A Gay Time in Old Savannah

The first major stop of the trip was in Savannah Georgia. I had never really heard of the town but apparently Harry's parents spent some time there once and Harry has always been impressed with the stories they tell about how nice and interesting it was. We stayed in a nice hotel downtown thanks to Mike's hook up and our room basically opened onto a pool. Savannah's not that big so we spent most of our time there, really just about one full day, walking around the whole place. The streets were very wide in the old style that you might call a boulevard. The street only tended to be two lanes but with two more for parking and a big area with grass and trees in the middle it was about the width of what could have been six lanes. This is about as different as possible from China were they would have squeezed eight lanes into that space. The streets were also made beautiful by the big green trees which hung over all of them giving the whole street a lot of shade. There was some kind of moss hanging from the trees which might have been an invasive species but actually made it more beautiful by giving all the trees a sort of fuzzy look. The town had a lot of historical buildings and signs all throughout it and over the course of the day we actually walked through a good portion of the whole town.

Besides a number of nice old buildings and statues we went into a number of really nice little stores. The first one we went to was a sort of Willy Wanka like chocolate and candy store. One of the big things they made in the store was taffy which you could see going from being stretched by a machine to being separated wrapped and moved by conveyor belt to were it was sold. The whole thing made a funny little process that I took a video of. The store also sold all sorts of candied apples and chocolate. Harry saw that they had a bunch of old time lunch boxes like we used to have when we were kids with pictures of transformers of GI Joe on them. The deal was that if you bought one of these lunch boxes you could get all the taffy you could fit in it for free. Harry liked the idea of taking his lunch into work in a kids lunch box so he got one and a bunch of taffy. We walked around some more and came to this very odd little store selling basically only honey. I never knew there were so many kinds of honey or that you could base a whole store around it. The best part was the honey tasting that they did were you could try a little spoonful of different kinds on honey.

They actually had pretty different tastes and while I forgot most of the explanation of why that was the honey was really good. They also had what was basically part of a bee hive with waxy walls and all that you could eat with apples. The honey was good but the hive stuff was basically just to sticky and messy. They had one whole wall of honeys like you might see displayed with wine. The prices were also in line with the sort of place that could support a store only devoted to honey and while it was good, there's only so much I'm willing to spend for something I use as little as honey. The only thing any of us actually bought in there was tea made with the honey which was good as well. We walked along more looking for different stores and stuff to see. We walked down to the docks by the river and back up into the heart of the town. There were some interesting historical markers like a house where Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, stayed. What was really interesting about that sign was that it was erected in '56 and I wonder if it was partially put up as a response to early civil rights issues. All the signs had the year they were erected and the name of the historical society. It was also interesting to see the name change with time.

The most interesting thing we saw was one of the oldest synagogue in the country. The congregation was established in 1733 only about five months after Georgia itself was colonized. The synagogue we went to see was built in 1878 and is more notable for its style than for being old. Standing at the corner of square that looked like many of the grassy squares around the city the synagogue is in the exact style of a Gothic revival church. Steeple and all if it weren't for the few small star's of David you would never be able to tell that it wasn't like one of the numerous other churches in the city. We knocked on the door fearing it might be closed for visitors since it was Saturday a guy opened the door and told us it was closed since it was Saturday we said we knew and he looked at us and let us in. I can't tell if he actually knew we were Jewish or not, he was black also and definitly not Ethiopian or anything like that, but I guess in a synagogue that looks like a church in the deep South anything is possible. He brought us in to the main room and put on a little tape of the history of the place while he went to do some work. The history was pretty basic stuff about how old the synagogue was and so on, it had been one of the earlier US synagogues to become Reformed, but there was really very little as to why it looked like a church besides saying that Gothic revival was really popular when it was built and the people wanted to fit in.

I'm not really in any position to criticize Jews in 1800's Georgia but the whole thing just seemed distasteful to me. Reformed synagogues already share too much in common with Christian churches from organ music to simple call and response style of prayer. To have the synagogue look exactly like a church is going beyond fitting in it's basically trying to be Christian. The inside looked just like a church as well with pews and vaulted ceilings. After looking around the interior some, stained glass windows and all, we were told there was a little museum upstairs which we went to check out. It had some interesting stuff including a Torah that may have been more than 500 years old and letters commending the congregation from various US presidents including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, FDR, and the most recent four or five including Nixon who didn't ever really like Jews much. They also had some interesting books that mentioned the synagogue. Some were historical but one was basically a autobiography which included some really harsh things about the synagogue including wondering when a big cross would be erected and the transformation would finally be complete. I have to give them credit for not only having this book but for excerpting the part that was really critical about them.

My favorite thing in there was a picture of an old ceremonial shoe used in a ceremony that took place if one brother refused to marry his brother's widow. This was actually my Torah portion when I was Bar-Mitzvahed but I never knew that it actually took place in modern times. The Torah holds that if the brother refuses to marry his brother's widow she is supposed to take off his shoe, throw it into the desert, spit in his face, and then it says something like, "and he shall go into Israel as the unsandaled one." Apparently it was done in modern times basically to avoid the biblical proclamation that the brother marry his brother's widow. In fact it may actually have been done while the first brother was alive just in case. I have a picture of it on flickr but I didn't put it here since it didn't come out too well. As we were leaving the synagogue we saw a bunch of people and what sort of looked like a festival going on in a really big park nearby. What became apparent as we got to it was that it was a big gay pride event. We walked around for a while and someone stopped us and gave us some fliers for some sort of gay camp sight. He specifically mentioned that there was a nude pool area. I just couldn't decide what the right thing to say was. It seemed rude not to take the fliers but were we also taking them under false pretenses. It wasn't like he was out of line giving the fliers to three guys walking around a gay pride event, but it seemed as odd to take them as to not take them. I wonder what miss manners would say. Should we have just said sorry you're barking up the wrong tree and moved on or would that have been even more rude. Well at least we certainly had a gay time in old Savannah.