Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Title

The title alludes to the hoodoo notion of "midnight," the period between the time for good magic (11:30 P.M. to midnight) and the time for evil magic (midnight to 12:30 A.M.).[1]

Although Bonaventure Cemetery is the focus in the book, "the garden of good and evil" refers principally to the cemetery off Congress Street in Beaufort, South Carolina,[6] where Dr. Louis Buzzard, the husband of Minerva, the folk-magic practitioner who figures in the story, is buried. It is over his grave that Minerva performed the incantations to ensure a more successful result in the retrial for the case of Jim Williams. (The marriage between Minerva and Dr. Buzzard was the invention of John Berendt. Dr. Buzzard was based on Stephen Robinson, who died in 1947, aged 61 or 62.)[7]


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