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Community leaders, institutions, and even entire communities can inspire us to do great work ourselves. They can serve as role models, spark new ideas in us, or provide us with a place to place our energy. There are a great deal of community members and places left unsung or only recognized by a narrow population and while we can never show all of the people that deeply affect and serve their communities, we hope to shine a light on and share the stories of some of those people and places and what they mean to their community.
August 21, 2017
Submitted by: James Riley
You can tell a lot about a place by looking at its trees, if you can manage to see them. Trees are hard to see precisely because they are everywhere. It takes real effort to really see one. Or a tree needs be quite special to be noticed by any old fool. Trees are like birds. Countless pigeons, robins, and chickadees fill yards across the country without so much as a lingering glance from the breakfast table, but put a peacock in a garden and watch the tourist come with cameras to catch its glorious plumage. The trees of Savannah, just as ostentatious as any bird, are living texts that tell the story of the city both gracefully and beautifully.
Consider first the Magnolia. A sweet smelling summer blooming tree, the Magnolia is practically synonymous with the south. The elegant and large blossoms of the Magnolia mark it as a decorative tree first and foremost. It is somehow both dignified and grandiose. It, and the equally as beautiful and nearly as ubiquitous Crape Myrtle, encapsulate much of the southern assthetic, at least as far as stereotypes go. One thinks of Debutante Balls, drinking sweet tea on a porch, and watching the movie Steel Magnolias. The fact that I personally have never experienced any of those events does undercut my point, but only a little. The flower lends itself to such stereotypes and half-truths. There is an undeniable hazy dreamlike quality to the Magnolia flower, which has been blooming in the summer heat for millions of years. Whereas most flowers are pollinated by bees, or in rarer cases butterflies and moths, the Magnolia relies on beetles for reproduction. As a result the petals of the Magnolia are tough and leathery. The flower itself is large and relatively simple. It is a flower that predates us, like the land or stars, and like those things we project our ideas onto it. The magnolia flower isn't just a symbol that endures because it is striking, it is literally built tougher than other flowers.
Savannah is an odd fragmented city from above. Its jigsaw city limits are only made odder by the way that rivers carve up the land directly to the east of the city into various islands and beaches. Savannah itself is cut off from South Carolina by the eponymous river and it is on this waterfront that the Palmetto tree tells its part of the story loudest. The scrubby Palmetto indicates a climate that is on the border of tropical, that points to the Caribbean, but is not quite there. The Palmetto by its very nature indicates a history of colonial trade and by its location indicates the dark history of that trade. Looking upon the Palmetto one thinks of cotton and of cane. Of scarred backs and cut-off hands. Of blood red scars on black skin. You can practically hear the chains rattle on the sub-tropical breeze as you walk past the tourist shops of the waterfront. It is a history that Savannah does not ignore completely in its tourist districts but it is a history that is not completely past in the greater area of Savannah. Nor the rest of Georgia for that matter. Nor the rest of America. But in a city full of ghost tours, the specter of the slave trade looms larger than any other.
But it is the Southern Live Oak that is the quintessential tree of Savannah. The old city is divided into almost artificially charming squares of green spaces and the Live Oak is their undisputed centerpiece of each. This magnificent tree grows wider than it does tall and it positively drips with spanish moss. Like most oaks, it is long lived with some individuals growing for more than a thousand years. Unlike most oaks, it does not lose its leaves in the Fall. In the daytime it is beautiful and at night it is eerie. It is the biological embodiment of southern gothic.
The Southern Live Oak is the peacock of the plant world. It may not fan out quite so quickly, but when the twisted branches grow out in all directions like slow motion lightning its silhouette matches Hera's prized bird and is every bit as dramatic. To be sure, there are a great many plants more colorful than the Live Oak, but then again there are more colorful birds than the peacock (some at least). But there is more to beauty than color. And there is more reason to look on something than beauty.
Imagine you are a little girl with a chicken. This chicken is special, not just because it is yours and you love it but because it can do something uncommon for chickens. It can walk backwards. Now a newspaper man comes all the way from New York just to write about your chicken. You might begin to see the story in all things. You might want to tell the stories of all the chickens learning to walk backwards, for any human to have grace is as uncommon as that. It did instill in one little girl a lifelong love of fowl that culminated in her procuring the king of birds: the peacock. Flannery O'Connor loved her peacocks in the purest way, because they never loved her back.
I do wonder if Flannery O'Connor ever looked at the trees of her childhood home with the same attention and admiration she had for peacocks. She once wrote, "Once or twice I have been asked what the peacock is "good for" - a question which gets no answer from me because it deserves none." So it is for trees. And so it is with art. O'Connor also said that art "is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it." These things, living and nonliving beauties, are a good within themselves, not just because of what they can give us. But they do give us so much if we earnestly put our whole selves into seeing and hearing them. The trees were here for all of our history and they record our stories as well as those of others. Although not everyone can hear them, they speak for themselves.