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on the town council, he led a protest against a poll tax and had the law changed—but a decade of illness and financial insecurity was weighing on him.

      “He was energetic, active, well accepted, well respected,” said Carrol, “and had to go from being on his way to great things to the bottom economically, and it just knocked him for a loop.”

      Whether John’s own problems were a cause or merely an effect, the Waymon family was fracturing. Eldest brother John Irvin fought with his father and left home at sixteen, completely vanishing from the Waymons’ lives for more than ten years. With the advent of World War II, Carrol enlisted in the army.

      “There was a lot of conflict between my mother and father, and there was a lot of conflict between Dad and the children,” said Frances. “I never met my oldest brother until some thirty-one years of my life, because he left home because of Dad. My mother was very independent, very strong-willed, very determined. Very strongly committed, very, very religious. She is a pillar of strength, and highly respected.

      “I felt like some of the frustration came from the fact that maybe Mom was more dominant. I feel that that added to that frustration, with Dad constantly trying to be respected as the head of the household.”

      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.

      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

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