First stop was Atlanta, where my sister, Rachel, met us for a couple of days. We stayed on an urban farm with goats, turkeys, chickens and cats and spent most of the time sitting around and catching up, since we hadn't seen each other since Christmas. We did, of course, spend one afternoon touring the Jimmy Carter Presidential Museum. He is absolutely my favorite president ever, and although I have been to his museum before, I loved going back and taking Matt and Rachel with me. My favorite quotation was right at the beginning of the museum, just as you enter. It's from Walter Mondale: "We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace." Can any American president since Carter claim all three of those statements? Just sayin'. He will always be my hero, and when I learn about what the Carter Center is doing today, I am so proud of him. I've read most of his books, except for his Civil War novel, which I just can't get into. Did you know he took up painting when he was 70? Some of his paintings are pretty good. It gives me hope that maybe I can try it, too.
Of course, we also visited Martin Luther King's grave, at the MLK National Historic Site.
By that time, we were on the way out of town, and I was eager to visit the farm where Flannery O'Connor lived for the last 14 years of her life, writing and raising 50+ peafowl, her favorite birds.
It has become increasingly difficult to teach Flannery O'Connor to students, because they just don't get most of the religious references. For instance, one of my favorite stories, "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," has all these references to Church of God vs. Catholic hymns, as well as a whole thing about the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and how it's the real presence of God. When I've tried to teach these stories, I spend most of the time just going through and explaining all the references. It's too bad, because they are just so fantastic. We read a couple out loud as we were driving to Milledgeville and then to Savannah. I guess the most accessible story is probably "A Good Man is Hard to Find," but even reading that a lot of people have no clue. There are so many references to the dirt roads and rutted paths and woods and little shacks in those stories that it was nice to be driving through the areas where you definitely could see all those things. I'm pretty obsessed with Flannery O'Connor, now that I really think about it, so much so that I selected our B and B in Savannah because it's right next to her childhood home, and I selected the room we're staying in because you can see her house from the window.
We met this guy that lives on the top floor of her house and gives tours to people in the afternoons, but we were on the way to the beach so we just chatted for a while and asked which characters we most identified with, and talked about our favorite parts in the stories and novels. It was really fun, more fun that touring around another home with a guide, which is starting to get tiring even for a history buff life me.
Speaking of touring, we did go visit the old Colonial Park cemetery, because I wanted to see the grave of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who is buried there. His name is Button Gwinnett, and he's pretty obscure. He was born in England and came over here in the 1730s. He was kind of unsuccessful in a lot of things, although I guess he did support the Revolution. Unfortunately, his political rival, Lachlan McIntosh, killed him in a duel in 1777, after McIntosh called him a "scoundrel and a lying rascal" or something like that and then of course Button challenged him. Although they both shot each other in the leg, I guess Button was shot in a femoral artery, so he didn't live to see actual independence, although he did serve as governor of Georgia for a short time after the governor died, but he was not re-elected. Lachlan, on the other hand, was able to fight in the Revolutionary War, return to Savannah, and help host President George Washington when he came down here on a visit in 1791.
The best thing about Button Gwinnett that I learned today is that he is a character in Fallout 3, a video game! You have to get the Declaration of Independence after some sort of nuclear holocaust, and Button is the robot who is guarding the document. Check it out. Watch the part of Fallout 3 where Button Gwinnett appears.
We spent the rest of the day on Tybee Island, on the beach, because it was 80 degrees. There's a lot of history associated with this island, as it was strategically important during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. But today, I just cared about lying on the sand and relaxing, reading about pirates.
Lots of pirates came and went through Savannah in the early days, and we had dinner at the oldest and most famous restaurant (very touristy of course) in Savannah, The Pirate's House, which was a tavern where they would get men drunk and then kidnap them and force them to work aboard the ships, just like in Billy Budd. Or Treasure Island, which we were reading while sitting down by the river. Arr!
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