She was ten years old when a white couple arrived late to her piano recital and someone asked her parents to give up their front-row seats. Her mother and father stood without a word and started toward the back. Eunice Waymon sat at that piano in front of everyone and announced there would be no music — not one note — until her parents were returned to the front row. They were. Only then did she begin to play.
The whole town of Tryon, North Carolina had come because everybody already knew the Waymon girl could play. She had been at the piano since she was three. Church pianist by six, working the pedals before her feet could comfortably reach them.
A woman named Miz Mazzy — an Englishwoman who had settled in Tryon — gave her Bach every Saturday. And Bach decided the rest of her life.
*”Once I understood Bach’s music,”* she wrote, *”I never wanted to be anything other than a concert pianist.”*
Not a singer. Not a nightclub star. A Black girl from a preacher’s family in the Jim Crow South was going to walk onto a classical concert stage — and there had never been one who looked like her.
The town of Tryon believed it with her. Miz Mazzy and others set up a fund with Eunice’s name on it. Black and white residents of Tryon put their money in. In return, the child played free recitals. She practiced five hours a day.
After Juilliard, the real target was the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia — the most selective conservatory in the country, free to attend, the place that would make the dream real. Her whole family believed so completely that they packed up and moved to Philadelphia to be near her.
The Waymons bet everything on one audition.
She played it well. Then the letter came.
Curtis said no.
She was eighteen years old. She had carried a whole town’s fund and a whole town’s pride on her hands. Her family had uprooted itself on the strength of those same hands.
She did not believe for a single second that she wasn’t good enough.
“I knew I was good enough, but they turned me down,” she said years later. “It took me about six months to realize it was because I was Black.”
For a while, she stopped. The girl who had practiced five hours a day thought about leaving music entirely.
When she went back, the work she could find was small. She taught piano to other people’s children. Then a student mentioned a summer job playing piano in a bar in Atlantic City for ninety dollars a week — double what Eunice was earning.
She figured if her student could get hired, so could she.
The bar owner told her the job had one condition: she would have to sing, not just play.
She had never worked as a singer. She started anyway — six nights a week, six hours a night.
Her mother was a Methodist minister who would not have wanted to know her daughter was playing in a bar. So Eunice Waymon didn’t use her real name. She borrowed “Nina” from a nickname and “Simone” from a French actress she admired.
And the voice no conservatory had ever asked to hear turned out to be one of the great voices of the century.
She put the Bach in it anyway. The training Curtis had refused to certify went straight into her playing — the counterpoint and structure sitting underneath songs that sounded like nothing else on the radio.
She sang “I Loves You, Porgy” and the country heard her. She sang “Mississippi Goddam” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” and stood on civil rights platforms beside Martin Luther King. She recorded dozens of albums and wrote hundreds of songs.
In 1993, a reporter asked her about Curtis. She said her name had grown bigger than the whole institute.
She was right.
In 2003, more than fifty years after that letter, the Curtis Institute gave Nina Simone an honorary degree.
She was seventy years old and ill with cancer at her home in the south of France.
Two days later, she died.
It comes back to two chairs in a front row.
At ten, she had already decided her mother and father would sit where they could be seen — or there would be no performance at all.
Curtis, at eighteen, told her to take a seat at the back of the whole profession.
She did then what she had done in that library as a child.
She would not sit where they put her
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