|
Nina
Simone CDs
Forever
Young, Gifted & Black: Songs of Freedom and Spirit (2006)
/
Anthology (2003)
Nina: The Essential Nina Simone
(2000, 2003)
The Very Best Of Nina Simone, 1967-1972 : Sugar
In My Bowl (1998) /
The Blues (1968, 1991) /
Compact Jazz: Nina Simone
(1989-1991)
*
* * * *
Nina Remembers in
I Put a
Spell on You
A Review by Rudolph Lewis Here it is three years after Nina
Simone's death (2003) and ten years after the
publication of I Put a Spell on You (1993) and I
am only now taking a serious look at her life, and a
fascinating one it was, indeed—from
a backwoods child prodigy to a beloved national and
international star.
Nina's
memoir, I Put a Spell on You,
is excellent in construction. It is called an
autobiography. Well, it's not. It is indeed a memoir.
There is no intention to tell all. So many details that
could have been included were, I suspect, excluded for
literary effect. It
is a dense drama intended to represent certain aspects
of her character and her vision of the world. It is
short on reflection and self-analysis Though I
have finished the book, I cannot pretend that I know
her any better. But I love what she has achieved in
this book and its possible implications.
Clearly,
she as an adult on her own was a wild woman, a free
spirit, frightening to a degree, and, in some ways, to
be pitied for her naiveté and trust of others she barely
knows. There remains
a mystery about her. In fear and awe, men are attracted
to such mysteries as Nina. Maybe the evangelism of her
early childhood days went deeper, much deeper than she
understood herself.
Nina's father before the Depression
was the leading breadwinner of the family. This reversed
during the Depression and the mother, an itinerant
Methodist minister, along with the children, provided
much more than the father who lost all his businesses
and became ill and unable to rise to his former economic
status. The mother because of her work, her ideals, and
her religious blindness did not provide the girl
children, specifically Nina, the affection they needed
and desired.
In her piano teacher "Miz Mazzy," Nina
found the motherly affection she needed. In some sense
her appraisal, love, and respect of her father declined
in that he gave into the power and influence of the
mother. One of the sons also became estranged from his
father, I suspect, also because his father did not meet
the manly standards of the larger society.
Two loving parents do not guarantee a
set outcome, as Nina exposes. Loving people in your life
are indeed important. Nina had her mother's white
employer, Mrs. Miller, who provided the initial money
for piano training. Nina had her English music trainer,
Muriel Massinovitch (Miz Mazzy) who was a
substitute mother, her "white momma." She had the entire
local town (Tryon), including churches, that raised
money for her education.
There was a great deal of repression
of sexual energies achieved by Nina to get to Juilliard,
including her sacrifice of Edney the Cherokee. She was
16 and he 18 when she for New York. She went back 28 years later to rekindle a
romance that had long been dead. He had married Nina's
best girl friend soon after Nina left Tyron and
had by Nina's final return five children; and
Nina had two marriages and a daughter. For her to return to
her hometown expecting that Edney after all those years
would be ready to leave and go off with her was indeed
the work of an extraordinary imagination. Edney's mother
calls her and tells her that she cannot come again to
the house for Edney. That it was now too late.
Spitefully, Nina demands a return of her high school
graduation photo that had set on the family piano for 28
years. Edney's mother hands it to Nina through her
limousine window.
Away in New York frees Nina of some
of the sexual restrictions that bound her in the North
Carolina mountains. As a result, I suspect, of the
mother-daughter conflict, her first best friend became a
stylish prostitute. From her she learned a bit about men
and their unusual desires.
In response to the apparent weakness
of her father, Nina makes a hasty marriage to a white
beatnik, Don Ross, a marriage which was a means of
dealing with her loneliness. But the marriage didn't
work long because her beatnik husband did not possess
the work ethic, the drive for success, in which she was
instilled. She ended up taking care of him and being as
lonely as before. Moreover, the relationship lacked the
desired passion. Then she marries a Harlem cop,
Andy Stroud, who was
rumored to have thrown a man off the roof. Before she
marries him, he beats the living daylights out of her;
ties her hands behind her back and puts a gun to her
head and forces her to interpret the letters of Edney
she had kept over the years. Before they married, soon
after, Shroud
claims he did not remember the incident.
After her marriage Andy takes over
managing her career, which eventually leads to problems
with the IRS. According to Nina, she signed no contracts
and allowed him to deal with setting up the businesses
and handling her money. She says she did not know how
much money she had: "Ask Andy." As the story is being
told there is a suggestion that this relationship, this
marriage, will end tragically with many recriminations.
We are kept in suspense until near the end of the book.
And again there are few details. Maybe it was the intent
to protect her daughter, Lisa Celeste.
In the
memoir, there certainly is an extraordinary reversal,
that is, from an alienation from the mother (a seeming
hatred) to a fierce hatred of a father she adored,
coming immediately after her break with her 2nd husband
(Andy Stroud). It was like a lightning storm, seemingly
provoked by the smallest of things.
 |
Being a
star made her fiercely alone. No one seemed to
have prepared her for that. Maybe there is no
preparation to soothe the ills of genius, especially
when it desires full freedom. The politics of the book
and the relationship she had with political activists
seem a minor note, though she was indeed a political
activist, of sorts, and deeply sympathetic to the civil
rights movement and toward SNCC's black power activists,
like Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. But her
expressions comes off as a kind of ranting. Certainly,
she was not a nationalist, though some of her songs,
like "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black," were
nationalistic. "Four Women" might be the first black
feminist song. |
Maybe she was disturbed. With genius
and privilege we enter a new realm of being, a different
way of existing in the world. Surely, according to her
memoir, this is the case with Nina. I wonder whether the
"disturbed" or the "lost of mind" aspects people note
are not tinged with moral judgments. For instance, she
had a proclivity in certain settings of pulling off her
clothes, and dancing naked in public. How much of this
was influenced by her revolt against early childhood
evangelism, her mother's puritan morality, and her
father's lack of manliness (seemingly) is anyone's
guess.
