by Alan Light
In her private writings, Nina revealed this agony regarding her appearance. In one undated note, she wrote: “I can’t be white and I’m the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise—if I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time wide open for them to jeer and approve of or disapprove of.” She went on to describe herself as “someone who has been brainwashed to think everything they do is wrong…someone who’s been robbed of their self respect their self esteem some one’s who’s been convinced they have no right to be happy. But then why haven’t I killed myself?”
The change in her outward appearance, then, was obviously about more than just style—to use a phrase becoming popular around this time, she was realizing that the personal is political. The new hair coincided with her increasing interest in black pride and a growing engagement in activism. In a diary entry written in February 1966 in South Bend, Indiana, there’s a short but critical sentence scrawled at the end: “I decided today that I wanted to be more Active in civil rights.”
Since “Mississippi Goddam,” she had been closely associated with the movement, performing at benefits and speaking out onstage. She later said, though, that she had initially been propelled into activism by raw emotion but had been slower to engage with its arguments and ideas. “The civil rights movement was something that I got into before I became fiercely political,” she said. “I was just doing it because—well, I loved it. I approved of what they were doing, but I didn’t talk about it a lot. I was just composing songs to spur them on.”
To Nina, “politics” was rooted more in her work and her example than in organizing and legislating; what resonated was an idea, the model of independence and pride she practiced—as she told Vernon Jordan, “I am civil rights!”— rather than strategic action. “I didn’t educate myself very well,” she said. “I was so busy working that there wasn’t time to reflect on what I was doing.”
Later, she would even claim that she was moving at such great speed that she had no real recollection of such historic events as the trip to Selma. “My mind during this time was on automatic,” she said. “I don’t remember most of this job because all I did was work, work, work. At times people’s faces are not even clear in my mind. I’m sure that stacked somewhere in the back of me when I’m not so tired is all this memory. I don’t remember doing all this.”
In some ways, it was as if she was providing a soundtrack for a community that she wasn’t entirely able to connect with. “One of the things she said to me was that she really felt bad that she was not more active in marching and protesting and things like that,” said Andrew Young. “And I thought how very strange and odd for her to say that. One of my friends who was there commented to me later, ‘God, she was so present—she was everywhere, in all our projects, in all our work.’ What she was doing, going around the country spreading the word of the movement—nothing was as cogent of the frailty and the humiliation and the sadness and the joy of what we did than her music.
“More than any other artist, I think that her music depicted and reflected the time. It just seemed to be so very current, so very fluid, and expressed so completely the aspirations, the anxiety, the fear, the love, the rejection, the hurt, the horror, the anger of what we were feeling at the time. Her music always seemed to be so on top of our situation.”
As Simone’s involvement increased—in the language of the time, as she became more “militant”—some of the greatest leaders and spokespeople of the movement became first her fans and then her friends. She was getting more engaged with the thinkers who were leading the historic action.
“Langston Hughes was befriending me, and he invited me to his house to have coon, like a possum, to eat,” she proudly recalled. “I started to want to become part of these people. I met Stokely Carmichael at church in Philadelphia. He told the whole audience that he knew who I was, and that I was their cultural heroine and I was their singer of the black movement and how proud he was of me.”
Even Andy, who was skeptical of the intellectual predilections of new friends like Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin, saw how eager Nina was to contribute to the conversation. “She thought herself the equal of anyone for intellectual discussions,” he said. “She was as bright as you can get, I was amazed listening to her sometimes.
“This was like going to church. She loved being with these people; being around them was the air under her wings. It elevated her, it energized her. She got uplifted in these kinds of surroundings.”
The new company she kept and the ideas they exchanged would shape not just her work but her understanding of the power that music could have in the world. “During the ’60s, my people started having riots and saying, ‘We want this and we want that.’ I said, ‘Well, okay, now I can change my direction from love songs and things that are not related to what’s happening, to something that is happening for my people. I can use my music as an instrument, a voice to be heard all over the world for what my people need and what we really are about.’ ” Contributing to the cause was no longer just an option; it had become an obligation, and she was becoming increasingly fearless, even reckless, onstage. “I think it’s my duty to express in music what they’re feeling, and I’m privileged I can do that.”
Stroud, already wary of Nina’s distraction from her career goals, claimed that her sense of activism could be irrational, even destructive. He said that she would talk about poisoning the local reservoir or grabbing one of his guns and shooting people. “She went absolutely crazy,” he said. “It got really heavy and bad. She wanted to just go in and devastate the community, one way or the other.”
Nina’s songs, statements, and onstage demeanor were starting to affect bookings. The movement had already pivoted from King-style nonviolence toward a more aggressive push for Black Power, complicating its relationship to the white liberals who made up much of Simone’s audience, and her fierce words and unpredictable behavior made promoters increasingly nervous. “The protest stuff…created a negative atmosphere, people were turned off,” said Stroud, who as her manager was acutely aware of the impact of her priorities on the bottom line of her touring.
