by Alan Light
Simone felt that her father resented his wife’s autonomy and her prominence. “He had more blues than anything,” she said, “because my dad did not like my mother preaching. It was always a rivalry for him. Something that takes her away—he didn’t like it, he never liked it. He finally started preaching himself, became an ordained minister. I think now I look back, he did it to spite Momma.” Not that Simone took his preaching too seriously. “The fact is, I thought it was a joke,” she said.
At the time, though, Simone didn’t feel there was significant strain in her parents’ marriage. They may not have shown much affection for each other, but they didn’t fight, so as far as she was concerned they seemed happy enough.
As a girl, Eunice was proud of her mother’s role as a leader in Tryon. “I loved the way she looked, I loved the way she preached, I loved the way she cooked dinner, when she sang, when she walked,” she said. “I was interested in everything to do with my mother—everything.
“They called her ‘Mother Waymon’ in the community. They’d come to her with their problems and things, and my mom always has someone around who needs her for something. She loves that role. It doesn’t complete her life, but I’ve never heard her complain. Me, I complain all the time.”
But as much as she admired her mother, there was a distance between them, and it would bother her for the rest of her life. Eunice never felt the same kind of intimacy from her mother that she had with her father. “I didn’t get enough love from my mom, did not have no affection,” she said. “I needed to touch. I needed someone to play with me. And everything in the house was serious. There were never any jokes. There were never any games. My mom didn’t allow Chinese checkers, she didn’t allow cards. No dancing, no boogie-woogie playing. Everything was ‘no.’ ”
It was primarily Lucille Waymon, the oldest sister, who took care of the children. She stood in as a sort of surrogate mother while Mary Kate was out on the preaching circuit and provided the maternal affection they were missing.
“My mother never kissed me, she never held me,” Simone said in another interview. “I got that from Lucille. When Lucille got married I cried, ’cause he was taking her away from me. My mother wasn’t my mother—Lucille is my mother, she brought me up.”
There was also constant pressure on the Waymon children. Given their mother’s status and their father’s ambition, it was assumed that they would be high achievers, shining examples who were active in the community. “We were expected to be model kids, because we were preachers’ kids,” said Carrol. “We were supposedly the very epitome of good kids, living lives publicly, real bright. It was expected that we be the brightest in the school and we had that kind of reputation.”
Eunice’s behavior certainly lived up to this high bar, and she was desperate to please her mother. “I never got into any trouble,” she said. “If I got in trouble at all, I’d go downstairs in the basement and cry. All my mother would have to say to me is ‘You did something wrong.’ She never spanked me or anything, all she had to do was say that I did something wrong and I would cry myself to death. If my mother told me to jump in the river, I would have jumped in the river because she said so. I never disobeyed at all. Never.”
All the time she was navigating the complexities of her family life, though, Eunice Waymon had already found the thing that would offer her solace and give her direction. She had, in fact, already begun the path that would determine the rest of her life. From her very first days, the girl who would become Nina Simone had discovered music.
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When Eunice was a baby, she saw a page in a magazine. It was an advertisement, with some musical notes on a staff. She looked at the notes and started to sing.
At six months old, she knew what notes on paper actually were. When she was three, a piano arrived at the Waymon household; she recalled playing the spiritual “God Be with You Till We Meet Again,” in the key of F—though she didn’t quite know about keys yet. “I didn’t get interested in music,” she once said. “It was a gift from God and I know that.” She would later tell an interviewer, “Music is a gift and a burden I’ve had since I can remember who I was. I was born into music. The decision was how to make the best of it.”
Carrol said that as a baby Eunice would clap and sing along in church and that she would turn toward music whenever she heard it. And in the Waymon household, with the onetime musical performer John Divine at the head, there was no shortage of opportunities to listen.
“There was music every day,” Carrol said. “Music going to bed, music waking up. I remember first we had an organ, and after Nina was born and discovered she had a musical talent, we eventually got a piano, and the piano was the center of the family.”
The entire clan was so musical that they would jostle to play the piano each night: at the end of supper, whoever called it first got the coveted seat in front of the keys. “We all liked to play,” Simone said. “Everybody knew I was the best in the family, but I wasn’t that special.”
Even though the Waymons were allowed to listen only to religious music, Eunice was still exposed to other styles. “I was and still am influenced by everything I hear that is musical,” she would say, mentioning Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, the blues singer Ivory Joe Hunter, and celebrated contralto Marian Anderson as voices she recalled from her childhood.
Simone’s dad would let her play “worldly music” on the piano—boogie-woogie was her favorite—and he would serve as the lookout when her mother was due home. “He would come running down and say, ‘Baby, you can’t do that now, your momma is on her way home now.’ And then he would grin in my face and hers like nothing was wrong at all.”
Although she was secretly playing secular music at home, Eunice’s talents were almost immediately put to use in her mother’s church services. “My mom christened me in the church,” she said, “and she used to always say, ‘I’m giving all of you back to God, you’re in his hands now.’ She took [me] with her at her Bible meeting when my feet didn’t even hit the pedal. She was preaching in many cities and many towns, and she’d always take me to start the service.”