These acts might have been influenced
by her attraction to white bohemianism (on two
continents). Then she had a tendency towards excessive
drinking, gin and champagne. In some sense, she has a lot in common with
the LeRoi Jones of Greenwich Village portrayed by Amiri
Baraka. Then there are probably her notions of the
privileges of stardom and fame, and her notions of what
personal freedom means, and her desire for and to be
associated with “black power,” all of which she
relished, seemingly as a result of her desires for
security and self worth. At our best, I suspect we can
say, that was Nina, and leave it at that. There
are a number of episodes that seem quite revealing but
then seem no more than good healthy fun, that is, in the
telling.
There is her attempt to seduce Louis
Farrakhan. She notes his small feet—the
smallest she had ever seen on a man. He wanted to talk
politics and she continued to watch his feet and drink
gin. Finally she asks him to go with her upstairs. He
continued to talk politics—so
she sent him home. There is also her relationship with
Wilhelm Langenberg (Big Willy), through whom she became
"a Philips artist." Nina writes, "Andy got angry with me
over something and Big Willy stepped in and said, 'Andy,
look at you, you have no deep sense of your colour
—
you don't really know who you are. Nina has colour and
she has the weight of forty million people on her back.
You know you should be gentle with her'. I don't know
who was more shocked, Andy or me."
Later, after splitting with Andy, she
goes to Holland, has dinner with Big Willy, returns to
her hotel room, and Nina writes, "I got to my knees and
bared my breasts, took my dress down and said, 'I've
come to marry you, because you always said that you
should marry me if I wasn't married to Andy'." After
getting down on his knees with her, Big Willy declines
and walks out of the room. Big Willy was invested in
apartheid. He died a few months later.
There's also an interesting episode
in I Put a Spell on You between Nina Simone and
C.C. Dennis, a Liberian plantation owner, which occurs
after an episode with a Liberian witch doctor, which
helps her to sort out her relationship with her father.
Dennis was 70 and she in her mid-30s. C.C. was, Nina
writes, "more exciting and attractive than any man I had
ever met half his age." This interchange goes on for
several pages.
She continues, "out in the forest in
this huge mansion I wasn't the same woman I was in my
house by the ocean." Though a liberated woman, Nina
liked commanding men. C.C. told her, "In Africa men are
the boss." (You may recall she married a
Harlem cop who she feared.) C.C. promised her (this was
in the mid-70s) $25,000 a year to spend as she liked and
marriage, a role as his wife, if she could bring him to
life. "It was not a success. I crept back to my own room
sore, physically sore, and confused." She did not
provide details.
During the military coup in 1980,
Nina writes, "C.C. Dennis died two weeks later, his
heart broken. Before he died he burnt his mansion to the ground
so Samuel Doe's men couldn't take it. They say C.C. and
Martha Prout [the younger woman C.C. married] were among
those people paraded naked through the streets. It could
have been me." During the late 70s and early 80s Nina
did indeed go through some tough times even threats of
arrest as a result of tax problems. But she recovered.
Her fans loved her and wanted her to be an unquenchable
star.
Nina also took on younger lovers in
Barbados and Liberia. But clearly she was attracted to
older men with power. By the time this book was written
Nina was about 60. She seemed to have sorted out her
personal life and her career. Ironically, she seemed to
have been guilty of the same maternal neglect of which
she accused her mother that caused her considerable
emotional turmoil. That conflict seemed, however, near
the end of her life resolved. It would indeed be of
interest to read Lisa Celeste and her memories of her
mother. One is left wondering, How
much of Nina's character is representative of all
American black women? As far as we can see through her
eyes, Nina's mother and father had a partnership
relationship. He was not the ornamentation that Nina
found in younger men. Seemingly, for her mother, he
played a vital role as husband and father. But he was
not "boss" in the C.C. (African) sense of the word. Her
father was no patriarchal (commander like Andy Shroud or
the PM of Barbados or C.C. or Big Willy) figure.
For Nina, it seems, because her
father was not boss, he was not fully man and when she
overheard him lying to his son that he was more than a
partner, but rather fully the boss of the family, Nina
concluded that not only was he not full man (carrying
the economic weight of the family and thus able to make
decisions beyond his wife) but he was also a liar and
someone that she could not trust at all. Thus the break
with her father. Is this the "natural" impulse of
American black women, namely, a rejection of black men
who only pretend to have a "big voice," when power
actually lies in other quarters? Clearly, Nina
throughout much of her life suffered from insecurity and
loneliness.
Her father, the most important man in
her life, to a point, could never save her from either
malady. Did she demand too much? Children always do. And
maybe too many American black women demand too much of
their men, or not enough of that which they can indeed
provide, namely, love and respect.
posted 3 July 2006
* * * * *
* * * * *
* * * * *
update 3 November 2007 |
