When Eunice first completed her Saturday lessons at Mrs. Mazzy’s, she would go to Mrs. Miller’s and play with the Millers’ son David while she waited for her mother to finish the housework. As the children grew older, though, she was no longer allowed to hang out with her friend, a sudden slap in the face that she said was her “first introduction to being black.”
After that shock, she adopted another postlesson ritual and stopped every week at Owen’s Drug Store for a grilled cheese sandwich and an orange soda. In retrospect, that tradition was also tainted by racism and segregation, as she wasn’t permitted to sit at the store’s counter for her snack. “I ate it outside, standing,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t go in because I was black. But it was my reward for a good lesson, and then I walked home.”
Following four years of lessons, Mrs. Mazzanovich organized the Eunice Waymon Fund to raise money for the young pianist to continue her training after she left for high school. Mrs. Mazzy put an ad in the Time Bulletin newspaper and took up collection at church. As a thank-you for backers, she also put together ten-year-old Eunice’s debut recital, on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1943 at the Tryon Library.
The whole town was invited, and about two hundred people attended. “My mother had bought me a white dress for that day,” she recalled. “It had short little cap sleeves and a fitted waist.” Eunice was old enough to be nervous and self-conscious: “I was scared. I was trembling in my boots.”
Even before she started playing for her first audience, though, something profound happened that forever changed how Eunice Waymon understood the world. Her parents, who were seated in the front row, were asked to move to the back of the room to make space for other, white audience members.
“They were fixing the seats so that people could watch her fingers,” her mother said. “And that meant I would have to sit over there and not watch my daughter’s hands. And when she went over there and saw it, she came back and says, ‘I will not be playing. My mother is a black woman. And if she can’t sit where she can watch my hands, then I won’t be playing.’ She said, ‘Daddy, you can hit me, you can beat me, you can kick me, you can do anything you want to me, I will not.’ ”
Nervous as she was, Eunice Waymon took her stand. She couldn’t understand why her parents were being displaced, but she knew that it wasn’t right. And so she waited to start her performance until she felt that the situation had been corrected—a pattern that would become very familiar during her career onstage.
The Waymons were returned—somewhat awkwardly—to their original seats, and the recital went on as planned. Eunice was especially proud that she was allowed to improvise her last number; five audience members were asked to each choose a note, and then she created a piece using their selections. The juxtaposition of Bach-inspired structure and the freedom of improvisation, a thrilling tension that sat at the heart of Nina Simone’s artistry, was taking shape even at her very first concert.
Despite the slights—with the Millers, at Owen’s Drug Store—that she had already experienced in her young life, this recital was the first time that Eunice ran up against the full sting of racism. After confronting it directly, Eunice started to resent that racism was an issue her family never discussed. To her, that silence was irresponsible. “Of course I wish they had admitted that it existed and told me all about it, so that I wouldn’t have been so shocked when it happened,” she reflected. The Waymons may have been trying to shield their children from the full effects of prejudice, but of course there was no real escape. Even after taking on the mantle of an activist, though, Nina Simone focused on conditions larger than just her own experience.
“When [my mother] talked about Jim Crow and segregation, she rarely referred to it at that stage in her life, even though it did touch her,” said Nina’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly. “She did tell me about times when she was told her nose was too big, her lips were too full, and her skin was too dark. I assume she was told that there are only certain things you’ll be good for in your life.”
As she prepared for high school, despite her time on the road with her mother, Eunice remained especially close to her father, who continued to offer the tenderness that her mother held back. “He is the first person who showed me what to do when I had my period,” she said. “My father told me how to destroy the cotton and where to do it, because we had a wood stove and we had an outdoor toilet. My momma didn’t tell me anything.”
Her maturing body coincided with the arrival of her first boyfriend. When Edney Whiteside and his family moved into the Waymons’ neighborhood in Tryon, Eunice immediately took notice of the handsome boy, two years older than she was. Soon they were meeting every Sunday afternoon at four o’clock for a ritual drive, with no chaperones, to the town of Edneyville, from which he got his name. The parents all liked one another, and despite Mary Kate’s strict sense of decorum the young couple received everyone’s full approval.
“I had no boyfriend,” Simone recalled. “I was hanging around with a little gang of five girls, but most of them had been taken, and I felt so left out of things. I was alone most of the time. I tried to fit in, but I couldn’t. But when Edney came, something did fit, he was the perfect person to be with. He was quiet, sensitive as all hell. What I liked about him the most was how well he dressed and how much in order he kept. And we obeyed the rules, that American dream where you go together a long time and get married.” It was the first of many times that she believed a relationship could help her “fit in” and solve deeper problems.
Despite this new romance, however, her family and teachers decided that in order to continue with an education that would challenge her talents, Eunice would be sent to a girls’ boarding school, Allen High School in Asheville, North Carolina. The first thing to do, naturally, was to set her up with a piano teacher there. Mrs. Mazzanovich contacted a former music professor at Columbia University to look after Eunice in Asheville. That professor, in turn, arranged for weekly lessons with Clemens Sandresky, a Polish-born instructor, to be paid for by the still-active Eunice Waymon Fund.
Eunice arrived in Asheville in the fall of 1945 and was thrown into a far more rigorous educational environment than the one in Tryon. “It was a black boarding school for girls, with white teachers,” she said. “I like to say that I’ve been international all my life, because those teachers came from Redwood, California, from France. They had three black teachers, the superintendent was black, and the rest of them were white. Unbeknownst to me, these women were preparing me to be the world’s first great black classical pianist. That’s what they were preparing me to do.”
As it had been in Tryon, her schedule was demanding, the discipline of going from classes to homework to piano practice unrelenting. She would wake up at four o’clock in the morning to play the piano before the school day started. “In high school, all I did, sweetheart, was study,” she would tell Kiilu Nyasha in 1986. “If it was not the piano, it was studies in science and French and the regular studies that you have in high school. I studied all the damn time.”
This intense focus, however, probably had as much to do with discomfort in her new setting as it did with the school’s strict approach. Though only about sixty miles from Tryon, Asheville had a very different vibe, and the cultural shock may have propelled the teenager to take solace in the familiarity of her strict piano routine. She described the contrast to Maya Angelou—“from the Black town with its easy rhythms, its smiling and familiar faces, its well-known sights and scents, to the bordered and tight, frightened and frightening ash-pale face of white Asheville.”
While at Allen, Eunice kept up a frequent correspondence with her mentor, Mrs. Mazzanovich. “She constantly, constantly in her letters assured me of her love,” Simone said. “I mean, it got to the place where she knew how much I needed to hear it. But she would underline sentences—‘Of course I love you child, you know I love you.’ And she’d send me poems, the most beautiful poems that she