What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light

  The tension between mother and daughter, along with Nina’s deteriorating condition, pushed Lisa back toward Andy. “When my parents divorced, she changed, and so my father became my knight in shining armor,” said Lisa. “It didn’t matter to me what she said, I knew that if she was acting a certain way I could call my dad and she would back off. I didn’t believe her—had I believed her, I don’t know if I would have made the same choices, but she was the person that was beating me when they divorced, so I would call my father, and he would protect me.”

  Lighter-skinned than Simone, Lisa looked more like her father than her mother. That resemblance alone could be enough to set Nina off. (Schackman remembered the writer of “Four Women,” so acutely aware of the power of skin tone, telling her daughter, “You’re just like your father, you’re like a half-breed.”) “Whenever she looked at me, she saw my father, so I couldn’t win for losing once they separated,” Lisa said. “I think she was jealous of the fact that I was light-skinned with smaller features, and oftentimes I was persecuted for that when she was having a bad day. And I’d say, ‘Well, I didn’t pick Dad, you did.’ ”

  But Nina’s complicated feelings toward her daughter went beyond the reminders of her ex-husband. Schackman believed that she also resented the economic privileges that Lisa had growing up—a luxury that Simone never enjoyed as a child. He guessed that she felt competitive with her daughter. “Nina had an awful lot of anger and destructiveness toward Lisa,” he said. “As far as Nina was concerned, she saw something in Lisa that she didn’t like—her character, personality, whatever—and Lisa was lovely, just a beautiful young girl.”

  Lisa maintained that she wasn’t miserable, in spite of her unstable home life—she liked school, had her favorite music and cartoons. But during this tumultuous time she did her best to stay clear of Nina as much as she could.

  “I think she was very resentful, very angry, and very afraid,” she said. “And a lot of times when people are afraid, it doesn’t necessarily come out as wild-eyed and screaming, it comes out in anger, because oftentimes they don’t know that that’s what they are. And children and animals are usually the first ones to be on the receiving end of that.”

  Ironically, this same year Simone was honored for “Human Kindness Day.” The all-day tribute took place in Washington, D.C., on May 11, 1974. It was one of the bright spots of this period—made more special by her own mother’s attendance.

  Cosponsored by the National Parks Service and put on with the support of government agencies and major corporations, the event was packed with festivities celebrating the singer. Things kicked off with a breakfast reception at the Kennedy Center, followed by a luncheon for her at the Museum of African Art. Next up was one of the main elements: a free seven-hour concert held on the Washington Monument grounds, with big acts like the Pointer Sisters, New Birth, and Herbie Hancock performing.

  Additionally, there was a special musical and theatrical program titled “Tones of the Lady of Ebony—A Tribute to Nina Simone,” directed by Harry Poe and staged at the Smithsonian Institution. The day also included art and writing awards for students, and a collection to raise money for a dam in the drought-stricken area of the Sahel in Africa.

  Simone was in high spirits during the day, as demonstrated during her own evening performance. “Nina was ill and she had seen a doctor,” said drummer Leopoldo Fleming. “She says to me, ‘Leopoldo, I’m not feeling too well, so please don’t make me dance.’ I said, ‘Okay, Nina.’ So we do the concert, and during the concert she starts dancing. After she comes to me and says, ‘Leopoldo, I thought I told you not to make me dance.’ I said, ‘Nina, I didn’t make you dance—it was the drums that made you dance!’ She loved dancing, you can see that when you see clips of her in concert.”

  During the tribute, Simone carefully monitored her mother’s reaction. It was a rare opportunity for Mary Kate Waymon, usually so uninterested in Nina’s career, to see what her music meant to people. “She didn’t know what they were going to do to me, to her child that day,” she said. “Because that was an all-compassing day—I mean, they crowned me, and my mom was watching to see what they were going to do to her child. It was beyond her imagination, what happened that day.”

  Photographs of Mary Kate on the day betrayed her uneasiness with the attention; more tellingly, Nina’s own thoughts about what her mother may have been feeling reveal the combination of arrogance and fear that had haunted her since childhood.

  “[The pictures] captured this anxiety,” she said. “Can you imagine your child being so exceptional that people come in, they want to look at it and they want to feel it and they want to touch it and they want to take it here and they want to take it there? And you, as a mother hen would do, you watch and say, ‘Okay, all right—only so far now, only so far. Bring her back.’ That was all in my mom’s face that day. It was in the pictures. She never said anything.”

  Though Mary Kate supported Simone by attending Human Kindness Day, she still never acknowledged Simone’s involvement in the civil rights movement, or any of the other reasons that her daughter would be receiving such an honor. Simone continued to feel no acceptance or approval from her mother for her music or her activism. “She acts as though it doesn’t exist,” she said. “It was all just unreal to my mother.”

  Whether her mother was still uneasy with Nina’s career making nonsacred, nonclassical music or whether she simply couldn’t comprehend this level of celebrity, she never engaged with her daughter’s work. With her father now gone, his final months and his death stirring up a morass of emotions for Nina, this sense of Mary Kate’s indifference was more painful than ever.

