Book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Review

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March 20, 1994
Voodoo Justice
Past GLENNA WHITLEY

MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF Adept AND EVIL
A Savannah Story.
By John Berendt.
HE voodoo priestess looked across the table at her wealthy customer, a man on trial for murder: "At present, you know how expressionless time works. Dead time lasts for one hour -- from one-half an hour earlier midnight to half an hour later midnight. The one-half-60 minutes before midnight is for doin' good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin' evil. . . . Seems similar nosotros need a niggling of both this evening."

When he began living part of the year in Savannah, Ga., John Berendt, a columnist for Esquire and a erstwhile editor of New York magazine, was looking for -- what? Respite from the big city? A charming trivial Southern town dripping with humidity and history to notice equally fodder for a novel? What he found was a cultured but isolated backwater, a town where who your groovy-grandparents were still matters, where anti-Yankee resentments are never far from the surface and where writers from New York are invited to midnight voodoo ceremonies in graveyards.

The book he has written based on his eight years of living part-time in Savannah is a peculiar combination of true crime and travelogue. The first half of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" is most the people Mr. Berendt encountered: Joe Odom, a ne'er-do-well lawyer, piano actor and tour guide, who drags antiques and an entourage of eccentrics to reside in one historic house after another from eviction to eviction; the Lady Chablis, a radiant black elevate queen who uses the author as a convenient chauffeur to drive her home afterward her hormone shots; Serena Dawes, whom Cecil Beaton once chosen "ane of the most perfect natural beauties I've always photographed," now in middle historic period and given to boas, chiffon and dark green nail shine. And there'due south her lover, Luther Driggers, an inventor who discovered that a sure pesticide could laissez passer through plastic, making flea collars and no-pest strips possible. After failing to capitalize on his observe, he has become a town character who "walks" flies by gluing threads to their backs, and keeps the people of Savannah tense with threats to poisonous substance the water supply.

The second half of the volume is the story of Jim Williams, a rich antiques dealer and restorer of Mercer Business firm, one of the urban center's nigh beautiful celebrated homes and the site of the Christmas party Savannah'due south social elite "lived for." Vi months later Mr. Berendt arrived, Williams was charged in the 1981 shooting of Danny Hansford, a tempestuous young man known as "a walking streak of sexual practice" to both men and women in town.

Williams, Hansford'south employer and sometime lover, pleaded self-defense. The evidence was far from clear-cut. It appeared that Williams may have staged the shooting, moving crucial pieces of evidence to make it look as if he fired his gun only after Hansford tried to kill him. Convicted, he rapidly won a new trial when show of prosecutorial misconduct was sent anonymously to his chaser.

Before his second trial, besides engaging expensive criminal lawyers to represent him in the courtroom, Williams hired Minerva, the voodoo priestess, to put a curse on the prosecutor. Mr. Berendt makes it clear where Williams thought the better value for the dollar was.

DESPITE Minerva's ministrations, the second trial also ended in confidence. While Jim Williams ran his antiques business and wrote messages to Architectural Digest from jail, his lawyers managed to persuade the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn the verdict and order nonetheless another trial. Over again Minerva went to work, throwing graveyard dirt on the steps of Williams'south enemies' homes. After the third trial concluded in a mistrial, Williams was retried yet again and became the only person in Georgia history always tried for the same murder four times. Seven months after finally being acquitted, Williams died, in January 1990.

Mr. Berendt's writing is elegant and wickedly funny, and his eye for telling details is superb. In recounting the tale of Williams'southward trials, he frequently veers off and includes overheard conversations, funny vignettes and bits of historical and architectural data -- a method that a bottom observer might have botched simply that works wonderfully hither. "Midnight in the Garden of Proficient and Evil" might exist the outset true-criminal offense book that makes the reader want to phone call a travel agent and book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime.

WHY GEORGE MERCER 3D STOPPED DRINKING

Midway through Jim Williams'south 2d twelvemonth in jail, Savannah more or less forgot about him. The city turned its attention to other topics. There was a skillful deal of talk, for instance, about the divine intervention allegedly visited upon George Mercer 3d.

George Mercer 3d was a prominent businessman and the half-brother of the belatedly Johnny Mercer. Mr. Mercer was leaving his house in Ardsley Park i evening to go to a dinner political party when he suddenly realized he'd forgotten his car keys. He went dorsum inside to get them. In the front hall he heard a vocalism say loud and clear, "George, you drink too much!"

Mr. Mercer turned effectually, but the hall was empty. "Who are you?" he asked. "And where are you?"

"I am the Lord," said the voice. "I am everywhere."

"Well, I know I potable more than I should," said Mr. Mercer, "only how practise I know you're the Lord? If you really are, show me. Show me now. If y'all can bear witness to me you're God I'll never drink again." Suddenly, Mr. Mercer felt himself beingness lifted high in the air. Upward over his house. Upwardly over Ardsley Park. He was lifted so loftier he could look downward and meet all of Savannah -- the downtown squares, the river, Tybee Island and Hilton Head. And the voice said, "Take I proved to you that I am real?" Mr. Mercer declared and then and in that location that he did believe, and the Lord put him back down in the front hall. George Mercer 3d never took another drink after that.

Even people who doubted the truth of that story had to admit that on a spiritual level at least something very foreign was happening to Savannah's upper crust.
From "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."

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