We talked of many things that morning, but those two lines, sung with eyes closed and fists clenched, said it all and more. Dark histories woven like shadows under the birdsong and dappled light.Īt the end, Vaughnette bursts into song: “If I be a slave,” she sings, “I be buried in my grave and go home to my god and be free.” It’s a song that was sung by her ancestors, and they were there with her, I think, in every broken note. She shows me the market square where enslaved men, women and children were bought and sold, the holding pens where they were kept like cattle, tiny arrow slits in thick granite walls for air. On Johnson Square, I meet Vaughnette Goode-Walker, aka Sister V, a local African American historian who leads tours that follow in the footsteps of the slaves who once arrived here in their thousands, marched from the port to the plantations. It has Georgia peach cobbler on the menu - often with a smoking hot drum solo from regular bands. The nearby Good Times Jazz Bar & Restaurant is a close second. I eat a feast of tapas-like bites with a soulful Southern twist: ruby-red shrimp and grits, triggerfish draped in ginger. Housed in a former Greyhound bus station, its 1938 art deco flourishes have been beautifully restored to their original sheen. ![]() It’s briny hedonism and history wrapped into one little cultural bundle of gastronomic, boozy joy. Savannah is that rare thing in urban American: a city that’s not only preserved its heritage charm, but somehow added to it as well. It’s said he found the city too beautiful to burn. ![]() But when he reached Savannah, he stopped. In 1864, towards the end of America’s bloody Civil War, General Sherman marched his Northern troops through Georgia, destroying all as he went. I begin a few miles inland, in a city just as rich, only in history, food, architecture and art: Savannah, the queen of the south. I’m seeking that feeling Willy found hard to put into words. These are the Golden Isles, and I plan to spend a week travelling between four of the best. On their west, coastal forests as verdant and teeming with life as a tropical jungle. On their eastern sides are dunes and vast sand beaches. Just a few miles from land, between shallow inlets and bays, 14 are woven together to create a sea balustrade. That unique geology funnels a huge diversity of plant and marine life towards its shores, from loggerhead sea turtles, which lay their eggs here every summer, to right whales - among the most critically endangered animals on the planet - which use the warm, mineral-rich waters as a calving ground in winter.Īnd those shores harbour even more natural treasures: the barrier islands. Ecologists call it the ‘Georgia Bite’ because it’s the innermost point of a stretch of coast that gapes like an open mouth as it extends south from Cape Fear, in North Carolina, to Cape Canaveral, in Florida. But now I get it - these islands are golden because of the way they make you feel.ĭespite being a mere 110 miles long, Georgia’s coast packs a big punch. I thought these islands were named after that sunrise colour. “You can get the beach anywhere, but this is something hard to put into words.” Here are three that might just do: pure Georgia gold. ![]() ![]() “This is why I love these islands,” Willy says in melodic, Southern tones. Then I see them: three manatees playing in the shallows, their big, cumbersome bellies breaking the surface as they perform slow, lazy rolls. A splash, an exhale, two nostrils poking above the water. Bright blue kingfishers skim the still pink of the river. Suddenly, my guide, Willy Hazlehurst, stops and puts a finger to his lips, pointing to a circle of bubbling water just beyond the beach. In the early autumn light, the salt marshes of Georgia’s Golden Isles glow a glittering amber. I hike along the shoreline as maritime forests dripping in Spanish moss arch their limbs above me.
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