You Can't Fool All the People All of the Time

I’ve been thinking a lot about history lately, as I’m sure many of you are. It’s kind of impossible not to in Savannah, seeing as we stomp all over it on these streets every day.

It’s not like we can help it. This city is literally built upon ruins and bones, a layer cake of centuries squishing under our wheels and feet. FFR, try walking down Oglethorpe without encountering some memorial about how they paved an old cemetery and put up a median.

That’s just the way it goes, right? Time rolls on, places get built over, people are forgotten. For every story about General Oglethorpe and Tomochichi repeated by a garrulous tour guide in a silly hat, thousands of other anonymous contributors to what came before lay buried beneath the cobblestones.

Of course, there has to be discernment. Otherwise, how would the past make any sense? Someone got to choose who got the engraved rocks and lofty biographies, winnowing down the narrative ages ago. What we know as true is defined as much by what was written down as what was left out.

Making that point, Nazi vanquisher Winston Churchill told us that “history is written by the victors.” Yet eternal cultural sage Bob Marley reminds “half the story has never been told.” Makes ya wonder how much we think we know is incomplete and probably incorrect.

Surely the megalomaniacal tyrants have this in their ketamine-porous brains as they actively work to erase the accomplishments of people of color from the annals, including our highest-decorated soldiers. Though our current craptocrats aren’t the first to serve up a sanitized white supremacist version of American history: From the decimation of indigenous civilizations to the abject lies of Reconstruction to the ridiculous notion that immigrants don’t belong here, it’s kinda been our thing.

The fragile baby men currently in charge are making sure that these malnourished mashed potato myths persist, hoping that the people of the future will herald them as heroes.

But history has a funny way of jumping the rail. Around here it’s even managed to lay new tracks, in spite of stubborn engineering.

Our newly renamed Taylor Square finally pays homage to the remarkable Susie King Taylor, the Black schoolteacher and Civil War nurse who contributed the only firsthand account of the battleground written by a woman.

The hideous tragedy of the Weeping Time has gained international recognition since local writer Kristopher Munroe published his 2014 article in the Atlantic, though activists persevere to stave off plans to develop the westside acreage where the largest auction of enslaved people took place in 1859.

Fabled raconteur George Dawes Green elevated to the mainstream the secret 18th-century swamp fortress of an enclave of escaped Maroons in his novel of Kingdoms of Savannah.

Sistah Patt Gunn and her Underground Tours continue to provide context as to why, who, and, how our city was truly built.

Still mostly hidden is the story of a scrubby spot just over the bridge to Tybee Island. I crossed this bridge thousands of times before I learned what once transpired at the mouth of Lazaretto Creek that empties into the south channel of the Savannah River. &ou’re certainly forgiven if you have no idea.