Savannah continues to promote and develop its reputation as A Gothic City exemplar. We are consistently voted as one of the most haunted cities in the United States. Ghost tours are found everywhere. An annual Flannery O'Connor celebration is held in Lafayette Square in front of her childhood home. People dress up as O'Connor short story characters, chicken shit bingo is played, a march around the square with a brass band of sorts playing.  Forrest Gump jumps on tour buses and his bench is in the History museum.

The once neglected gothic architecture grows grander with restoration each passing day. The trees still hang with moss throughout the downtown and beyond. The Book (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) still brings fans to see the landmarks of the book. The Bird Girl sits in the Telfair Academy in an exhibit which tells the story of Bonaventure Cemetery. The Savannahian artists' Jack Leigh and Augusta Oeschlig whose work has been noted as having gothic themes are often exhibited in museums. The city continues to define itself as having  and being  proud of its Southern gothic heritage.

Lest you think the Gothic is a thing of the past Savannah continues to develop its Gothic Nature. The first opera about Savannah was commissioned by the Voice Festival in 2015. It is called Alice Ryley. And of course it reeks with Southern Gothic atmosphere and themes.  Michael Ching, the American composer and librettist who  was commissioned and penned the opera, said he was inspired by the heroic nature of Riley’s character. Sherrill Milnes the famed opera baritone singer of the Metropolitan Opera of New York plays the tour guide in a cameo appearance. It tells the story of Alice Ryley a historical character and now a ghost that haunts Wright Square where she was hung for murder. Alice Ryley is an indenture servant from Ireland who falls in love with a man who eventually kills their wicked overlord. She is brought to trial and even though she did not do the killing she is convicted and because of prejudice against her Catholic faith her appeal to General Oglethorpe is destroyed. It is discovered that she is pregnant and she is allowed to give birth but is hung the day after the child is born becoming the first woman to be hung in Georgia.  And today her ghost can be found in Wright Square once known as hanging square looking for her baby.

Yet another nod to all things Gothic is the new Graveface Museum recently opened on Factor's Walk. One floor has, the history of sideshow attractions explored through one of a kind photos and videos. All are dedicated to the memories of the traveling circus. Another exhibit down the hall  leads to the  the true-crime room. Inside, are exhibits dedicated to some of the country’s most infamous criminals and crimes. These include things as Jim Jones’s sunglasses and Charlie Manson’s sweatpants. One of the largest collections of John Wayne Gacy paintings and, various doodles from  other serial killers can be viewed.

The museum centers around the macabre and strange. The museum is also home to a room that contains well-over 15 pinball machines, Of course, all horror-themed featuring classic horror characters such as Elvira, Swamp Thing, Adams Family, and others. 

Closing:
But what does it mean to be a southern gothic city. It means you celebrate differences and the odd characters of the world. It means you are aware of the injustices of the world. We are aware that history is to be preserved not lived. That living in the past leaves us open to stagnation and decay. It means that we are aware of the poverty in our city and we know it must be ended or it will end our dreams of a great city. It means the South is our pride and we will rise again not to past glories but to a new justice filled city that celebrates differences and builds wealth for all.  So as we close this series know that Savannah is the city that defines southern gothic.

             Robert De Niro in Cape Fear

t is not only writers but other art forms that would be influenced by the culture and climate of Savannah. Augusta Oelschig, a Savannah artist,  lived from 1918-2000 and Flannery lived from 1925 -1964. Oelschig was called a Southern gothic painter. Oelschig would travel and live in New York and travel to see and learn from the muralists of Mexico before she returns to Savannah. Oelschig was only eight years Flannery’s senior. Art Historians say her penchant to paint scenes of injustice and the lives of southern blacks was influenced by the Mexican muralists but I have an idea the Southern Gothic bug had hold of her too. We see this in her paintings of old abandoned Carousels. The once glorious carousels are now decaying and but a memory of what they once were. She did her series of carousels it is said while grieving for her brother after his death. A review of a career-spanning exhibition of Oelschig’s work that opened just weeks after the artist’s death described her aesthetic as having “a distinctive style that is both steeped in the Southern Gothic tradition and remarkably unique.” 
 Robert Taylor Arms one of the great printmakers of the early 20th century went all through Europe making meticulously detailed prints of Gothic cathedrals and buildings calling Gothic architecture the pinnacle of Humanity’s creative mind.  In 1933 he came to the Telfair Academy to teach printmaking. John Taylor Arms in his brief sojourn here continued to communicate his love for all things Gothic in his year residency here in Savannah. 

