Her father, John Divine, had lost his dry-cleaning business during the Depression, only to be idled altogether by intestinal obstruction. Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina, the sixth of her parents’ eight children. Far from detracting from her civil rights heroism, it makes that achievement all the more astonishing. Light’s prose is often hackneyed, but he provides an even more probing account of Simone’s inner struggles than Garbus.
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Just how difficult is the story of Alan Light’s biography, What Happened, Miss Simone?, which was “inspired” by Garbus’s film and based on the same archive of source material, including Simone’s diaries and letters. “I have to live with Nina, and that is very difficult,” she confessed in an interview. Simone was also deeply tormented about her desires for women. (Lisa Simone is an executive producer of the documentary.) She had a weakness for tough men and hustlers: “A love affair with fire,” as her daughter Lisa Simone told Garbus. She suffered from bipolar disorder, a condition that remained undiagnosed until the 1980s, when her demons had all but taken over and a Dutch fan saved her from near vagrancy. White supremacy was not the only hellhound on her trail. Simone’s courage was undeniable, but it was also a shield, even a mask, designed to protect her from hostile forces, real and imagined. As Dick Gregory recalls in Garbus’s film, “We all wanted to say it, but she said it.” The mere fact that Simone dared to say “Mississippi goddam” represented a revolution in black political oratory.
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Oh but this whole country is full of lies “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet,” Simone coyly announces, before working herself into a furious assault on white counsels of patience: “Mississippi Goddam” was written in 1963, the same year as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and provided a sharper expression of the mood among young civil rights activists. Her most famous song, however, was one that she composed herself. She did not so much interpret songs as take possession of them. Her repertoire was catholic-Gershwin, Ellington, Jacques Brel, Kurt Weill, Bob Dylan-but whatever she sang ended up sounding like a Nina Simone tune. Frustrated in her ambition to become a classical pianist, she smuggled Bach into the night club, combined his music with folk, blues, and jazz, and enforced recital hall rules: those who made any noise while she played could expect a cold stare or a tongue-lashing. This exchange appears early in Liz Garbus’s remarkable documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, and it’s a startling moment, for if Simone, who died in 2003, conveyed anything on stage, it was fearlessness. “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear. Then, suddenly, an answer occurred to her. “It’s just a feeling,” she replied, seemingly flustered by the question. In 1968, an interviewer for New York public television asked the singer and pianist Nina Simone what freedom meant to her.
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