Little Pink-ish Houses For You and Me

We’ve got some guys working on the roof. When we bought our house here in Savannah, the inspection failed to turn up a couple places in our attic that take on water. Now that I finally have a job, we’re able to deal with the situation. The metal roof in question may be the home’s original one. The house was built in 1867, and it’s possible – even likely – that it has never been replaced. Over the decades, various owners have patched it here and there, but it’s never gotten a good going-over, which is what we’re doing now. It’s expensive AF, but the repairs need to be done so we’re doing them.

Yes, the roof is a metaphor.

Homes are expensive. They eat up a lot of discretionary income. We pay the price because we understand that homes, like nations, are worthwhile investments. We take care of them because they also take care of us. Homes are where we raise our families. They’re where we eat, sleep, argue. They’re where we live.

Letting the little things get away from us in the short-term inevitably create long-term problems. Personally, I’m the one in our household far more inclined to ignore the little stuff while my wife, Martha, is the one who anticipates issues and heads them off before they get out of hand. It’s not that I’m unaware that things need to be fixed, just that my brain is focused too much on the cost of things instead of their value. Having a bathroom whose ceiling isn’t in danger of collapse from water damage is valuable, but the value is sometimes hard to appreciate until the ceiling actually falls onto your head.

This house has an interesting history; the story goes that its original builder was a Confederate captain in the Civil War who was captured by the Union forces and sent to a POW camp in New York. The conditions were dark and miserable. At the war’s end, Captain Hopkins returned to his native Savannah and its cotton trade. Hopkins co-owned a warehouse on River St, where he and his partner conducted business an import/export cotton business. When he built the house, his stated intention was to make each room fully sunlit so that he never had to endure another dark room again. As a result, the house has a unique cross shape. Large windows in every single room keep the room flooded with sun.

Pink-ish.

Like the nation itself, our home is wrapped up in the racial history of the country. Though slavery had been outlawed by the time the house was built, the original census lists a few “servants” who worked here, servants who would have been enchained only a couple years earlier. They were the ones who likely did the home’s repair work, keeping the home in proper shape for the entertaining expected from a semi-prominent businessman.

The Southern cotton business, of course, was built on the bodies of slaves, and whatever good fortune befell Captain Hopkins can be laid at the feet of the Black bodies that provided the labor, which made such a success possible.

Hopkins only lived in the home for a few years before dying from what was then known as “consumption,” and which we now call tuberculosis. I have no evidence for this, but I suspect he picked up the disease during his stay in New York. After his death, his widow divided the plot of land on which the home sat and erected a duplex on the newly created lot next door. Half of the home was used by her daughter’s family and half was rented out to tenants. A hundred something years after its construction, I was introduced to my next-door neighbor when he complained that the workers then painting the exterior of my home were speaking Spanish too loudly and threatened to call the cops on them. “They’ll believe me because I’m white,” he said. He was an old man, and a drunk, who died from cancer about a year ago; but he also could be a lovely and a generous guy if he liked you. Ain’t that America?

The value of a home can be measured in many ways. What’s the neighborhood like? The folks on the block? Is there crime? How’re the schools? Is this a place we could see ourselves living? Why are the people selling the house to begin with? Is it haunted. They say my city of Savannah is the most haunted town in America. I don’t believe in ghosts that show up and say “boo,” but I am convinced that history does indeed haunt us.

They say it’ll take a couple weeks to get the roof shored up. When that’s done, there’ll be something else. And something else after that. Nothing this old survives without constant care. So we might not always like it, but we understood the assignment when we bought the place. Take care of the things you love. Take care of people you love. Be good to your neighbors. Leave this place better than when you found it.