“She became embittered by what was going on in this country,” said promoter Ron Delsener, who had booked Nina at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, in 1991, looking back at a time when urban violence and radical politics were dividing the audiences of many black artists. “It came out in her performance and she started to turn off the white audiences who were now afraid to go to her shows…afraid of hearing some message they were sick and tired of hearing.”
The public and industry response to her amplified political commitment was instilling in Nina a bunker mentality. The more her ideas were challenged, the angrier she became and the more she railed against the status quo. Simone was also feeling a greater sense of mission in her work, and with that came, even at this early stage in her career, the conviction that she was underappreciated. “I have no faith that the greatest talent in this country will get any recognition while they’re alive,” she said in a 1966 interview. “Perhaps Bob Dylan, but me, and Billie before me, and Coltrane—in the jazz circles, yes, but not the general public. I don’t believe that the talent that would be considered artistic in this country is going to get any recognition, and that includes me.”
—
Simone’s greatest contribution in 1966 (and among her most important works ever) wasn’t focused on integration. It was a song that only her black audience could truly understand, a penetrating and scathing examination of America’s complicated attitudes toward skin tone. The song, called “Four Women,” had to do more with her decision to grow out her natural hair than with her participation in protests.
In 1984, she gave a lengthy description of the song to Mary Anne Evans, one of the several collaborators who attempted to write a memoir with Simone.
“Four Women” is four distinctive descriptions of f
our women. And it capsules completely the problem of the blacks in America among the women.
The first woman is called Aunt Sarah. She is 104, she’s dark-skinned, woolly hair like me, her back is down to here from carrying all them damn shit all her life. And she lives in Harlem, she talks with a southern dialect, and she’s old and feeble now,she can barely make it. She knows who she is, and we have seen her all over America. All black people have seen her.
The first words are “My skin is black, my arms are long, my hair is woolly, my back is strong. Strong enough to take the pain that’s been inflicted again and again, what do they call me? My name is Aunt Sarah”—and “Aunt” is important, it comes from “Auntie,” like the whites used to call the mammies to suckle their babies. Everybody black heard it and they knew what I didn’t say and what I did say. Whites heard it too, but the blacks really got mad behind it.
Second woman, “My skin is yellow, and my hair is long. Between two worlds I do belong, my father was rich and white, he raped my mother late one night. What do they call me? My name is Saffronia.” I don’t know where I got that name, it’s just a common name down South. That gets all them yellow bitches who think that they’re better because they have long hair and their skin is yellow. What I’m doing is getting rid of the load ’cause I have been just burdened down with all these problems. It’s bad enough to be born black in America, but to be burdened down with the problems within it is too much.
The third woman, “My skin is tan, and my hair is all right, it’s fine”—so she imply she don’t give a damn, it’s fine. “My hips invite you, daddy, and my mouth is like wine. Whose little girl am I? Well, yours, if you got enough money to buy. What do they call me? My name is of course Sweet Thang.”
The last woman—and it’s all done with music and there is a big rumble, and a very big pause and very fierce. And she reminds me of the Israelis and Stokely Carmichael. “My skin is brown, my manner is tough, I’ll kill the first mother I see because my life has been too rough. I’m awfully bitter these days because my parents were slaves, what do they call me?” And then, you expect her to say “King Kong,” then she goes “My name is”—and she says it fiercely—“Peaches.”
All my songs, the important ones, have razor cuts, I call them, at the end. I cut you, I make you think and it’s immediate. So the whole thing was that she’s gone to Africa, she’s got her ass together. Her name is Thandewye, look that’s my name, so they expected that. “My name is Peaches,” and you say, “My God, she probably was the sweetest of all.” She turned. I sing it angrily and that also is a cut because it just doesn’t make no sense.
That’s it. When any black woman hears that song, she either starts crying or she wants to go out and kill somebody. ’Cause all I did was I just took them and said, all right, there is the problem. Every black in the world who heard that fucking song knew what it meant. It’s personal to thirty-two million blacks out there.
Simone said that images of the four women came to her on an airplane, and that she wrote the song but kept it to herself for a full year before performing it. She waited even longer to record it and featured it as a track on the 1966 album Wild Is the Wind.
According to Lisa Simone, Andy told her that he assisted in the composition of this landmark song. “Dad claims, and I’m inclined to believe this, that he helped her write that song,” she said. “Sweet Thing is a prostitute, so she was asking him questions about different females. I’m sure she came up with the music all by herself, but in terms of the characters and the breakdown of those different characters, Dad and her did it together, according to him.”
Al Schackman knew exactly which woman represented Simone herself. “Nina was Peaches,” he said. “ ‘You don’t mess with me,’ ‘I’ll kill every motherfucker I see,’ and that’s the last woman that you hear. Peaches is the part of the persona that Nina became. You did not want to mess with her—she pulled out a knife in a second, she didn’t take any of the shit that the other three did or play the white folks’ games that the others did.”
