The avenging angel

By Bukka Rennie
May 03, 2003

Eunice Kathleen Waymon is dead. She was born in North Carolina in 1933 and at the age of ten gave her first classical piano recital - a career that American society did not allow her. This authentic black personality, who later became known to the world as "Nina Simone", is sadly now no more.

She, this lithe, petite, winsome woman, took on the whole damn racist superstructure of America and tore it to pieces with the power of song.

If I am not mistaken I think it was my then girlfriend, Emrold of 3rd Avenue, Barataria, who gave me a gift of Nina's LP, "I Put a Spell on You" and so inadvertently engineered an association that would last a lifetime.

The title-tune was a remake of Screaming Jay Hawkins' work, done in similar raucous, down-to-earth manner that awoke you and made you pay attention. I was completely bowled by that number as well as by her mournful, throaty but soothing treatment of Ne Me Quitte Pas.

In fact my very first efforts as a writer, a collection of short stories done in the early '70s, and still not offered for publication, was titled after a particular number on that said LP - Blues On Purpose.

Submerged in the politics of the time - the Black Power movement - Nina emerged as the most potent artistic voice of protest and the demand for justice and equal civil rights. Nobody expressed the pain we all felt as she did. One could sense the deep measure of this woman, her act was no put-on, no pretense, no stage dramatics.

Nina tingled, her sensibility exposed like raw, bleeding flesh, and you feared that at any moment the pain could become too much for her to bear and trigger implosion of her delicate, physical frame.

You remained riveted to her, to that voice that tore through you, that washed and cleansed you, that made you resolve to be raging bulls in the quest for justice, equality and peace.

Her concerts were experiences of tumultuous catharsis. I saw white Canadians and white Americans virtually "go to pieces" at her concerts. One such gentleman, I recall, began to butt his head against the edge of the steel stage in a case of brutal self-flagellation. His face a bloody mess, he fell to his knees and then prostrated himself before SHE, Nina, as her voice trailed away: "...I wish I knew how it would feel to be free/ I wish I could break all these chains holding me..."

And later: "...Alabama got me so sick/ Tennessee made me lose my rest/ but everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam...", which she had written in 1963 to underscore the assassination of Medgar Evers and the murder of little African-American girls who had gone to a church that was bombed by white Americans.

Nat Shapiro, the musicologist, described her as "a blues singer, a jazz singer, an avenging angel, a witch, all of this but none of this...", quite rightly suggesting that she was too big, too much, to be classified.

In my mind I can even now hear her introducing the song Why? (The King of Love is Dead) in 1968: "...Of course, this whole programme is dedicated to the memory of the late Dr Martin Luther King, you know that, don't you..." Or hear her talk about how the spirit of deceased playwright Lorraine Hansberry comes on stage stronger and stronger each time she does To Be Young, Gifted and Black and "soon I will not be able to do this song at all..."

It may have been at that same concert, I cannot be certain, that I heard Backlash Blues for the first time, a song written specifically for her by the renowned poet Langston Hughes of Harlem just before he died.

In doing that song Nina fearlessly disabused us of the concept of a white backlash on account of African-American affirmative action. "Mr Backlash," she sang at the end, "I'm gonna leave with the blues..." From then on there was no turning back, her revolutionary consciousness soared to heights previously unimagined by any such artist.

She burst into the late '60s-early 1970s like a thunderbolt with a mix of her own creative writing and versions of the legendary Bob Dylan: Revolution! Revolution, The Times, They Are A-Changing, I Shall Be Released and the very mystical Suzanne that takes you on a journey of the inner-self that guarantees rehabilitation, restoration and rejuvenation: "Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river/ and she feeds you tea and oranges/ that come all the way from China/ and just as you are about to tell her/ that you have no love to give her/ she catches you on her wave-length/ and she lets the river answer..."

The only other piece of music that has had such powerful, almost bewitching, effect on me as Nina's version of Suzanne is the late Andre Tanker's Morena Osha.

It was at that point that everyone in the know got scared for Nina's safety and well-being. Particularly so, her good friend Miriam Makeba. In fact Nina once said it was Makeba who first told her about T&T and about the appreciation that she, Makeba, was given in this country and the ruckus that took place at the Seamen and Waterfront Hall when Makeba did the Click Song there. Miriam had by this time dared to marry the then Stokeley Carmichael (Sekou Toure) and was as a result marginalised by white America and rejected outright by the American entertainment world: no work, no recordings, no tours. Makeba had to flee to Europe for survival.

I recall Makeba saying to us in Montreal (she was accompanying her husband) how fearful she was for Nina. She was quite prophetic in proclaiming that Nina was the next one to be placed on the firing line.

What Makeba and Hugh Massakela were to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa was comparable to what Nina meant to the African-American liberation struggle.

White America conspired to choke Nina slowly to artistic death but they could not kill her spirit. And though she underwent years of suffering from what appeared to be manic depression and bouts of alcoholism, she re-emerged fresh, full of verve and stoic defiance - a kind of Muhammad Ali of song.

She loved T&T and would come here often times incommunicado. I recall a local TV male personality, a "mixed fellah", once laughing loudly at a picture of her and even went on to ask his audience: "Who or what is that?" And knowing that she was one who frequented these shores I remember hoping that she was not around. I am not surprised to hear that when her biography was done in 1991, it was titled: I Put A Spell On You.

Thank you, Emrold!