  Meanwhile, Simone had continued her attempts to maintain the relationship she was most excited about, returning to Barbados every few months to keep up her affair with Prime Minister Barrow. Eventually, though, he grew tired of her unreliability. One incident in particular pushed him away. She had been begging Barrow to take her to Martinique for lunch on his private jet. Finally, he relented and arranged for a day trip, telling her to be ready at seven o’clock the next morning. But Simone went out dancing that night and stayed out until 5:00 a.m. When Barrow’s men came to pick her up for the flight to Martinique, she went to the door, bleary-eyed, and said she couldn’t go.

  “Well, this hurt the prime minister so much, he didn’t say anything,” she said. “He just quietly closed down the villa on me. And the next thing I knew, I was asked to get out, and I had to go back to America.”

  She would consider Barrow one of her great lost loves, and throughout her life she would try to win him back. After he broke up with her, though, she had to contend with reality and was faced with a life in serious disarray.

  Simone returned to the States with Lisa, and the two lived in the unfurnished apartment in New York. The communications from the IRS became increasingly urgent—until ultimately a warrant for her arrest was issued. The county court had taken control of the Mount Vernon property. Simone and Stroud were arguing bitterly about who was responsible for the unpaid taxes, blaming each other for the failed payment.

  Lisa indicated that Simone was remorseful about their transient lifestyle and regretted how chaotic everything had become. “After she divorced my dad and the house we had in Mount Vernon was taken by the IRS, she called us nomads,” she said. “Her biggest lament was that she never was able to provide me with a home. She didn’t know that as long as I was with her and she was not having a bad day, that wherever we were together, that was home.”

  —

  Things looked bad for Nina Simone in the mid-’70s. But around this time an unlikely ally appeared, offering her a small morale boost. In July 1974, she took Lisa to a David Bowie concert at Madison Square Garden. About a week later, she went out, on a whim, to a private club called the Hippopotamus, and shortly after she arrived Bowie himself walked in with a small entourage and sat in a corner of the club. When Simone got up to leave and walked past his table, he invited her to sit
down.

  Though they had exchanged only a few words, Bowie asked for her phone number and then called her that night at exactly 3:00 a.m. “He said, ‘The first thing I want you to know is that you’re not crazy—don’t let anybody tell you you’re crazy, because where you’re coming from, there are very few of us out there.’ ”

  For a month, he called her every night and they would talk for hours. Finally, he paid a visit. “He looked just like Charlie Chaplin, a clown suit, a big black hat,” said Simone. “He told me that he was not a gifted singer and he knew it. He said, ‘What’s wrong with you is you were gifted—you have to play. Your genius overshadows the money, and you don’t know what to do to get your money, whereas I wasn’t a genius, but I planned, I wanted to be a rock-and-roll singer and I just got the right formula.’ ”

  What Bowie was affirming for Nina was her true calling as an artist, a sensibility that he could recognize as something different from that of a pop star. At a period of such turbulence, it was a lift that she needed. “He’s got more sense than anybody I’ve ever known,” she said. “It’s not human—David ain’t from here.”

  Bowie later would record “Wild Is the Wind,” the title song from the 1966 Simone album, as the final track on his stellar Station to Station. And soon, as Bowie had done before her, Simone would leave her home country in search of a more sympathetic environment. She had no permanent address, a dwindling connection to her family, persistent frustration with how her music was accepted (or not), and doubts that she was being compensated fairly for her record sales, plus she was being pursued for tax evasion. Other than the Human Kindness Day appearance, she had performed only a handful of concerts in 1974. With everything going wrong in the States, she decided to pack up and leave.

  “The most prevalent view was that she was being tremendously harassed by the government,” said Andrew Young. “And we were very sad, but we understood the nature of government harassment—at this point, the government was burning our mail.”

  In a constant search for acceptance, for her true calling on earth, Simone was now fighting without a community left to bolster her work. Young felt that she was paying a higher price for her activism than the political organizers were. “At least with us, there were people whom we could cling to and lean on and draw strength and support from. But she was probably very isolated. In her community of artists, there’s not a great circle of support.”

  Lisa remembered feeling that something dramatic had shifted in the activist community and in American culture. “It’s almost like it just ended one day—it was going on and the next day it wasn’t,” she said. “So many people were leaving, whether they were assassinated or they just decided that they were tired—once we were allowed to vote, it was almost like, ‘Okay, yay, we got the prize, everything is fine now.’ And she’s like, ‘No, no, it’s not.’

  “I know she felt like she was alone, and she was still fighting while everybody else was happy that they had gotten their certificate. She never stopped speaking out against injustice. I think that Mom’s anger is what sustained her, really what kept her going. It just became who she was.”

  Simone maintained that she was “chased out of this country,” but she had also grown disillusioned with the possibilities for true social change. “I was angry, I felt naive,” she said. “I felt that there was no more movement anymore and that I wasn’t part of anything.”

