Chapter 18 from Bruce Feiler’s The Council of Dad’s

Bonaventure Cemetery, just east of Savannah, has two side-by-side stone gates at its entrance. The gate on the left has two chiseled stone pillars capped with female figures cradling crosses. It is known as the Christian gate. The gate on the right has similar stone pillars topped with Stars of David. It’s called the Jewish gate.

On a swampy, mosquito-plagued afternoon I drove through the Jewish gate, grabbed my crutches, and climbed the few steps to the visitor’s center. Inside are sample stone carvings, assorted porcelain urns for ashes, and portraits of famous people buried here, including governors, ambassadors, and Confederate generals, along with Pulitzer
Prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken and four-time Oscar-winning songwriter Johnny
Mercer.

A sign tells visitors that Bonaventure’s most famous resident, “The Bird Girl,” a four-foot-two-inch bronze statue of a girl holding a bowl in each hand, has been relocated to a museum downtown. This little-known statue from an unheralded plot was featured on the cover of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The book’s meteoric success inspired countless pilgrims to trek to Savannah, many of whom came to
Bonaventure and began chipping off chunks of the statue’s pedestal.

I gave the attendant my surname. She disappeared into a musty backroom, then returned momentarily with six worn, yellowed cards. Each contained the name of someone interred at the cemetery, the date and place of the person’s death, along with the date, style, and location of burial. The names were my great-grandparents, Daisy and
Melvin Feiler; my great-great uncle, Edwin Cohen; my grandparents, Aleen and Edwin Feiler; and my uncle Stanley Feiler.

I was amazed by how much information these cards revealed. My great-grandfather managed to be buried on the same day he died, July 18, 1952. My great-grandmother, who died on September 27, 1960, was relocated from Starkville, Mississippi, in time to be buried two days later. My uncle, whose body was donated to science, was buried seven months after his death in April 2001. My uncle was cremated; my grandmother buried in a casket; my great-grandmother interred in a monarch vault. “It’s a concrete container,” the attendant explained. “Jews aren’t usually buried in vaults, just dry ground. But things are always changing.”

I thanked her, returned the cards, and stood up to leave.

“Are you going to visit your family?” she asked.

“Sort of,” I said. “Really I came to visit my own gravesite.”

Bonaventure, or “lovely place,” is one of the most storied settings in an otherwise storied city. Established as a rice plantation before the American Revolution, the wooded bluff above the Wilmington River became a private cemetery in 1846. The seller, U.S. Navy
Commodore Josiah Tattnall, is said to have introduced the line “Blood is thicker than water” into American history after aiding the British against the Chinese in 1859.

The cemetery’s most distinctive feature is what Harper’s Magazine in 1860 called it’s “mournful avenue of live oak,” a promenade of soaring evergreens called the king’s trees because their hearty wood was once reserved for the Royal Navy. John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, who camped in Bonaventure for five days in 1867, called the specimens “the most magnificent planted trees I have ever seen. The main branches reach out horizontally until they come together over the driveway, while each branch is adorned like a garden with ferns, flowers, grasses, and dwarf palmettos.”

Nearly every branch of these grand oaks is draped in silvery, beard-like skeins of
Tillandsia, or Spanish moss, which shrouds the entire grounds with a funereal air. A cousin of the pineapple, the exotic garlands swing and sway with every motion of the wind, wrote a visitor in 1859, “not unlike the effect produced by the tattered banners hung from the roofs of Gothic cathedrals as trophies of war in olden time.”

Covering over 160 acres, Bonaventure was part of the rural cemetery movement of the nineteenth century in which burial grounds were relocated from crowded church backyards to plush, garden-style paradises, where the deceased would retire close to nature and the grieving would be uplifted by the blooms. These “cities of the dead” were designed to be places of hope, not sadness, where death was no longer macabre but a state of “silent slumber,” “sweet repose,” or “eternal sleep.”

Forerunners of modern-day parks, cemeteries became desired leisure destinations where people brought carriages, picnics, and amorous intention. Anyone who courted in
Bonaventure on a Sunday, it was said, was sure to marry. Bonaventure is so lovely, wrote one observer, that “Death is robbed of half its horrors.”

I searched out three family plots before heading to my own. The first belonged to Johnny Mercer, whose mournful ballad “Moon River” is Savannah’s unofficial anthem. The lyricist of more than 1,500 songs, and co-founder of Capitol Records, is buried alongside his wife, Ginger, and other family members. The stones bear his song titles: “My Mama Don Tol’ Me” for his mother; “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” for his wife; “And the Angels Sing” for himself.

Conrad Aiken is also buried alongside his parents, though the overtones are less pleasant. When Aiken was eleven, he awoke one morning to hear his parents arguing. His father then shot his mother and turned the pistol on himself. The future poet laureate of the United States ran barefoot across the street to the police station. “Papa has just shot Mama and then shot himself.”

The elder Aikens’ graves are marked with a single monument, while the troubled writer, who went on to edit the Harvard literary magazine with T.S. Eliot and lived around the world before returning to Savannah, is buried under a granite bench to encourage visitors to stop and enjoy a drink. The bench contains an inscription that my brother has adopted as his Internet alias. One day Aiken saw a ship named Cosmos Mariner sailing into Savannah. Enchanted, he checked the paper for its routing, only to find a boilerplate entry saying no information was available. The entry became his epigraph.

COSMOS MARINER
DESTINATION UNKNOWN

The third grave I visited was more personal to me.

Jack Leigh was the photographer who took the image of the “Bird Girl” that appeared on the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A native Savannahian and a graduate of my high school, Jack dreamed of being a painter but abandoned that for photography. After apprenticing widely, he returned to Savannah, took a haunting shot of a swan in the city’s most touristed fountain, and believed for the first time that he could see his hometown in a fresh way. That image now hangs on our bedroom wall in Brooklyn Heights, a symbol of a private stroll Linda and I took around the fountain moments after we were married.

Jack went on to publish five books of precisely focused, finely observed images of dying worlds along the rivers, swamps, and inland waterways of Georgia’s low country. In 2003, in his early 50’s, Jack was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. He longed to spend his final weeks in the place he loved most, Tybee Island. My parents offered him their beach house. Jack experienced his waning days in the place where I spent my weaning ones. When I was struck early with cancer, the parallels with my longtime friend, who also had two daughters at home, was painful. I was curious about his state of mind as the end of his life neared.

“Jack’s primary work as a documentary photographer,” said Susan Patrice, his ex-wife, who spent the final months at his side, “was really the work of being an open human being who could show up in any situation and be truly open and engaged. And while you’re developing that skill as an artist, you also develop it as a human.

“What I found remarkable,” Susan continued, “is that as we were driving out to
Tybee after Jack had been in the hospital for months, he kept saying, ‘Slow down. I’ve forgotten how beautiful the world really is. Do you see it? Do you see it?’ I kept thinking, ‘He sees it because he’s visited death, but also because he’s cultivated this capacity to see. He may not be strong enough to lift the camera, but the camera has become irrelevant.”

Jack especially loved Bonaventure. When his daughter Gracie was young, the two walked around its grounds for hours, every day. For several years before he was diagnosed, Jack’s health began to deteriorate. During that time, he began photographing hundreds of stone angels around Bonaventure and other cemeteries. “I believe he was unknowingly trying to reclaim his spiritual tradition,” Susan said.