“On Sunday morning, she’d play for the morning service,” said Mary Kate. “And people would come just to hear her play. ’Cause when she struck the piano, people said something went all over the church.” The rise and fall of the service, the control a masterful preacher had over a congregation—church is a performance, of course, and the lessons learned on these Sunday mornings would forever inform Nina Simone’s approach to being onstage.
She later described the sheer intensity of the church rites. “They were some of the most exciting times that I’ve ever had. In many ways, what the kids are doing now when they dance for hours, listening to rock and roll music until their minds are blown and they’re in a trancelike state, this is what revival meetings were like. The music was so intense, the rhythms were so intense, that you just sort of went out of yourself. I would start to play a spiritual at precisely the moment in my mother’s preaching when it was needed, and this would spark everybody in the room. And then the rhythms would get more intense, and it’s just like anything that starts and gets more exciting, and everybody gets involved in it.”
As she got older, Eunice’s schedule of services became increasingly grueling. She went to church in the morning and played for Sunday school, then at eleven o’clock for the choir, and then for two sessions of programs in the afternoon. There was prayer meeting every Wednesday night, choir practice on Fridays. But after a while, though she loved music in her bones, she began to grow bored with all of this church work.
Nor was she entirely at ease with the zeal of the revival environment. The visceral pleasures of the music were a reflection of an all-encompassing faith she hadn’t fully embraced. “My early joys were mixed with fear,” Simone said later. “The church where I spent most of my time spilled over with music and revival. Joy danced around the walls as lively as children, and music was the air we breathed and
the water we drank. To watch the people in church meet and greet their God was like watching a reunion between old friends.
“But at the same time, I felt left out. Included in the general happiness, but left out from the deeper secrets. I was afraid when my mother spoke in tongues. Or when she became silent. Especially when she became silent and went into her private place. I feared that the very thing that provided me with joy could also bring about my alienation.”
Playing constantly in church may have been dull at times, intimidating at others, but the rigorous discipline she developed there laid the foundation that informed her playing for the rest of her life. “Whatever she did, I would trace it back to her house, that black Baptist church,” comedian and activist Dick Gregory would say. “She was overqualified for the blues—she had a good sense of the whole piece, she wasn’t somebody just there yelling a song. She had something to go on, and you trace that back to the mother, and to church involvement, and the aspirations she had for her.”
The music of her mother’s church may not have been her ideal outlet, but it was evident that Eunice Waymon had exceptional ability and that she had a structure in which she could develop it. Soon she would find music that would touch her own soul the way the Gospel reached her mother, and she would be ready to give all that it required.
CHAPTER 2
“There was a white woman who had money, she heard about me. There was another white woman who was a music teacher. The two of them got together and did a job for me.” Her even teeth show in a half-grin. “And on me.”
—IN AN INTERVIEW WITH MAYA ANGELOU, 1970
If church music was constricting Eunice, it did also provide opportunities she had never dreamed of. When she was six years old, in 1939, the community choir performed at the Tryon Theater, with Eunice accompanying the group and playing some solos. She later described it as the day that saved her life.
Two women in the audience took notice of her. One, Mrs. Miller, employed Eunice’s mother as a housecleaner, while the other, Muriel Mazzanovich, was a local piano teacher. When they heard her play, it was immediately clear to both that this young girl had a gift and should be taking formal lessons. They approached Mary Kate after the concert and convinced her that her daughter should have formal weekly instruction to nurture her talent.
Fifty years later, Nina Simone still remembered showing up for her first lesson with “Miss Mazzy,” a British woman who had moved to Tryon with her husband, a Russian painter. The house was set back from the road, and the studio was made out of local cement, with a fireplace and a high ceiling. If it sounds like an intimidating space, it made a strong impression on Eunice when she first arrived.
“It was on a Saturday afternoon at three o’clock,” she said. “I’ll never forget it, scared me half to death. I remember how she looked, how she smelled, it all registered at one time. She frightened me. It was a huge studio, at least twenty to twenty-five feet high, and her husband was painting when I got there.”
By this time, Mrs. Mazzanovich was already a middle-aged woman, and although she was tiny she had a formidable presence. “She was so elegant,” Simone said. “She was from England, and you know how the English are. She wasn’t an old white woman. She was petite. She looked like a bird, she ate like a bird, she talked very fast like that—‘Eunice, you must do it this way. Bach would like it this way. Now you do it. You try again. All right?’ ”
Miss Mazzy always wore her silver hair in a bun. Eunice thought she was very pretty and remembered that she always rewarded her with candy at the end of a lesson.
“I thought all white people was like that,” she said. “That’s one of the shocks I got when I found out about prejudice. I just thought they were hard to get to know and somewhat standoffish, but all elegant. I had no way of knowing they weren’t.” Maintaining her own sense of elegance, and trying to create a truly black version of sophistication and pride, would be crucial to Simone’s identity—and it was initially inspired by this childhood mentor.
