Southern charm after midnight

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil exposes the peculiarities of Savannah, a curiously self-contained city deep in the American South

"You mustn't be taken in by the moonlight and magnolias.... Things can get very murky," warns bachelor bon vivant Jim William, before being thrust centre-stage in a series of white-knuckle murder trials.

Clint Eastwood directed the movie based on the best-selling novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. According to author John Berendt, Savannah is a curiously self-contained community whose remoteness reflects a state of mind rather than a reality. "Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace... its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener.... Eccentrics thrived," muses Berendt.

Arriving in 1733, founder James Oglethorpe chose a bluff commanding the southern bank of the Savannah River, 30 km from the Atlantic, to build a town whose grid of streets would be softened by twenty-four garden squares. Nearly all have survived.

The colony prospered on plantation cotton and tobacco, and Savannah became a city of rich traders, living within strolling distance of one another and beginning the tradition of partying which continues to this day. When the Civil War threatened to disrupt the good life in Confederate Savannah, prominent citizens hastened to negotiate a surrender. Decline set in around 1920 when cotton suffered a double whammy from economic misfortune and the boll weevil. By 1946 Lady Astor was comparing Savannah to a beautiful woman with dirt on her face.

Demolition of the old produce market spurred the first efforts at historic preservation. Amongst those leading the push, local poet Conrad Aiken took up a newly-renovated townhouse on Oglethorpe Avenue right next door to the house where his own father had shot his mother, then himself, in 1901.

As the veneer of Southern gentility falls away, eager visitors shell out their five dollars for fold-out maps of the haunts of Berendt's bacchanalian characters. Most of the 19th century cotton warehouses facing the river have survived, although the construction of a monstrous Hyatt Hotel scarred the riverfront and interrupted Factors Walk, the cobbled lane linking the rear entrances. Some warehouses are boarded up, others house law practices, shipping lines, antique dealers or America’s rather self-conscious bed & breakfast inns.

The cotton exchange was built of rust-red sandstone in 1886 when Savannah was the greatest cotton port on the Atlantic, loading two million bales each year. Bronze plaques honour the pioneering steamships bankrolled by local entrepreneurs: the Savannah was the first to cross an ocean. Elsewhere along the riverfront are the gold domed city hall, a maritime museum and a medley of tugboats, tour boats and tourist traps. There’s a statue of Florence Martus, the Waving Girl who vowed to hail every passing ship until her lover should return.

Sated with beautifully restored mansions, wrought iron and historic plaques, I wandered across East Broad Street, into a streetscape of peeling paint and deteriorating fretwork. The King -Tisdell cottage houses a black heritage museum but otherwise the designated historic district lay behind me. A good half of Savannah's population is black. Now the East Side revealed some spontaneous street life, not just middle-class Anglo couples craning out the windows of motorised trolley buses. There are few grand porticoed mansions out this way, just simpler clapboard dwellings, their porches relatively austere.

African Americans in their stiff Sunday suits - check and tartan - mingled outside the St Benedict the Moor: "HEY miz Abby how y'DOIN'"?? Around here, incidentally, is where Chablis, the cafe au lait transsexual of Midnight lived. In the mild morning air several young men, ebony sinews glistening, were jamming around on the basketball court in Crawford Square. We’re pooped, been at it all morning. Man, come back around four to see a real game. Two little girls perched on a bench, their hair stiff with baubles and braids.

More churchgoers filed out of Second Baptist Church into leafy Greene Square. In 1864 the newly-freed slaves would welcome the conquering Union General Sherman to their Sunday service here.

Cabbie John Baker ushered me into his rattletrap station wagon with its littered seats and shrieking brakes. In vain we sought out Bonaventure Cemetery and the grave of Conrad Aiken, where author John Berendt used to sip a companionable martini. After a long drive out through scrub pine forests, passing petrol stations and plywood storefronts, we both figured we’d come way too far south.

Two sets of directions later, just as the day began to fade, Aiken's bench-like marble slab materialised in a quiet forested setting overlooking a river bend. This Eden of oak, statuary and Spanish moss was once a lavish plantation. The mansion caught fire during a dinner party, which continued unabated. My very mellow chauffeur announced that he first got laid in this very cemetery that, oddly, took him all afternoon to find again. It took us two hours to get here, just a matter of minutes to regain the city. John was happy with twenty dollars - and an afternoon's amusement for both of us.

Back across town, just about where planters' mansions give way to peeling Victorian gingerbread, I had time to kill. Behold, the chicken-to-go counter of Kroger's colossal supermarket also offered Cajun rice and fried okra as side orders. That's What I Like About The South burbled the local bank's cash machine as it slugged me a dollar for being an outsider. Like the hothouse exotics of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it seems BankSouth's customers seldom venture far from home.