by Olivia Laing
A kind of severing went on in her childhood, a descending line that cut her off from everyone around her. Her parents couldn’t afford piano lessons, but one of the women for whom her mother cleaned offered to pay for a year of tuition. For 75 cents a lesson, the piano teacher, who she called Miz Mazzy, introduced her to Bach and gave her so much of the affection and attention she lacked at home that Eunice came to regard her as ‘my white momma’. After the year was up, Miz Mazzy badgered the citizens of Tryon into setting up a town fund to pay for her continuing musical education in return for regular concerts (according to Simone’s biographer Nadine Cohodas, the fund only had two donors, both wealthy white women).
Eunice became public property, the black prodigy, the chosen one permitted to pass through doors that were otherwise securely locked. It was the beginning of her long isolation – the loneliness of practising six, seven, eight speechless, unaccompanied hours a day multiplied by the loneliness of being invited to cross tracks that were mortally dangerous to everyone who shared the colour of her skin. Not that she was allowed to forget, in those Jim Crow years, the reality of segregation. She might be the town project, but she still had to take her grilled-cheese sandwich outside the pharmacy while the white children ate inside, a humiliation that stayed with her no matter how rich she got.
This isn’t to say that she made no attempts at resistance. In 1944, she gave a recital at the Tryon library. It was an all-white affair but she insisted her parents attend. Sitting at the piano, she saw them being moved from the front row to make room for a white couple. She announced to the audience at large that she would not play unless her parents were sat where she could see them. They were allowed to return to their seats, though Eunice also heard snickers, hardly the last time she’d be laughed at on stage. She was eleven years old.
She was brought up to believe in the American dream: that effort and talent will lead unequivocally to success, never mind what kind of body you inhabit. This powerful illusion held until April 1951, when she was rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music, the Philadelphia conservatory that had been her consuming goal since childhood. At first she believed she simply wasn’t good enough, but people kept telling her the decision had been racist. The realisation that the door was not open after all was what forced Eunice Waymon to create her second self, the doppelganger who became a world-famous star.
The stopping-up of her talent meant she needed an outlet as well as a source of funds. In the summer of 1954 she began to play in a bar in Atlantic City under a new name, Nina Simone, chosen because she didn’t want her mother to know she was performing what Mary Kate had always called real, as opposed to holy music. She brought concert hall airs to the Irish drunks, wearing a chiffon evening dress and demanding total silence as she played. She hadn’t intended to sing, but the owner of the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue insisted on the very first evening: sing or go.
Music was a lodging place where she could temporarily house her feelings, pouring her anger, sorrow and self-hatred into songs she knew were too small, too superficial for her prodigious gifts. She put everything she’d learned into it, making a single tune float into hours, taking it to places no other person had the dexterity or intelligence to imagine, let alone to reach. Performing was from the very first a ghetto and a trap, a manifestation of her disgrace and a reminder of the unjust outside world, but it was also a place in which she could enact her own original vision, as a concert hall could never have been. Refused the category she wanted, she refused cat-egory altogether, sailing from blues to jazz to gospel to soul, often in the space of a single song, while the piano underneath yearned its way always back to Bach.
Soon she was playing clubs in New York and putting out records; soon she was driving around Greenwich Village in a steel-grey Mercedes with red leather seats, top down, a queen in a red hat. By the late 1950s, fame and money had arrived, neither quite the blessing that it seemed. She wanted to be listened to, insisting on it even in those early years, but she didn’t always want to be looked at. ‘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’, she wrote in an undated note to herself. ‘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.’
It wasn’t until after she’d been married twice and had a daughter of her own that she really began to focus on the civil rights movement, to realise that the miseries she was confiding to her diary were in themselves political. She knew about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, she was friends with the writers James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, but it took the playwright Lorraine Hansbury to make her see that her own experiences were connected to the ongoing legacy of slavery, to wake her up to the realities of race and class. Hansbury was a dynamic, brilliant young lesbian, who at the age of twenty-seven had written A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by an African-American woman to be staged on Broadway. ‘We never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together,’ Simone said of their electrifying friendship. ‘It was always Marx, Lenin, revolution – real girls’ talk.’
1963, the year of the March on Washington, was the turning point in her political awakening, the moment she finally shed her reluctance to be involved. On 12 April, Good Friday, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and jailed in Birmingham for taking part in a non-violent demonstration against segregation. Protestors were attacked with Alsatians and cudgels and drenched with fire hoses as they walked from the 16th Street Baptist Church (the city’s first black church and the organisational headquarters of the movement) to City Hall, where they hoped to encourage the mayor to discuss segregation. While King and fifty other Birmingham citizens were in jail, Nina was playing a show in Chicago at the time, a frivolity that Lorraine was quick to ring and point out.
