The afternoon of your life
“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”
Carl Gustav Jung
I am in several weekly groups – parent coaching, virtual parent meetings with other parents like me, ACA meetings, and it seems that none of us were prepared for this phase of our life – the afternoon.
I came across the Jungian idea in a meditation and it resonated. No longer concerned with the accumulation of life, the accretion of things, the pursuit of money, success, accolades, I turned inward to what drives me, what is me, but I did so under duress.
I got to the afternoon on my knees.
At 59 years old, I was at a cross roads in my work and life, I boldly stepped into the job market with a resume and interviews, something I hadn’t done in decades, and I was passed over for candidates with less experience but more morning in their lives. When I learned about the pass from the two jobs, I drove over to City Park and walked into the least populated area and got down on my knees in the still wet grass and said aloud, “What do you want from me?”
It was then that I stepped into the next reality of my life – the 100 Men Hall – where my afternoon has become full of meaning, purpose, community and all of the areas I was seeking but honestly, had no idea it was what I wanted. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this need or desire. It was only after Faire Magazine asked me a question for an article on artists and makers about myself that I wrote:
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 101st 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.
