12 Nov 2025 6 min read Womanism

i’ll take you there

Dancing Toward Wholeness with Mavis Staples and Toni Cade Bambara

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? … Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter.”
—Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

vinyl record on vinyl record — Photo by Jakob Rosen on Unsplash

My daddy is a Music Man. He’s got hundreds of vinyl records stacked in our credenza shelves. And in the bookshelves. And in storage. When I was little, he went digital, amassing a library of hundreds of thousands of songs. He burned tapes labeled in black Sharpie and then CDs with custom covers, and CD jackets. There was a printed binder with every song in his catalogue organized by genre, and he would sell custom mixtapes. He was our personal DJ, and Saturday morning was his stage. Before sunlight hit the living room carpet, the house was already alive with sound—Al Green, Gladys, Curtis, the Isleys. He’d start cleaning, then start dancing, and we all followed, like a small congregation learning how to pray with our bodies.

Somewhere in that swirl of dust and soul, I heard Mavis Staples. Daddy had this old record that skipped halfway through I’ll Take You There. You had to catch the needle just right or Mavis would stutter on the word place. He never minded. He’d lift the arm, blow off the dust, and drop it again. The groove was worth the patience.

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I know a place
Ain’t nobody cryin’
Ain’t nobody worried
No smilin’ faces
Ly’in to the races
Help me. Come on. Come on.
Somebody help me now.
(I’ll take you there)
Help me y’all
(I’ll take you there)
Ooh, mercy (I’ll take you there)

As a child, I didn’t know where “there” was, but Mavis made it sound reachable. A place you could dance your way into. I didn’t know why it seemed like she was begging me to go. When I got older and read Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, I realized it’s because not everybody is going to make it there.

Mavis and Minnie Ransom were in conversation across time. Getting “there” is the same as being well. And it might be lit “there,” but the journey is something else entirely.

Wholeness is no trifling matter.

In The Salt Eaters, Minnie Ransom speaks this line to Velma Henry, who lies half-alive after a suicide attempt. The room smells of herbs and sweat. Minnie, the town healer, moves around her, brushing Velma’s hair from her face, whispering names, repeating, coaxing, assisted by Old Wife, a spirit guide embodying the accumulated knowledge and presence of Black women across generations. Healing here is communal, messy, and urgent.

Velma is a community organizer in Claybourne, exhausted from trying to hold everything together. Her organization is overburdened, tackling the multi-headed beast of drugs, prisons, schools, rape, battered women, and abused children. Her husband’s infidelity sends her over the edge. She is a Black woman with no safe place, convinced there is no “there” that Riperton beckons us toward.

Wholeness in this scene is both metaphysical and political. To integrate mind, body, and spirit is dangerous labor. It asks you to face what has broken you and to let a community hold the weight without turning away. Minnie’s voice is tender and unflinching. She knows the pull of numbness and the ease of staying half-gone. She is not asking whether Velma deserves healing. She is asking if Velma is ready for the cost it will demand.

I know a place, y’all
(I’ll take you there)
Ain’t nobody cryin’
(I’ll take you there)
Ain’t nobody worried
(I’ll take you there)
No more smilin faces
ly’in to the races

Mavis says, “Let me take you there.” Bambara says, “Are you sure you want to be well?”

Riperton promises a journey. Bambara warns of the work. Both invite you forward. Both ask you to consider what you are willing to risk.

Each line is a pulse, a promise, a description of the “there” she calls us toward. Riperton never names the place, but it is specific. “There” is the tangible geography of wholeness. The refrain of “I’ll take you there” hovers beneath every line like Minnie Ransom’s voice over Velma. But the song does not arrive without response. Riperton, like Minnie, asks consent:

You gotta, gotta, gotta let me
let me take you, take you
take you over there

“No smilin’ faces / Lyin’ to the races” names the social, political, and communal stakes of wellness. Healing asks us to see deception, harm, inequity, and still move forward.

Velma is drowning in what we’d now call the intersectional weight of labor: political labor, care labor, racialized labor. Her suicide attempt is bigger than despair over an ain’t shit man. Velma is struggling with the unrelenting demands of being indispensable. The community depends on her capacity to organize, heal, and lead, and that dependence fractures her. Velma is trying to take her people “there”, but I am not sure she’s ever set foot on that soil herself.

Each repetition of “I’ll take you there” is a step on the journey. The rhythm keeps you steady, like shanties that kept oarsmen pulling in tandem, formation songs that moved troops forward, or the songs sung in cotton fields, sugar mills, and indigo factories. Riperton inherits that lineage of labor, survival, and communal care. I’ll Take You There is a marching song too. It holds the body, calls the spirit, and carries you forward.

Listening to Mavis, I hear vocation in her tone. That deep, rough warmth carries both wound and witness. She is not describing heaven; she is describing the ongoing work of heaven-making. That is vocation: labor that moves us toward wholeness while the community’s optimism, its endless calls to “keep pushing,” often conceal the cost extracted from Black women like Velma. The deception isn’t always malicious, sometimes it’s the lie of endurance itself: that you can keep giving and survive it.

Capitalism treats time like a whip. Music treats time like a circle. In capitalism, rhythm is a deadline. In vocation, rhythm is a drumline.

The groove in the song holds repetition and variation. It keeps movement steady while leaving room for improvisation. Healing requires structure with flexibility, faith with motion. You cannot grind your way to wellness. You have to groove there.

When Minnie Ransom follows her question with, “You’ll have to choose, sweetheart. Choose your own cure … There’s nothing that stands between you and perfect health, sweetheart,” Velma is stunned, unsure how to answer. That moment clarifies what the labor of wholeness demands: consent, agency, participation.

And just like Velma, we may come exhausted, battered, half-gone, unsure we can do it. Yet the groove makes it possible to move forward anyway—to dance into wellness, to participate in the labor of being whole while feeling the pulse of something communal, rhythmic, and tender carrying you along.

And I want to be well enough to get there. Not just to arrive, but to take somebody there with me.