Two months later, on 12 June, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot to death, two hours after President Kennedy had announced his Civil Rights Bill. Evers was the field secretary of the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and had helped to organise mass protests to desegregate its beaches, buses and parks, all of which had been met with violent resistance by white residents, parading with swastikas and armed with just the sort of homemade weapons wielded by Guston’s Klansmen. Evers was a close friend of James Baldwin, who had written the play Blues for Mister Charlie about their nocturnal journey together to discover the white murderer of a black man.
Evers was shot in the driveway of his own home by a member of the White Citizens’ Council, while carrying an armful of T-shirts to give out to demonstrators the next day. Each was stamped with the legend: JIM CROW MUST GO. The hospital in which he died was segregated too, and at first he was refused entry, though he was plainly bleeding to death. Years before, when he was a boy, a friend of his father’s had been killed for talking to a white woman. His bloody clothing lay on a fence for months afterwards, and Evers said that for the rest of his life he could still see it in his mind’s eye, a visceral symbol of what racism really was.
Like that death, Evers’s assassination ignited something in Simone, but there was worse to come. She couldn’t go to the March on Washington on 28 August because she was rehearsing for a tour. She watched it live on television from the big house she’d bought in Mount Vernon, a suburb of New York City. Eighteen days later, she was sitting alone in her den above the garage, still rehearsing songs, when she heard on the radio that four members of the Klan had planted sticks of dynamite in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham during Sunday school, killing four little girls. Later that day, there were two more murders in the city. A white policeman shot a sixteen-year-old black boy who was throwing stones at a car full of white men waving Confederate flags and hurling bottles, and then two white men on a motor scooter plastered with more Confederate stickers pulled a thirteen-year-old black bo
y off the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle and shot him too. The Confederate flag, the same symbol waved at Charlottesville, had recently been resurrected as a symbol of opposition to civil rights, if not active nostalgia for the era of slavery.
Addie May Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Carol Denise McNair, Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware, all of them dead, all of them children. This was what Lorraine had been trying to tell her. ‘I suddenly realized’, she wrote in I Put a Spell on You, ‘what it was to be black in America in 1963.’ She went down to the garage in a trance, out of her mind with rage. When her husband Andy walked in he saw at once that she was trying to make a zip gun, a homemade firearm. ‘Nina, you don’t know anything about killing,’ he said. ‘The only thing you’ve got is music.’ An hour later she emerged again with the sheet music to ‘Mississippi Goddam’. When she sang it, she felt as if she’d flung ‘ten bullets’ back at the Birmingham killers.
As she became more involved with the movement, her performances changed. She wasn’t a popular entertainer any more. She was a freedom fighter, using music as a ‘political weapon’ for rallying her people, providing sustenance and education. The movement thrilled her. There was so much hope, so much to discuss. Was non-violence really the best technique? Was separatism necessary? What kind of future society should be created? Her own inclinations were closer to the militant Black Power teachings of Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton than the turn-the-other-cheek Christianity espoused by Bayard Rustin and the NAACP. When she met Martin Luther King, she burst out, ‘I’m not non-violent,’ before he even had the chance to say hello (‘That’s OK, sister,’ he replied).
For the first time since she’d been rejected by Curtis, her life felt meaningful. As an activist, she had a sense of dignity and purpose that had been lacking right through her adult years. Singing freedom songs, she told an interviewer, ‘helps to change the world . . . To move the audience, to make them conscious of what has been done to my people around the world.’ When the organiser Vernon Jordan asked her in 1964 why she wasn’t more involved, she had snapped, ‘Motherfucker, I am civil rights.’ A song is not a gun, just as a painting is not a protest march, but that doesn’t mean it has no effect on the outside world. In a radio interview in 1969, Simone explained that she didn’t think artists had to take a political stand, but that it was their duty to reflect the reality they live in. Striking a Reichian note, she described American society as a cancer that had to be exposed before it could be cured. ‘I am not the doctor to cure it however, sugar,’ she said. ‘All I can do is expose the sickness, that’s my job.’
Over the years, she thought a lot about what music could do, trying to understand the strange transaction that took place when she sat down at the keys and opened her mouth. Some of her tracks were plainly cathartic, like her cover of ‘Pirate Jenny’, a song from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, which had been playing everywhere in Berlin the year that Reich arrived in the city. Simone pours everything she knows about invisibility and hard labour into the role of the servant girl Jenny, intoning the sinister line ‘I’m counting their heads as I’m making the beds’ as the prelude to a retributive murder spree.