Simone’s relationship with Muriel Mazzanovich would become one of the most purely warm, positive relationships in her life. “Mrs. Mazzanovich used to hold out her arms to me every time I came,” she said, “and hug me, and kiss me, and say, ‘You’re home.’ She always said that I was her child—that my mother birthed me, but that I was actually spiritually her child. Because she loved me, and she took more care of me than my mother.”
Though her teacher’s affection was welcome, even necessary, it wasn’t a perfect relationship. Eunice felt ashamed when Miss Mazzy would call her pupil her “little colored child.” And Mrs. Mazzanovich had a temper, a quick fuse that Simone felt she inherited.
Her teacher introduced Eunice to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer who would be her greatest influence. Bach’s work not only became her ideal of how she wanted to play but also served as a model for the ways she would structure her own music later in her career.
“Bach is technically perfect,” she said. “He’s a mathematician, and all the notes make sense mathematically. They add up to something, and they always add up to climaxes, like waves of the ocean gathering momentum as they get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then, after a while, after so many waves have gathered, you will see a tornado or you will see the ocean come up and destroy land.
“When you play Bach, every note is executed flawlessly. It has to be. And every note is connected to the next note. And when you get thirty-two or sixty-four notes, they all make sense with your left hand, and then you have a second voice with your right hand, you’ve got two voices going on. And when that happens, my actual voice came in as a third voice. It wasn’t as strong as my right and left hand, but it added enough weight to climax.
“Mozart was close to Bach,” she continued, “but he wasn’t half as deep. Beethoven was a very forceful composer who composed things in waves and in storms. But he didn’t have what Bach had. Bach did it in a technical way, Beethoven did it in an emotional way.”
The precision of Eunice’s training would later be obvious to the musicians who played with her as Nina Simone. “The band suffered because of Mrs. Mazzanovich,” said Al Schackman, the guitarist who would become Simone’s most lasting collaborator, “because when Nina made a mistake studying with Mazzanovich, she had to repeat the phrase ten times. So we would go to practice and if anyone made a mistake we would have to play the piece ten times.”
Eunice walked three miles every Saturday to take her hour-long lessons. Mrs. Mazzanovich also instructed her in posture, proper placement of the piano stool, how to bow; she taught her how to be a performer and an artist. At the end of the session, they would play duets together.
Her life was highly regimented. She was waking up at three o’clock in the morning, studying and doing her chores before she went to school, then practicing piano for hours. Studying Bach, singing gospel in church, playing blues for her father, being both a preacher’s daughter and a prodigy supported by the community, young Eunice Waymon had to perform a balancing act that involved managing complicated ideas about race, various cultures, and shifting priorities.
“Without willingness and probably consciousness, I traversed two worlds, two cities, two customs, two states of mind, each week,” she said. “The mannerisms of my piano teacher and her values had to influence me. I was a baby and bombarded by a weight heavier than most children bear, and more than I could analyze at the time.”
When Eunice first completed her Saturday lessons at Mrs. Mazzy’s, she would go to Mrs. Miller’s and play with the Millers’ son David while she waited for her mother to finish the housework. As the children grew older, though, she was no longer allowed to hang out with her friend, a sudden slap in the face that she said was her “first introduction to being black.”
After that shock, she adopted another postlesson ritual and stopped every week at Owen’s Drug Store for a grilled cheese sandwich and an orange soda. In retrospect, that tradition was also tainted by racism and segregation
, as she wasn’t permitted to sit at the store’s counter for her snack. “I ate it outside, standing,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t go in because I was black. But it was my reward for a good lesson, and then I walked home.”
Following four years of lessons, Mrs. Mazzanovich organized the Eunice Waymon Fund to raise money for the young pianist to continue her training after she left for high school. Mrs. Mazzy put an ad in the Time Bulletin newspaper and took up collection at church. As a thank-you for backers, she also put together ten-year-old Eunice’s debut recital, on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1943 at the Tryon Library.
The whole town was invited, and about two hundred people attended. “My mother had bought me a white dress for that day,” she recalled. “It had short little cap sleeves and a fitted waist.” Eunice was old enough to be nervous and self-conscious: “I was scared. I was trembling in my boots.”
Even before she started playing for her first audience, though, something profound happened that forever changed how Eunice Waymon understood the world. Her parents, who were seated in the front row, were asked to move to the back of the room to make space for other, white audience members.
“They were fixing the seats so that people could watch her fingers,” her mother said. “And that meant I would have to sit over there and not watch my daughter’s hands. And when she went over there and saw it, she came back and says, ‘I will not be playing. My mother is a black woman. And if she can’t sit where she can watch my hands, then I won’t be playing.’ She said, ‘Daddy, you can hit me, you can beat me, you can kick me, you can do anything you want to me, I will not.’ ”
Nervous as she was, Eunice Waymon took her stand. She couldn’t understand why her parents were being displaced, but she knew that it wasn’t right. And so she waited to start her performance until she felt that the situation had been corrected—a pattern that would become very familiar during her career onstage.