rhythms as people clapped along with the singing.

My memories are murals, landscapes–not photographs like the slideshow that plays in my mind when I think of Zambia or Kenya. I didn’t stay long enough to make friends, and my parents left angry and hurt, neither of which were feelings they processed well. In our story, Ghana was more of a layover than a destination, not because it was a bad place but because we never found a way to join the story.

When we lived in Marshfield, Massachusetts, we were sitting on our front porch one morning when the recycling truck came by and I realized I had forgotten to put our bin out. I grabbed it and ran down the street after the truck. When I caught up to it, the man who emptied the bin spoke in an accent I recognized.

“Are you from Kenya,” I asked.

“Yes, from Nairobi” he said; “why do you ask?”

“I lived in Nairobi when I was a boy. It was a good place.”

He smiled and we stood and swapped stories for a few moments, long enough to figure out we had played rugby against one another while I was at Nairobi International School and he was at Nairobi School. And we both liked the chapati and keema at Iqbal’s restaurant.

That conversation opened up a host of memories; today’s made me wonder what memories I failed to pack when we left Ghana because I was carrying too much grief. I thought I was living a different story, and when it changed that chapter got lost.

Peace,
Milton