Louisiana Dance Halls | Dance Halls Archive - Page 48 of 173 - Louisiana Dance Halls

Louisiana writer Ernest Gaines saw a fight there that partially inspired his novel “Of Love and Dust”: from an unpublished speech: “I was visiting some relatives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I think about 1958, and a friend of mine and I went to a bar out in the country…. My friend and I went to this bar, and in this bar I saw a fight betwren two young men. This bar is surrounded by sugar canefields, and most of the people who come here are from the country or from small towns not very far away. They come- to drink, they come to dance, they come to gamble, they come to fight, they come to steal your woman, they come to steal your man. Some of them come, knowing they’ll probably end up in jail that night; They come, knowing they might get cut or even shot at-but they come. They come to forget the hard work in the field all week; they come to forget the menial job they’ve work at-in town all week. They come to forget, to forget, and to forget. And they will accept whatever fate is waiting them. If nothing terrible happens, then the night has been somewhat of a success; if something bad happens, then these things are expected in a bar such as this one. So it was here that I saw the knife fight between the two young men. Fortunately for both, the fight was stopped before either was fatally wounded.” It also inspired the story “Three Men”: Ernest Gaines: “In “Mozart and Leadbelly,” Gaines writes, “The White Eagle was a rough place, and there were always fights, but I wanted to experience it all. One novel, Of Love and Dust, and a short story, ‘Three Men,’ came out of my experience at the White Eagle bar.” Carol Fran and husband/saxophonist Joe Francois performed R&B there in the mid-1950s: part of the Louisiana “crawfish circuit.” ...