Citizens Cemetery lies on Hamar Street, right next to Beaufort National Cemetery. This modest burial ground is the “garden” referred to in the title of John Berendt’s 1994 novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. In Clint Eastwood’s movie version, Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, stood in for what Kevin Spacey’s character, Jim Williams, calls “the colored cemetery down the road.”
The novel’s Minerva, the root doctor portrayed by Irma P. Hall in the film, was based on Valerie Boles. Her common-law partner, Percy Washington (1890–1973), is interred here in Citizens Cemetery. Washington himself was a root doctor, known locally as Dr. Eagle and renamed Dr. Buzzard in the book and movie. Valerie Boles and Percy Washington lived at 1408 Congress Street in Beaufort, two blocks east of this cemetery. After Washington’s death in 1973, his widow married Edward Boles.
Stand quietly for a moment and consider those connections between place, story, and people. Two blocks east, at 1408 Congress Street, is where Valerie Boles and Percy Washington once lived.