In most list of the top ten southern gothic movies two were made here in Savannah. One features a novel written by Flannery and with native Savannahian Leopold Stratton making an appearance in it: Wiseblood . The other movie was Cape Fear original had Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, and Polly Bergen. The remake had Robert Deniro, Nick Nolte, Juliette Lewis, Jessica Lange. The film tells the story of how a convicted rapist who, using his newfound knowledge of the law and its numerous loopholes, seeks vengeance against a former public defender whom he blames for his 14-year imprisonment. He felt unfair courtroom tactics were used.  Many of the outdoor scenes were filmed on location in Savannah. The indoor scenes were done at Universal Studios Soundstage. Mitchum had a real-life aversion to Savannah, where as a teenager, he had been charged with vagrancy and put on a chain gang.

But probably many people's favorite movie with Savannah as the setting is Forrest Gump made in 1994. Director Robert Zemekis said about the South: "There is something about the Gothic South that we depict in the movie. In a strange way, it's sort of the most patriotic part of America in the way it is slow to change. The South was always in the script. It's where these characters came from. The one constant that we had in the movie is that the characters kept coming home (to the South). It (the South) is that one place that seems to never change, when the rest of the world does."
The Savannah scene is central to the movie. The protagonist Forrest Gump, who is a mentally challenged innocent, reveals that he is waiting at the bus stop bench to anyone who will listen because he received a letter from Jenny his childhood sweetheart. Despite their divergent paths in life he has never lost the fire of his love for her. His famous quote ‘Life is like a box of chocolates’ originates here. Jenny is now living in Savannah and had seen him on TV during his run across America and invited him to visit. Jenny reveals Forrest to be the father of her child, also named Forrest, and that she is suffering from an unknown virus (presumably HIV/AIDS). Jenny proposes to Forrest, and he accepts. Forrest and Jenny return to Greenbow with Forrest Jr and are finally married. Jenny eventually dies of her illness and Forrest becomes a devoted father to Forrest Jr. Later, Gump is waiting with his son for the school bus to pick him up for his first day of school. As the bus departs, the feather from the beginning of the film floats off into the air. 
This film evokes the emotions and themes of Southern Gothic and it seems only natural that it centers on him in one of our historic squares. Today the bench is in our history museum and some tour buses are lucky enough to encounter an actor who portrays Forrest with a brief case in hand.

Of course Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is yet another example of a movie that accentuates some of the themes of Southern Gothic. Savannah's own Lady Chablis plays herself and Clint Eastwood directs. These are but a few of the movies made in Savannah but they are the more obvious shows with a gothic feel. Next blog we will finish the series on Savannah: The Gothic City.
 

