As she got older, Eunice’s schedule of services became increasingly grueling. She went to church in the morning and played for Sunday school, then at eleven o’clock for the choir, and then for two sessions of programs in the afternoon. There was prayer meeting every Wednesday night, choir practice on Fridays. But after a while, though she loved music in her bones, she began to grow bored with all of this church work.
Nor was she entirely at ease with the zeal of the revival environment. The visceral pleasures of the music were a reflection of an all-encompassing faith she hadn’t fully embraced. “My early joys were mixed with fear,” Simone said later. “The church where I spent most of my time spilled over with music and revival. Joy danced around the walls as lively as children, and music was the air we breathed and the water we drank. To watch the people in church meet and greet their God was like watching a reunion between old friends.
“But at the same time, I felt left out. Included in the general happiness, but left out from the deeper secrets. I was afraid when my mother spoke in tongues. Or when she became silent. Especially when she became silent and went into her private place. I feared that the very thing that provided me with joy could also bring about my alienation.”
Playing constantly in church may have been dull at times, intimidating at others, but the rigorous discipline she developed there laid the foundation that informed her playing for the rest of her life. “Whatever she did, I would trace it back to her house, that black Baptist church,” comedian and activist Dick Gregory would say. “She was overqualified for the blues—she had a good sense of the whole piece, she wasn’t somebody just there yelling a song. She had something to go on, and you trace that back to the mother, and to church involvement, and the aspirations she had for her.”
The music of her mother’s church may not have been her ideal outlet, but it was evident that Eunice Waymon had exceptional ability and that she had a structure in which she could develop it. Soon she would find music that would touch her own soul the way the Gospel reached her mother, and she would be ready to give all that it required.
CHAPTER 2
“There was a white woman who had money, she heard about me. There was another white woman who was a music teacher. The two of them got together and did a job for me.” Her even teeth show in a half-grin. “And on me.”
—IN AN INTERVIE W WITH MAYA ANGELOU, 1970
If church music was constricting Eunice, it did also provide opportunities she had never dreamed of. When she was six years old, in 1939, the community choir performed at the Tryon Theater, with Eunice accompanying the group and playing some solos. She later described it as the day that saved her life.
Two women in the audience took notice of her. One, Mrs. Miller, employed Eunice’s mother as a housecleaner, while the other, Muriel Mazzanovich, was a local piano teacher. When they heard her play, it was immediately clear to both that this young girl had a gift and should be taking formal lessons. They approached Mary Kate after the concert and convinced her that her daughter should have formal weekly instruction to nurture her talent.
Fifty years later, Nina Simone still remembered showing up for her first lesson with “Miss Mazzy,” a British woman who had moved to Tryon with her husband, a Russian painter. The house was set back from the road, and the studio was made out of local cement, with a fireplace and a high ceiling. If it sounds like an intimidating space, it made a strong impression on Eunice when she first arrived.
“It was on a Saturday afternoon at three o’clock,” she said. “I’ll never forget it, scared me half to death. I remember how she looked, how she smelled, it all registered at one time. She frightened me. It was a huge studio, at least twenty to twenty-five feet high, and her husband was painting when I got there.”
By this time, Mrs. Mazzanovich was already a middle-aged woman, and although she was tiny she had a formidable presence. “She was so elegant,” Simone said. “She was from England, and you know how the English are. She wasn’t an old white woman. She was petite. She looked like a bird, she ate like a bird, she talked very fast like that—‘Eunice, you must do it this way. Bach would like it this way. Now you do it. You try again. All right?’ ”
Miss Mazzy always wore her silver hair in a bun. Eunice thought she was very pretty and remembered that she always rewarded her with candy at the end of a lesson.
“I thought all white people was like that,” she said. “That’s one of the shocks I got when I found out about prejudice. I just thought they were hard to get to know and somewhat standoffish, but all elegant. I had no way of knowing they weren’t.” Maintaining her own sense of elegance, and trying to create a truly black version of sophistication and pride, would be crucial to Simone’s identity—and it was initially inspired by this childhood mentor.
Simone’s relationship with Muriel Mazzanovich would become one of the most purely warm, positive relationships in her life. “Mrs. Mazzanovich used to hold out her arms to me every time I came,” she said, “and hug me, and kiss me, and say, ‘You’re home.’ She always said that I was her child—that my mother birthed me, but that I was actually spiritually her child. Because she loved me, and she took more care of me than my mother.”
Though her teacher’s affection was welcome, even necessary, it wasn’t a perfect relationship. Eunice felt ashamed when Miss Mazzy would call her pupil her “little colored child.” And Mrs. Mazzanovich had a temper, a quick fuse that Simone felt she inherited.
Her teacher introduced Eunice to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer who would be her greatest influence. Bach’s work not only became her ideal of how she wanted to play but also served as a model for the ways she would structure her own music later in her career.
“Bach is technically perfect,” she said. “He’s a mathematician, and all the notes make sense mathematically. They add up to something, and they always add up to climaxes, like waves of the ocean gathering momentum as they get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then, after a while, after so many waves have gathered, you will see a tornado or you will see the ocean come up and destroy land.
“When you play Bach, every note is executed flawlessly. It has to be. And every note is connected to the next note. And when you get thirty-two or sixty-four notes, they all make sense with your left hand, and then you have a second voice with your right hand, you’ve got two voices going on. And when that happens, my actual voice came in as a third voice. It wasn’t as strong as my right and left hand, but it added enough weight to climax.
“Mozart was close to Bach,” she continued, “but he wasn’t half as deep. Beethoven was a very forceful composer who composed things in waves and in storms. But he didn’t have what Bach had. Bach did it in a technical way, Beethoven did it in an emotional way.”
The precision of Eunice’s training would later be obvious to the musicians who played with her as Nina Simone. “The band suffered because of Mrs. Mazzanovich,” said Al Schackman, the guitarist who would become Simone’s most lasting collaborator, “because when Nina made a mistake studying with Mazzanovich, she had to repeat the phrase ten times. So we would go to practice and if anyone made a mistake we would have to play the piece ten times.”
Eunice walked three miles every Saturday to take her hour-long lessons. Mrs. Mazzanovich also instructed her in posture, proper placement of the piano stool, how to bow; she taught her how to be a performer and an artist. At the end of the session, they would play duets together.
Her life was highly regimented. She was waking up at three o’clock in the morning, studying and doing her chores before she went to school, then practicing piano for hours. Studying Bach, singing gospel in church, playing blues for her father, being both a preacher’s daughter and a prodigy supported by the community, young Eunice Waymon had to perform a balancing act that involved managing complicated ideas about race, various cultures, and shifting priorities.