Bonaventure Cemetery and Midnight in the Garden

Bonaventure Cemetery sits on a bluff above the Wilmington River east of Savannah, and it was considered one of the South's great burial grounds long before a book made it nationally famous. The live oaks are enormous, their branches reaching over the paths and draped with Spanish moss. The monuments are Victorian in the grandest possible sense, stone angels and elaborate crypts clustered among the trees with a specificity that makes you feel as though the people buried there are still making decisions about their presentation.

Johnny Mercer is buried in Bonaventure. Mercer grew up in Savannah, left for New York and eventually Hollywood, and became one of the most successful lyricists in American popular music. He wrote the words to "Moon River" for the nineteen sixty-one film "Breakfast at Tiffany's," a song that was nearly cut from the film before Audrey Hepburn reportedly told the studio executives that if the song went, she went. The song stayed. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Mercer also wrote "Blues in the Night," "Jeepers Creepers," and "Days of Wine and Roses," among dozens of others. He is buried in Bonaventure under a marker that is less elaborate than many of his neighbors'.

John Berendt's nineteen ninety-four book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" set part of its narrative at Bonaventure, centering on the Bird Girl statue that had stood there for years. After the book sold more than four million copies, the statue was moved to the Telfair Museums to protect it from souvenir hunters. Bonaventure became a pilgrimage site. It had been worth visiting before the pilgrimage. It is still worth visiting now that the pilgrims have come and mostly gone.