In my last post I wrote about Flannery O'Connor who won three O’Henry awards for her short stories and the National Book Award for a collection of her short stories. But Savannah also has two Pulitzer Prize winners for poetry and short stories: Conrad Aiken and James Alan MacPherson both native Savannahians have elements of Southern Gothic in their writing, although neither would be classified as Southern gothic.
Yet the early and late life story of Pulitzer Prize writer Conrad Aiken captures the essence of the gothic nature of the world, reflecting the themes of a Southern gothic. At a young age he found his mother shot by his physician father and his father dead of a self- inflicted wound. Conrad  at the age of ---walked to the police station to inform them of what had happened. After this he was taken to live with relatives in New England. But Aiken would say in an interview Oh, Poe, yes. I was reading Poe when I was in Savannah, when I was ten, and scaring myself to death. Scaring my brothers and sisters to death, too. So I was already soaked in him, especially the stories.
He would say about his being a southern writer "Not at all. I’m not in the least Southern; I’m entirely New England. Of course, the Savannah ambiente made a profound impression on me. It was a beautiful city and so wholly different from New England that going from South to North every year, as we did in the summers, provided an extraordinary counterpoint of experience, of sensuous adventure. The change was so violent, from Savannah to New Bedford or Savannah to Cambridge, that it was extraordinarily useful. But no, I never was connected with any of the Southern writers."
INTERVIEWER
In what way was the change from Savannah to New England “useful” to you?
AIKEN
Shock treatment, I suppose: the milieu so wholly different, and the social customs, and the mere transplantation; as well as having to change one’s accent twice a year—all this quite apart from the astonishing change of landscape. From swamps and Spanish moss to New England rocks.
Aiken was by no means a writer of Southern gothic. yet in his vaudeville poems he tells of the sordid lives of the performers whose passions and violence catch the tonal quality of his own terrified childhood recollections. The sad, wry music of Aiken’s poetry seems to ask, To what purpose the passion and the violence? Natural death is enough to contend with, without the horror of passion and murder.
In his poetry Aiken has characters ranging from the would-be type of Christ,  middle-class “monarchs of all they survey,” a Faustian puppet, a master demon and a vampire. These poems all talk of death, resurrection, and what one person has described as the cycles of death.
Remarkably, although he considered himself a New Englander Aiken chose to live out his final days here in Savannah in a house adjoined to where his mother and father died. In fact one person would recount Aiken telling him one day in his second story office that beyond the west wall of the room was the exact room where he found his mother and father dead. Aiken, it is reported,  often loved to walk to Colonial Cemetery and have martinis there. That sounds about as Southern gothic as you can get. (Notably his wife Mary Aiken Hoover, a painter has a self portrait that hangs in the Telfair Academy of herself as a fortune teller).
Our other Pulitzer Prize writer was James Alan McPherson who grew up in Savannah. His celebrated first published short story The Gold Coast reflects familiar themes of Southern Gothic Literature. Robert, a young, black aspiring writer, supports himself by working as a janitor in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment building. In “the days of the Gold Coast,” the old building near Harvard Square had been a haven for the rich; Conrad Aiken had lived there; now, it the building was in decay. The Irish janitor before him lives in the building with his half-mad wife, and their smelly, barking dog. He is Robert’s supervisor and the story is about their relationship. In 1968 McPherson published his first volume of short fiction, Hue and Cry. In addition to “Gold Coast,” the stories in the book include themes of interracial relationships; the decline of an elderly waiter; the inconsistencies of the justice system when dealing with the outcast; and racial prejudice. All of these characters and themes could have been found in a Southern Gothic story. But Macpherson was not a Southern Gothic writer but Savannah’s spirit had a hold on him. MacPherson, whose father abused him physically, eventually left Savannah. 

There is one other significant writer who sojourned in Savannah and discovered its undercurrents:
writer John Berendt. He would write a book called locally The Book. His pen would write a book that would tell tale of a Southern Gothic crime\travel non-fiction book. This book holds the record for most time on the New York Times bestseller list for 216 weeks! It is a tale with a voodoo queen, drag queen, piano playing con man, and a whole list of odd characters set in Savannah. The story centers around a wealthy man (Jim Williams) who kills a drifter and has four trials in which he is acquitted each time.  The international sensation of the book put Savannah on the tourist map and the tourists started coming and have not stopped since. The jacket of the book introduced the iconic statue of the Bird Girl and its photographer Jack Leigh. Savannahian photographer Jack Leigh is known for his black and white photos to document the disappearing South. It is important to note that he adjusts his photographs playing with different shades of light. He is creating an atmosphere and often evokes the mystery, decay, of a south that was once. His photographs are southern gothic temples of black and white stained glass of a South that in a generation could be gone.  

Of course there are other writers that reflect the sense of Gothic Spirituality. The classic graphic novel that was later made into a film The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys by Chris Furhman. My next entry will continue the study of Savannah as the City that defines Gothic. Stay tuned.