Percussionist Leopoldo Fleming, who played with Simone for many years, noted that part of the power of “Four Women” was the dramatic, stately music moving with the different characters, reflecting the shifting moods. “I could feel the emotions of the four women,” he said. “You use different dynamics in the number. It doesn’t stay on one level. There is the harshness of some, and then there is the tenderness of the other. It’s like drama, and you have to use different colors in it.”
To Attallah Shabazz, the song was a tough but empathetic critique for a population rarely given the chance to engage in accurate self-reflection. “ ‘Four Women’ was an opportunity for black women to do an internal look at how we coexist,” she said. “She had the ability to tell a story, herself, and be all women while writing it—she didn’t change, she was the same person, but became all of them. And we all know one or two of those women, and so you feel represented. It’s introducing you to yourselves.”
But that hard-hitting look in the mirror wasn’t welcomed by everyone. Though Wild Is the Wind hit number 12 on the black charts, many black radio stations would not play “Four Women.” Simone said, “I thought it was stupid for black radio stations to ban the song. I should think they would have been the ones who would have supported it.”
The song was also sometimes met with confusion or dismissed by the audience when she performed it live. In a diary entry from February 20, 1966, she wrote that at an appearance in front of a black and Puerto Rican crowd at New York’s Hilton Hotel she was “very hurt when they giggled” at her performance of “Four Women.”
“Black people thought it was insulting,” said Roger Nupie. “Her message was ‘I just depict the four different types, and you have to think about it.’ And that was probably too difficult for the audience. Now it’s different—now it’s regarded as one of the most important songs in the civil rights movement.”
Despite the fact that this brave, radical song went over many people’s heads, Nina was still on the rise. That same year, she was presented with the Jazz at Home Club’s annual Jazz Culture Award. Accepting the prize in Philadelphia, she said, “I have always admired the late Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday and I know they never in their lifetimes were so honored as I am tonight.”
It’s interesting that Simone herself brought up Holiday in such a public forum, the singer to whom she was most often compared and about whom she expressed wildly varying opinions at different times. That same year, she praised Holiday again, saying the jazz legend was “the kind of woman who had so much integrity as an artist, and even at the expense of dying as she did and with dope and all, she just never let go of her integrity and what she had to say. We don’t find them like that anymore, this day and age everybody is going for the dollar. And if it means giving up what they have felt was good music for years, they do it. But Billie didn’t, so I look to her for inspiration.”
Later, however, she claimed that she was insulted by the association. “I think they do it because I recorded ‘Porgy,’ and because I’m black and because I’m southern. And they needed somebody to fill Billie Holiday’s shoes when she died….If they’re going to compare me to somebody, they should compare me to Maria Callas. She was a diva, I’m a diva. I’m not a blues singer.”
Simone’s feelings about Holiday were so conflicted, in fact, that she would even praise her and condemn her within the same conversation. In 1989, she told Stephen Cleary, “I was never influenced by Billie Holiday—I hated her songs. I didn’t admire Billie Holiday.” Within that very interview session, she went on, “As for Billie Holiday, every time I listen to her, I hear more in her music than I heard before. I can’t pay her a greater tribute than that.”
Holiday was only the most obvious scapegoat for Simone’s mixed feelings about jazz in general. To her, being identified as a jazz singer was a reductive insult, ignoring her classical foundation and categorizing her only on the basis of her race. Still, Nin
a offered her greatest admiration to the giants of the form—what she responded to most of all was a sense of true artistry and ambition, regardless of genre.
“I would travel five hundred miles to see Miles and Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington—those were the great masters,” she said. “But other than that, I didn’t like jazz. I didn’t like blues because it made me blue. I could play them, and I would play them sometimes, but they made me blue. And that’s what I didn’t like. Depressing.”
—
The year she recorded “Four Women” wasn’t all political fire and frustration. At home in Mount Vernon, the mood was generally positive, the atmosphere alive. Black cultural leaders like Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Miriam Makeba would gather at the house on Nuber Avenue, and Lisa and the Shabazz girls would put on shows for their esteemed guests. Simone and Betty Shabazz would chat on the phone and visit; the kids would play in the yard, frolicking on a tree swing.
Attallah Shabazz recalled the camaraderie among the civil rights women during this happy time. “These were brilliant, well-read, well-traveled, experienced women,” she said. “Charming, alluring, charismatic women, in a time that said, ‘Not you.’ So to sit and listen to this relationship between a Lorraine Hansberry and a Nina Simone and a Ruby Dee—some things I’ll never tell. They were rich in their humor and how they were able to zero in on every iota of social existence, how they could assess a thing. They were raw of laughter, and free.”
There were increasing signs, though, that not everything was well within the Simone-Stroud family. Ilyasah Shabazz remembered Nina yelling at Lisa when the girls made a mess with Silly String, and another occasion when they were so afraid of the singer that they hid from her at the top of a tall spiral staircase. “I loved her, and she was like an aunt, but she was strict, she was a disciplinarian,” said Ilyasah. “I was a little intimidated—I didn’t know the word, but I was intimidated by her.”