A blond, middle-aged man in khakis and a striped polo shirt sits at a grand piano in the middle of the light-filled atrium in the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport and plays the rambling opening notes of Fats Domino’s classic “Walking to New Orleans.” I feel like I’ve stepped onto a film set as I roll my luggage across the redbrick “town square” and past the storefronts, which are designed in a blend of local Georgian and Southern Gothic Revival traditions and not entirely unconvincing. After descending an escalator out into the gentle spring air, I meet my Uber driver—a gravel-voiced grandmother of two with faded shoulder tattoos—and have my first brush with Southern hospitality.
“If you like an alcoholic drink now and then,” she drawls, a wad of chewing tobacco lodged in her lower lip, “you could do worse than the slushy from Wet Willie’s.” She has my attention. “Doesn’t take but maybe two to get you feeling pretty right,” she adds as she sizes me up in her rearview mirror. She’s from Savannah, she tells me, and used to ride in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. I picture the girl she was on her horse, surrounded by young men from the nearby Fort Stewart Army base, as she describes their faces covered with lipstick from the town women, because it was “good luck to kiss a soldier back in the day!” I note how beautiful and seductive the Spanish moss is as we exit from the highway onto the streets of town. She catches my eye and says sternly, “Don’t lay in it and wallow in it! Don’t want to see you go home with chiggers! Even if you find you a good-lookin’ man! Don’t do it!” But if it were to happen, she swears by covering the bites with clear nail polish, which is, by her estimation, the only way to suffocate said chiggers. (Later research reveals them to be tiny insects that lodge themselves under the skin and cause almost unbearable itching.)
As we pull up to the hotel, I am struck by the sheer,…
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