The Book of Ten

I Got a Mind to Ramble

 i got a Mind to ramble n Alberta Hunter at The Cookery,  Winter, deep dark, the village streets deserted, so cold even the homeless have disappeared, and my friend and i are walking to the Cookery, university Place and eighth Street, both of us recently divorced and so much alike—literary, smart, neurotic, a little narcissistic— that her ex-husband keeps asking me out, but i don’t want to trade my old unhappy life for its identical twin. the air icy with our talk, those nights examining our marriages over and over, like darwin examining his earthworms, except the men are always the worms and we’re the survival of the fittest, first ones off the sinking ship of marriage. it’ll take years to admit our own worminess. oh, we’re shameless, wearing our heavy coats of sadness, our guilt-tight gloves like decorations. all we want is transformation— I got a mind to ramble, but I don’t know where to go— the tropics, bikinis and ban de Soleil, piña coladas at the swim-up bar, and long-lashed pool boys leering from the cabanas. i’m in love with someone else, someone who isn’t in love with me, and i don’t want to be. at fourteen Susan Sontag had a crush on thomas Mann while i had a crush on ray Weems, the quarterback, so what hope is there for me at thirty-four in love with the grownup equivalent of a football hero? at least we have the good grace to be sick of ourselves, a little bit anyway. inside the Cookery, the air’s heavy with smoke, steam heat, the crowd hushed  and expectant, and then the spotlight comes up and there she is, a tiny woman filling the room, bangle earrings almost as big as her head —poor Memphis black child, Chicago potato peeler, star, then nurse, then star again, the latest sensation at eighty-five. to sing the blues is not to have the blues, which are, after all, less about sadness than triumph and revenge, and she doesn’t, this high-yellow gal with the indian nose, though she knows we think she’s a cutie pie, Miss thing, and she’s playing us, jiving, the way she teases “i got a Mind to ramble,” slapping her hip like a tambourine, the dark, rich voice now a wink, now a growl, a voice someone called “a contralto that wears boots.” “Ladies,” she says, dispensing advice between songs, “if you tell a man you love him, you’re in a bad fix. he’s gonna ruin you. don’t let that happen to you, honey.” and then she segues into “down hearted blues,” a song she wrote in , fingers snapping, eyes rolling— Gee, but it’s hard to love someone, when that someone don’t love you. I’m so disgusted, heartbroken too. I’ve got the downhearted blues. . . . I’ve got the world in a jug and the stopper in my hand. I’ve got the world in a jug and the stopper in my hand. And if you want me, pretty papa, you’ve got to come under my command. and aren’t we transformed for a moment? for an evening we believe her, or believe we do, women who don’t need men, who don’t need love, the world and everything in it for once at our command.  What did we know? not much. Surely not how long it takes, the slow, blind ramble toward change, to arrive, if ever, at something provisional as wisdom. i wonder now if she saw, when she looked out into that dark night of white faces, how lost we were on the starless road, how alone and thirsty, no jug, no stopper anywhere in sight. and maybe she might even have pitied us a little, this old woman who’d spent one of her lifetimes mastering a kind of braille, emptying the bedpans of the dying, thumbing shut the dumb eyes of the dead. ...