  “Through her involvement in civil rights, she used the music for some purpose,” said Roger Nupie. “And with the civil rights movement ending, she was a little bit lost because she didn’t have this purpose anymore. She only had this music, her Nina Simone music—which wasn’t the kind of music she wanted to play in the first place, because it was not classical music.”

  Before Simone left it all behind, she released one final album, ending her contract with RCA Victor. It was another live recording, with largely African instrumentation. The LP had two songs that were written by Bahamian musician Exuma, but also her versions of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles” and a song that had been recorded by Ike and Tina Turner called “Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter.”

  The record, which would be the last new music she would release for four years, shared its name with a phrase that was one of Jesus’s seven “Last Words on the Cross.”

  The title of the album was It Is Finished.

  CHAPTER 12

  They treated me like I was gold, like a human being, which is not the way they treat me over here. My heart is in Africa….The Western world needs Africa, just to try to rape it all the time. The Western world needs me. That’s why they can’t let me go.

  The chance for Nina to make her home outside the United States came from one of the few singers she viewed as a peer. Miriam Makeba, nicknamed “Mama Africa,” was a South African–born singer and activist credited as the artist who first introduced African music to a worldwide audience. Because of Makeba’s campaign against apartheid, South Africa revoked her passport in 1960. She met Simone soon after, when she sought asylum in the United States.

  “She said that she had listened to me in South Africa and that when she came to America she wanted to meet me,” said Simone. “I went to see her at the Blue Angel in New York City, and we became friends then.” The pair occasionally performed together, first sharing a bill at a 1961 Carnegie Hall show.

  Of course, the two forces of nature collided at times. At one point, Simone told Andrew Young that she and Makeba were not speaking (though he replied that it was very difficult for anybody to get along with Makeba). And drummer Leopoldo Fleming recalled the first time he met Simone, at a party at Makeba’s New Jersey house. Simone had borrowed a fur coat from Makeba, and when she returned it that night the coat had been altered into a shorter, Eisenhower-jacket shape. “Miriam said, ‘This is not the coat I gave you!’ ” he said. “She said, ‘No, I had it restyled—I thought you would like that.’ ”

  Despite their clashes, the two women were close and understood each other. In 1974, Makeba invited Simone and Lisa to her home in Monrovia, Liberia, for some political events celebrating the country’s new government. The Simones made the move in September; Nina had not been back to the continent since the 1961 AMSAC trip to Nigeria.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Africa, I always knew that I would belong,” said Simone. “It took [Makeba] twelve years to take me, and she was a star and she knew everything that I knew about show business. But most of all, she knew about my homeland, where my ancestors came from. We shared the same goals. We had the same color. We had the same hair. We shared the same interest in men. She loved to dance and drink champagne, and make love, and so did I. And we loved African men. And she used to come and see me and bring two men for me and three for herself.”

  Simone found the people of Liberia—a country first formed as a place to relocate freed slaves from America and the first democratic republic in Africa’s history—to be generous and warm. When she first arrived, she was greeted with nonstop parties. Makeba arranged for her to go out on six dates in six nights, all with men who had made their fortunes in palm oil.

  A few nights after arriving, she was taken to a private club called the Maze by drummer Fleming (who was playing with both Simone and Makeba at the time) and some friends. She was having fun, feeling loose and dancing. Fleming had to leave because one of his party had to go to work in the morning. When he woke up the next day, he discovered that everyone was talking about Nina, who had stripped naked on the dance floor.

  “I was so happy to be at a place where I could do this,” Nina recalled. “I was so happy to be home. I was in Africa. This was maybe the third day that I was in Liberia. The next day the president heard about it, and I got scared—he said, ‘Who is this woman who came from America and stripped at the Maze?’ I thought surely I was gonna get arrested. But the next night the president was at the place.”

  Simone later incorporated the striptease and the abandon she felt that night into a song calle
d “Liberian Calypso,” a reworking of “Run Joe,” a tall-tale song that had previously been recorded by Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry, and even Maya Angelou during her days as a calypso singer:

  Bodies started moving all around

  I was so happy to be in town

  And as I slowly began to strip

  Everyone thought I was so hip

  I danced all over the place, you know

  All over the ceiling, all over the floor

  Up in the balcony, all around

  I felt so good just being in town

  (Elsewhere in the song, recorded in 1982, she thanked God, saying, “He brought me to Liberia / Everywhere else is inferior.”)

  Back in America, Andrew Young was relieved that Simone had made such a decisive break from the system that was causing her such pain. “I was delighted that she was at a point in life where she could withdraw from all of this and lessen the intensity of it. I mean, you’d go absolutely mad if you didn’t have some place of refuge. And many people in and outside of the movement just lost all sense of sanity. It was a particularly troubling and very difficult period for us.”

  As Simone was at last experiencing a sense of freedom she could never find in America, Lisa, who was starting seventh grade, was also beginning to settle into life in Monrovia. The first year, she stayed with a couple—a Liberian husband and American wife—who had a sixteen-year-old daughter. Eventually Simone bought a house of her own on the beach and had the space for her daughter, though Lisa was slow to move in.