Welcome to Aberjhani's

The Journey and the Return


It seems strange that a person should have to travel thousands of miles to learn something particularly significant about his own hometown. But that’s exactly what happened to me when I was stationed as a U.S. Air Force journalist at Eielson AFB in Alaska years ago. It was there that I discovered in an old copy of National Geographic that my hometown of Savannah, Georgia, was one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. Having grown up there in a project called Hitch Village and in other parts of the city, I could not understand why.

Then I returned years later amidst all the fanfare surrounding Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (the movie as well as the book), the phenomenal growth of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), and the election of the city’s first African-American mayor. I learned a lot about the Historic District’s celebrated architecture and how fortunate Savannah had been that General Sherman had refrained from burning the city down during the Civil War.

Once out of the Air Force, it was my intention to visit family and friends for a few weeks and then move on to other possibilities. Fate, however, had different plans for my life and one year rolled into another. As I gained some notice as a writer, friends and readers sometimes asked when I planned to write my “Savannah book” since everyone else, including many who were not native to the city, seemed to have done so. Without realizing that I in fact had already started writing my “Savannah book,” I usually answered that I didn’t believe I ever would because I usually thought more in world literary terms than regional. But then guess what?

Remaining in Savannah led me to do two things: 1) I spent a decade as my mother’s caregiver prior to her passing and therefore came to interact with my family on levels I never had before. 2) I met some of my hometown’s most extraordinary citizens and enjoyed the great honor of writing about them. Some, like celebrated photographer Jack Leigh, have since passed. Others, like Dr. Abigail Jordan, founder of Savannah’s African-American Monument and the national Consortium of Doctors, are still with us.

Suddenly, with a unique combination of stories examining my personal journey as a caregiver and writer, set in contrast to profiles of remarkable individuals and families, The American Poet Who Went Home Again seemed to breathe itself to life. Adding even more depth and substance to that life were several writers with whom I’d connected on AuthorsDen and who allowed me to include writings by them that further defined my ongoing journey. All lent their voices to the creation of my “Savannah book” and astonished this author by making its pages sing with a literary harmony all its own.


By Aberjhani

THE STORY OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE WAY DOWN SOUTH

The Harlem Renaissance Way Down South had its official beginnings as a lecture called The Harlem Renaissance in Savannah delivered by author-poet Aberjhani on August 28, 2004, at the Carnegie Branch Library in Savannah, Georgia, to commemorate the re-opening of the library. The branch had been closed for some seven years following damage from a storm. A book signing featuring the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance and The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois was held in conjunction with the lecture.

The subject of The Harlem Renaissance Way Down South is the substantial contribution which African Americans from the South made to the famous cultural movement most often associated with New York City. The author Aberjhani first became aware of the profound link between the two while working as a co-author (with Sandra L. West) on the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance.

“Significantly enough,” said the author, “that link was also personified by the fact that my co-author was working on the encyclopedia in the North while I was actually in Savannah doing the same.” To his surprise, he discovered that much of his research kept leading him back to his hometown: Savannah. He maintains that his research “made it clear that African Americans in the South did not just sit around waiting to be lynched during the Harlem Renaissance––as some have implied––but, whether consciously or instinctively, were active participants in the Renaissance on a number of levels, not just as migrants to the North.”

Amazon.com went live with the title as part of its Amazon Shorts program May 19, 2007, making it available for only 49 cents as digital media that can be downloaded, read on the website, or received as an email. It is particularly ideal for tourists planning to visit Savannah or New York City as well as for students of the Harlem Renaissance or the South in general.

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