Shoutin’ the Praises of Susie King Taylor Square

Anyone who’s been here a hot humid minute knows even the tiniest black cloud can pour down gallons of rain. The mean-looking dark puffball circling the low sky above the gazebo in Whitefield Square looked like a soaker, but Sistah Patt Gunn wasn’t fazed.

“It doesn’t rain on Gullah Geechee events,” she shrugged with a smile. “Just you watch.”

I clutched my umbrella and listened warily for a grumble of thunder as the beloved storyteller and activist checked her microphone with unhurried serenity, preparing for the monthly teach-in of the Center for Jubilee, Reconciliation and Healing. While it’s true the center’s Come Sunday gatherings have an unbroken record of excellent weather, my faith has been befuddled too many times by freak storm swamp hair.

Sistah Patt Gunn has no fear of lightning

Unbothered by the cloud stalking the tree line like a creepy clown, Sistah Patt circled Whitefield Square seven times and burned sage to call in and honor the enslaved ancestors who once toiled here. Some of them are interred under the bricked pathways in what was the city’s first African burial grounds, and the 18th-century strangers’ cemetery extends over to Calhoun Square on the next block. The chilling irony of these public spaces named for Confederate slaveholders may soon melt away under the warmth of civic engagement—starting with forced labor champion Calhoun, who wasn’t from Georgia but managed to worm his way into the local mythology anyway. 

(My Savannah-educated husband recalls the elementary school rhyme “John C. Calhoun/a man so handsome/he made women swoon,” which not only smacks of rape culture but it is wholly untrue; the man was as hideous as a genetically-modified squashbug and appears to have styled his hair with a pitchfork.)

Part history lesson, part hosanna, Come Sundays have become the lightning rod (metaphorically, please) of the charge to divest Savannah’s squares of slaveholder nomenclature, and last Sunday’s congregation crackled with new developments. (For a primer on the issue, catch up on award-winning local journalist Will Peebles’ steadfast documentation.)

After months of collecting signatures to upcycle Calhoun Square to Jubilee Square as an homage to the celebratory end of slavery, Sistah Patt announced Friday that the center will now seek to rename it Taylor Square to honor Civil War nurse, secret schoolteacher, resistance fighter, elegant memoirist, and all-around badass Susie King Taylor. 

The shift came after a few neighbors who live around the square waffled around the name change—according to the city charter, 51 percent of property owners around the square must approve before the proposal can be submitted (even though Savannah’s squares are public spaces and maintained by our taxes.) Apparently some fretted that the square ought to be named after an actual person (even though several others are not) and that at least Calhoun—who famously called slavery a “positive good”—fulfills the code’s conditions (even though he does not.)

Sistah Patt, well-versed in diplomatic compromise and the inexplicable absurdities of local politics, capitulated quickly. 

“They wanted a name, and we have one,” she explained, the storm cloud scurrying to the corner of the square. “The best, actually.”

It is a genius pivot.