Mississippi Transplant: Rachel Dangermond

"There are many reasons I could leave, but just like when Trump was elected and I wanted to move to Canada, a friend said, 'No, we stay, we fight, we make it right.'"

What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Today we hear from writer, mother, and owner of historic 100 Men Hall, Rachel Dangermond.

Featured contributor Rachel Dangermond | Photo by April Renae.

Where are you from?

I call New Orleans home, or rather I did for most of my life, but after Katrina and the decades plus years of trying to make my home there once again, I gave up and moved to the Gulf Coast. Sad to say, I haven’t looked back. For a very long time there was no place like home and then home became a much more fluid idea of rootedness. I’m rooted in a history of diaspora from my ancestors who left Toledo in 1492 during the Spanish Inquisition, to my grandparents who left Constantinople when it became Istanbul, to my immediate family who left Cuba with me in utero two months before my birth because Castro had marched victorious into Havana.

When did you move to Mississippi and why did you move here?

I moved to Bay Saint Louis Mississippi in July of 2018. I remember that day like it was yesterday because I was closing on my house in New Orleans and the 100 Men Hall that I was moving into in Bay Saint Louis all on the same day. My friend Darrin had driven the U-Haul truck and we parked it at the Hall, and we both spent the night at my friend Tommy’s beach house on Main Street. After the second closing, I came back to Tommy’s house and was alone and I just sat at his kitchen counter and cried. 

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Mississippi is also a myth—most friends were aghast that I would bring my African American son to Mississippi to live, and yet Bay Saint Louis has felt like home from jump.

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I bought the Hall because I was in a state of desperation financially and spiritually. The house I sold in New Orleans had been nicknamed the Spirit House because I bought it when we had to sell the house I was supposed to die in—the LaLa—this was in 2013 when I had lost my career job. For the next decade plus I was trying to grasp an ever-elusive financial security. So, after gunshots outside the Spirit House made my son and I scramble to the floor, and my Ford F150 went halfway under water with just a hard rain, I was done with the life I was white knuckling to hang onto and ready for the next chapter to begin. 

The Hall was to be a place for me to have writer’s workshops and do racial equity work, but I had no idea what was about to happen in this chapter and looking back from a space of nearly five years, if I had known what I was growing into I would have been too scared to even envision it.