Lake Worth Sojourn

I really enjoy spending time in Lake Worth.  Can you tell?

This woman kindly consented to be photographed in the Publix parking lot when I told her I loved her hat.

Psychedelically camouflaged VW Bugs add to Lake Worth's funky charm.

Although the gun lamp in an antiques store window did give me pause.

It also turned out that Bob, an old friend from Columbia, lives nearby.  I hadn't seen him in 40 years.

Bob took me to lunch and invited me and Christine to join him and his wife for dinner at his beautiful home in Greenacres (yes, it's really a place!).  Even though both of their daughters are in college, there's no chance of "empty nest" syndrome with 11 cats.

Savannah

Pulling off the bumper of Christine's Acura in the hotel parking lot marred our arrival in Savannah.  We took an Uber to a Rancho Alegre, an excellent Cuban restaurant with a beautifully lit bar.

A line out the door discouraged us from getting ice cream at Leopold's.  The Savannah College of Art & Design had programmed an interesting movie next door.  Encountering David Bowie in the Deep South was odd.  His turn playing an inscrutable alien probably won't draw the same crowds.

A local body shop demonstrated Southern hospitality the next morning by reattaching the bumper and belly pan free of charge.  We did some sightseeing in the River District and downtown, including the African American Families Monument with its sobering and controversial Maya Angelou inscription. 

 

 

An Uber driver told us not to miss the fountain in Forsyth Park.  Meh.

Like many before us, Bonaventure Cemetery was our final stop in Savannah.  It's segregated by religion, although wreaths decorated both entrances.

We wanted to see the Bird Girl, pictured on the book jacket of Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil, a bestselling nonfiction account of a local male prostitute's murder published in the early 90s ("it's like Gone with the Wind on mescaline" claimed author John Berendt when he first pitched the story to New York magazine).  Lady Chablis, a drag queen, played herself in the movie adaptation, directed by Clint Eastwood.  She died of pneumonia last September at 59.  Bird Girl had been moved to a museum but the Spanish moss provided the Southern gothic atmosphere we sought.

More Savannah

Aiken-Rhett House

Before the Civil War, the slave trade was to Charleston what tourism is today:  big business. A visit to the Old Slave Mart Museum, the only remaining structure in the city where human beings were bought and sold, dispels any doubt about South Carolina's primacy in America's racist history.

I asked the personable docent where we might tour a local house that still includes slave quarters.  Without flinching, he recommended the Aiken-Rhett House, an "urban plantation" that hasn't been restored.  Or "whitewashed," depending on your perspective.

Several family portraits hang inside.  Nobody bothered to paint the slaves.

The excellent audioguide sent us to back of the plantation first, where the slave quarters were located.    The curators probably wanted to dispense with the unpleasant reminders of the Confederacy's past first.

The slaves were housed directly across from the garage and the stables, in similarly spartan conditions.

Compare the slaves' dining room

 . . . to the one where the owners ate:

The slave quarters lacked an indoor toilet. The owners bathed here:

Their hearths differed, too.  Guess whose was whose.

Slaves were expected to be productive at all times 

. . . while their owners enjoyed leisure.  However, despite their comfort and easy access to religion, literature, music and art, the owners never questioned the morality of human chattel.

The Aiken-Rhett House offered less charged lessons, too.  Lighting the place must have been a pain in the ass before the advent of electricity.

Early electrical wiring was primitive, to say the least.

Despite the decay and indefensible past, beauty remained.