Months passed before I began to figure out what lay beneath and beyond my sight as I drove north over Savannah’s US Route 17 bridge.
Do you know which bridge I mean? The memorial one named after Eugene, the former three term Georgia governor and bitter angel of the Jim Crow era, Talmadge.
There is no footwalk on this bridge from which to enjoy the nearly 200 foot high view. Absent from the bridge are bums sleeping, trysting couples, whiskey bottles and newspaper litter, graffiti and other myriad signs of that modern humanity leaves as signs that it has been there. The bridge is a unique observation tower that rarely is used for such.
I wanted to see what was out there so I was not discouraged by this inconvenience whenever I crossed it.
If I raise myself up from my seat and twist around, shift my weight without losing control of the car, rotate my head, and glance over my left shoulder, I see through the cascades of steel cables draped from the bridge’s two towers the silhouettes of dozens of huge container ship cranes upriver to the north in the modern deep water port of Savannah. Ships patiently wait pierside while these monsters pluck containers from the 100+ foot high stacks like mechanical monkeys plucking ticks from their family members backs.
Carefully pivoting to look over my right shoulder through the King Kong sized bridge harp strings, I see the historic downtown Savannah skyline flowing out oceanward to the eastern horizon.
If I slow the car’s pace and stay steady and focused, I can pick out the ever growing encirclement of renovated historic port city buildings courtesy of SCAD, River Street’s ribbon of cobbles and wharf buildings, the Cotton Exchange, the distant railroad crossing bridge pylons. Behind my back is the city’s low profile historic district. As the car summits the bridge, some of the city’s historic squares foliage blinks in and out of view.
In the far distance along the riverbank, a life sized brass statue of the Waving Girl flaps her small clothe in perpetual welcome and farewell to the crews of the passing ships of the sea. Some of the smaller vessels toot at her in honor of her 44 years of such daily salutes. Gone but not forgotten, Florence.
It dawns on me when crossing that bridge that what I see to the east on my right was the number one slave trading port in the US. This past was long ago replaced and not preserved as it was up in Charleston to the north.
Most who visit this river front are unaware of this unless they make an effort to read the history of the town. This past has all been obliterated from the physical city save for a local museum and a few historical markers. Just a few blocks north of our house is the corner of Abercorn and Gaston Streets where sat the original cemetery for African American slaves. As the city of Savannah grew and prospered in the mid 19th century, the need for more dwelling and commercial space caused the city to claim that acreage without even casting a thought to disinterring and reburying the dead it held. They just built over the graves.
I realized a while ago that the past is never erased, just obscured. Some say this covering up is due to hate or guilt or politics. None of these seems to be the reason. Speed and money are what it’s about. Those others are just reasons that some use to keep others on their toes.
We are not ants who are bereft of eyes and sight. Nature does not waste eyes on lives spent entirely in the dark. She was exceedingly generous to us by providing us ears and cell phones to memorialize these bridge crossings in pictures as well as to search the web for answers to questions like these when they arise.
The river below the bridge sometimes shows off to the careful observer. Warm summer ripples scintillate under bright blue sky sunshine. Its water color differs depending on point of view, light, wind, season and the passing of ships. The Savannah shows all colors, no color, any color from the impenetrable brown of container ship propeller churned silt to pure glimmer. Its surface is like blank white writing paper, empty until someone fills it with some words that scamper across it until they vanish into a spray, then froth and finally bubbles as the captured thoughts and memories are swallowed whole and sink into the depths.
Meanwhile as the car begins its descent of the northern half of the bridge towards South Carolina, my hands tighten around the steering wheel in anticipation of the car accelerating towards the bridge’s sudden narrowing from two lanes to one. The river water ripples below, while the bridge rail imperceptibly seems lower opening up the bridge’s framing of the marshes in the Palmetto State. This bank is undeveloped. There are no people here for miles. Too wet and tidal. Only bugs and wildlife.
This place is not just growing on me. I am coming to like it and its people. A lot.
Copyright © 2017 From My Isle Seat
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