How I came to live in a blues hall

I was in Magnolia Antiques the other day hanging posters for an upcoming Blues Brunch featuring Bobby Rush, the King of the Chitlin’ Circuit, and I spotted a turquoise hamsa pendant on a beaded chain. Ten dollars – that is what it cost. I was shocked. Well it was $12, but she took $2 off for me. While at a celebration of life, someone commented on my hamsa, and I told her about my good fortune. She said, it was meant for you! I said no, actually, it had been mine and was being returned to me. This seemed like a more logical story.

The day I entered the 100 Men Hall, it felt like I was coming home. I was greeted by Jesse at the front door, who was inside the cavernous Hall painting tarot cards. There was nothing on the walls, nothing anywhere except two large tables that he had made that were arranged in an L-shape as a desk, and there were four cards lying face up. I studied them right before his wife at the time walked out to greet me.

I have read tarot cards all my life. The cards Jesse was painting were the Sun, Wheel of Fortune, Temperance, and The World. I made a mental note as I was whisked away to tour the apartment in back. My mind was already made up that I would be doing this, buying this blues hall, living in it, moving away from New Orleans.

Sun – The card portends good fortune, happiness, joy and harmony. It represents the universe coming together and agreeing with your path and aiding forward movement into something greater.

Wheel of Fortune – A common aspect to most interpretations of this card within a reading is to introduce an element of change such as the poor becoming rich.

Temperance – You should learn to bring about balance, patience and moderation in your life. You should take the middle road, avoiding extremes and maintain a sense of calm.

The World – The World represents an ending to a cycle of life, a pause in life before the next big cycle beginning with the fool. It is an indicator of a major and inexorable change, of tectonic breadth.

When I moved into the back of the Hall in July of 2018, a tectonic breadth began unfurling that seemed guided by divine hands. I say this because I did not have an imagination of this prior to moving in. When I was asked years later by Faire Magazine to describe this segment of my story, I wrote:

FAIRE

Rachel Dangermond was conceived in revolutionary Cuba and born in Miami after her family fled Castro’s victorious march into Havana in 1959. She grew up mainly in Central America, Puerto Rico, and New Orleans but has lived many places in between. Her writing career as a failed novelist, sometimes avid blogger and successful investigative journalist has stalled somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, where she now calls coastal Mississippi home and lives with her 12-year-old son, Tin, in the back of a historical Black dance hall whose purpose and construction was itself an act of revolution. 

Follow her on Instagram and Facebook as Rachel Dangermond, 100 Men Hall, and The Writing Room at the 100 Men Hall.

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My idea for the next chapter of my life was to move into an old dance Hall and write in community with other writers, but instead I became an impresario. It was in my car, windows down, radio playing a familiar song, that a moment of glee caught me by surprise, and I laughed and called myself an impresario for the first time. 

When first I walked through the 100 Men Hall’s doors, I was looking for a place to live and host writer’s workshops away from New Orleans, where neighborhoods were flooding regularly after the 2005 Federal Flood (aka Hurricane Katrina). I needed a new career path, and a friend had sent a link to a Blues Hall for sale in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, so I went for a look and ended up buying the Hall. I imagined fellow writers driving the hour from New Orleans for a respite by the breezy Gulf to enjoy weekend-long writing retreats. 

Nothing I had done in the past prepared me to be an impresario, yet everything had. The day I went for the property inspection, a circle of feathers lay on the ground so symmetrical they appeared to have been arranged. “An auspicious sign,” my Yoruba priestess friend told me, who suggested I pour libations in the center of it to thank the ancestors. Two days after moving in, a woman with long dreadlocks and deep roots with the Hall rode up on a rusty bicycle and hugged me by the scraggly oak tree thick with resurrection fern. A train went by that I would later learn rolls by on the regular yet with no discernable schedule and lays on its horn as long as possible as it crosses the intersection. In the grocery aisle on day six of owning the 100 Men Hall, a man lining cans on the shelf said to me, “You the lady bought the Hall. I saw Sam Cooke there when I was little. I snuck in behind my older brother’s legs.” His story now blurs with countless stories of children sneaking into the building to hear musical legends. 

A new plan was being born, not only would this be a great place to raise Tin, it also had rich ties to African American history. I envisioned one day my son would operate the Hall and half-jokingly referred to him as the 101^st man. Follow your spirit not your plans, a friend told me long ago, and here I was whisked into a narrative that is being written for me. We live in a dance Hall, an African American landmark, a rare building on the Mississippi Blues Trail, a place where memory clings like voices in the walls from dark days long ago. At that time, segregation forced Black musicians into a narrow, yet robust performance corridor called the “chitlin circuit,” a historic network of performance spaces that eventually put the Hall on the Mississippi Blues Trail map.

The Hall was built by and for the African American community during the long days of segregation and a Southern pandemic called Jim Crow. Inside, the building tells a more nuanced story than the one you will hear about Mississippi; it’s a story of self-reliance and resilience. A group of civic-minded men gathered together to take care of burials and medical bills in their African American community by establishing first a nonprofit then building a place to gather. The Hall soon became a Black energy center for a community shut out of mainstream white establishments and within its walls joy and friendships were celebrated. 

During the 1940’s through the 60’s, many of the region’s greatest blues, R&B and soul music artists performed at 100 Men Hall. This Hall was a regular stop for artists working on the famed “chitlin’ circuit” – James Brown, Ray Charles, Etta James, Sam Cooke. It was in the heyday of New Orleans rhythm and blues music that performers as legendary as Big Joe Turner, Etta James and Guitar Slim to James Booker, Professor Longhair and Deacon John, a who’s who of musical stars, played the Hall. 

My story, though, is always getting ahead of me. The vision of writer’s retreats, writing in a historical building, has given way to resurrecting the nonprofit originally started in 1894 by those men. I would continue the historical (almost “sacred”) tradition of presenting live music on its stage and gathering the community. An impresario was born. The community would rise up to meet me, bringing an energy vibrant enough to carry me through a barrage of hurricanes, tornadoes, pandemic shutdowns and small-town politics. 

To know the feeling of rejoicing in sorrow is nothing strange to me.

Over the front doors of the Hall now hangs this quote by James Carroll Booker III, the brilliant and outrageously talented pianist who the Hall pays homage to in our annual fundraiser, Booker Fest, every Labor Day weekend. A writer’s material derives from experience and the story of the Hall and my/our story are wending towards a future moment when I will sit back to write and recollect how my son and I came to live in a historical Black dance hall in a small coastal town in the deep South. For now, the show begs to go on.  

* END *

This was one of the photos used in the article. The roof was blown off by a tornado during Hurricane Zeta in 2020 – as if the pandemic shut down wasn’t enough – and the silver lining was having the Hall painted.

Photo by Ann Madden – Lonnie Bradley, Jr., Sandra Price, Whitney Bradley, me, Tin, Ge-Anna and Twin May

Yesterday, a 91-year-old Blues legend, Bobby Rush, played the 100 Men Hall for a blues brunch. This man is fascinating!! and I am still marveling at my good fortune to be here at this very moment in life, doing this thing that I never imagined. We brought Bobby into Studio DBA – a podcast and recording studio that we are fashioning (well, truth to tell, Jesse is doing all the fashioning) and recorded his story. Tell me I am not living inside a miracle.