The lyrics of ‘Mississippi Goddam’ also struck a vengeful note. Sometimes she sang ‘we’re all going to die’, a protest against the cautious pace of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, crawling towards incremental shifts in the law while the bodies kept mounting up. Too slow, Nina and her band bellowed in the chorus. Other times, she changed the pronoun, flipping the line from prophecy to threat. ‘Oh but this whole country is full of lies/You’re all going to die and die like flies’, she sang at Carnegie Hall on 17 May 1964, to an audience that grows audibly more unnerved by the verse. She told the film-maker Peter Rodis that when she performed it: ‘I just want them to be in pieces. I want to go in that den of those elegant people with their old ideas, smugness, and just drive them insane.’ In response, boxes of broken records were sent to her label and the song was banned on the radio in several Southern states.
But fantasies of retribution were not the entirety of Simone’s activism (and nor do threats delivered from a stage exist in the same order of reality as centuries of actual and ongoing atrocity). She might have been, as she put it herself, a woman on fire, but the Old Testament tone was always mixed with something tender, a yearning for contact. As a child back in North Carolina, she’d played the piano at revival meetings for hours on end, the congregation testifying and speaking in tongues, ‘just running back and forth . . . and the preacher gathering up all that spiritual energy and throwing it back out on the people. Women would have to go to hospital sometimes, they got so transported.’ It was this experience that she began to feel in her concerts in the 1960s, an uncanny energy that moved between her and the audience, as if every last body in the crowd was a source of power and she had found the communal switch.
Sex, she wrote in her diary, was the ‘source of power’ for her performances, the way she transformed the concert hall into an orgone box. I don’t know if she ever read Lorca on duende, but when she tried to explain what she meant, the best comparison she could think of was to a bullfight. She’d been to one in Barcelona, on a sweltering afternoon, and when the bull was finally killed she’d vomited with shock. A real blood-letting, she called it, the same phrase they used in Tryon when someone became enraptured, beside themselves, foaming at the mouth. It was ‘the same sense of being transformed, of celebrating something deep, something very deep. That’s what I learned about performing, that it was real, and I had the ability to make people feel on a deep level . . . And when you’ve caught it, when you’ve got the audience hooked, you always know because it’s like you’ve got electricity hanging in the air . . . I was the toreador mesmerizing this bull and I could turn around and walk away, turning my back on this huge animal . . . And, like they did with the toreadors, people came to see me because they knew I was playing close to the edge and one day I might fail.’
It’s funny, she sounds like Susan Sontag in that statement, when she was talking in the wake of her first brush with cancer about death as a bull, a black bull that she wanted to run ahead of. The difference is that Simone wasn’t just doing it for herself. I never saw her play, but I’ve felt that electricity sometimes at shows. Canetti said that there were many kinds of crowds, and once or twice I’ve been in one that felt like a huge animal. It’s an experience that comes close to the ecstasy of sex, the joy of shedding your own burdened, individual body and merging with a wild, surging collective instead. For Simone, it was a transaction that went both ways, which was why she screamed at audiences for chatting or getting up when she was playing. She needed their focus, their attention, as the raw material from which she could enact her transformations; the fuel for a long journey out.
As to where she was headed, I think what she was doing in the 1960s was carrying her audience down into their own most painful feelings, a high-risk, cathartic passage through fury, mourning, horror, hurt, despair and out again to joy, just as Vivian Bond did in Joe’s Pub on Lafayette Street five decades later. It wasn’t so much that she sang about freedom as that she enacted it by way of her own supple transformations, her ability to slip fluidly, spontaneously from mood to mood, to interpolate, to interrupt, to feint, to float away, to cut to the heart. Reich developed a kind of touch to break down his patients’ armour, the traumatic history that exists in every human body, and I think Simone did the same thing with song.
‘Everybody is half dead,’ she told an interviewer in 1969, setting out once again what sounds very much like a Reichian philosophy. ‘Everybody avoids everybody. All over the place, in most situations, most all of the time. I know. I’m one of those everybodies, and to me it is terrible. And so all I’m trying to do all the time is just open people up so they can feel themselves and let themselves be open to somebody else. That is all. That’s it.’
These days we tend to be sceptical of the political effects of opening up. It sounds like too much l
ike careless hippie platitudes. But in his despairing 1972 account of the civil rights movement, No Name in the Street, Simone’s friend James Baldwin took the same idea about emotional closeness even further. He was always among the most consistently insightful of Reich’s readers. Like Foucault, he’d raised a sceptical eyebrow at the notion of orgasms ending violence, and yet in this devastated book he drew on Reich to argue that curtailments or repressions of the private life had the gravest of consequences in the public world, identifying it as the root cause of racism itself.
I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, and on black-white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call the ‘Negro problem.’ This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them.