LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 1

      I was born a child prodigy, darling. I was born a genius.

      Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, on February 21, 1933, the sixth of eight children. The Waymon family was rounded out by sisters Lucille, Dorothy, and Frances and brothers John Irvin, Carrol, Harold, and Sam. Perhaps foreshadowing the instability that would go on to define much of her life, her father, John Divine Waymon, worked various odd jobs, never sticking with one craft for too long; mother Mary Kate was the granddaughter of slaves and came from a family of preachers (fifteen of them in all, according to Simone). She carried on that storied tradition and became a traveling Methodist minister, supplementing the spare income with cleaning and domestic work.

      Tryon was a resort town, which created—superficially, at least—a more liberal racial atmosphere than in most of the South. “It was not as rigidly segregated as other towns,” said Carrol Waymon, who would later become an educator and activist, forming the Africana Studies Program at San Diego State University. Black neighborhoods scattered through Tryon. This also meant that black people interacted more frequently with white people than they might in other places, playing sports together and working at the resort.

      Still, there was only so far such contact could go. “One of my brothers’ friends who must have been, I don’t know, nineteen, seventeen, something, it was found that he was going with one of the white girls,” said Carrol. “It was hush-hush, I didn’t know about it. He had to get out of town one night, so we went, ‘Why did he leave so soon?’ I began to understand he was not supposed to be going with whites.”

      By Carrol’s count, the Waymons lived in about seven different houses in the area. Frances, the youngest, described one of the residences as “a wooden house that was not much to be desired”—very old, with a brick stove, an outhouse, no insulation, and a porch that had been enclosed to serve as an extra bedroom.

      “You went out and you brought in buckets of water,” she said. “We had big round tin tubs, they call them. You heated the water on the wooden stove, that’s how you took your Saturday night bath. It was such an ordeal that everybody took baths on Saturday night. And we had a garden, we had pigs and cows and chickens. We were very poor.”

      Despite the family’s poverty, Nina Simone’s earliest images of her childhood were pleasant enough. “My first conscious memory of my mother is her singing while she cooks, while she washed clothes,” she said. “She was always cheerful. We had a farm, a little bitsy one. Momma used to churn buttermilk on an old-fashioned churn and she showed me how to do it.

      “Most of all I remember being with the other kids. Momma would cook for us, and sometimes she would say, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to get dinner.’ Sometimes we didn’t have much to eat and she would pray, and then by the time evening came on, we’d have enough food.”

      To stretch the rations and feed her family of ten, Mary Kate would make what she called “Waymon Specials”—dumplings or a concoction called vinegar pie. She canned fruits and vegetables to eat during the winter. “Momma never seemed to worry about being poor or hungry,” Simone said. “We weren’t ever hungry ’cause Momma knew how to not do that. It is true we were very poor, but we didn’t feel the poverty because of the way she did things.”

      The singer’s first recollections of her father were also charmingly bucolic. More approachable than her mother, he was lighthearted, even mischievous, and he and Eunice had a genuine intimacy, a special bond. “My daddy putting me on his knee, rocking me to patty-cake, my dad playing with me—I was his pet,” she said. “He had an old jalopy, a Model A Ford, and that thing used to make all kinds of noises; I could hear him clear across town coming home and I would run up the hill, through the woods, to be there when he crossed that particular spot, to jump on the running board and go home with him. I would do this every day.”

      “His whole life was playing,” she said in another instance. “He played at everything. He didn’t tell us any jokes, we were too young. But he was playful, always.”

      John Waymon’s flair for entertaining—including his distinctive “double whistle”—was more than just a way to amuse his family and keep their spirits light. In fact, he and Mary Kate had started out performing onstage together. “Daddy loved the ‘St. Louis Blues,’ had his spats, he could dance and sing,” said Carrol. “He’d play his guitar, and he also played the harmonica, he was excellent at that. Had he not met Mother, he would have probably gone on to be on the stage.”

      But when Mary Kate started preaching, after they were married, it put an end to his performing career. John worked as a barber, a truck driver; he even started a dry-cleaning business. He had what his daughter Frances described as an entrepreneurial spirit and was a pillar of the church community. As a business owner, he could proudly call himself middle class.

      But when the Depression hit, John’s options dwindled. Around 1931, he closed his businesses down and lost his trucks. He took work as a handyman, a caretaker for white families, a cook at a lakeside Boy Scout camp. But by the time Eunice was born, he was mostly working in the garden for sustenance and anything he might sell or trade.

      Some of this slowdown, though, might have had more to do with his health than with the country’s dire economic straits. He had a blockage in his small intestine, and in 1936 he had an operation. After the surgery, a rubber tube was inserted into the stomach so it could drain, and the wound needed to be exposed in order to be washed and bathed. And this condition meant that the sole responsibility of supporting the family fell on Mary Kate.

      Eunice, age three, was tasked with nursing her father back to health. “I would take him for a walk every day and fix his meals, and I was so happy,” she said. “He loved the heat, and he had these raw eggs that had to be beaten up with a little vanilla and a little sugar, and it tasted so good I used to get a little bit for myself. But I had to feed him this every day and take him for a walk.”

      There were additional upheavals during this time, too. During his recovery, the Waymon house burned down in the middle of the night. They moved once, then again to a town called Lynn, where their house was so primitive that not only did it not have indoor plumbing, it didn’t even have an outhouse; the family had to use the woods as the bathroom.

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