In Asheville, then, Eunice Waymon was searching for affection where she could get it. But what she claimed was really happening at the time was that she was being kept from Edney, whom she would regard as perhaps the great love of her life.
When Eunice left for Allen, her beloved Edney would write her letters every week; acutely aware of the social pressures of an academically competitive high school, she hid these from her friends because his spelling was so bad. He would drive up to visit her most Sundays. After a while, though, the letters’ frequency dipped, and Eunice began to feel as if something was off between them. Her gut was right. Not long after Edney’s correspondence became more sporadic, she discovered that he had started seeing Annie May, her best friend back in Tryon.
“I cried and I cried,” Nina said later, “and one day I confronted him, and he said, ‘Yes, I’m going with Annie May—you’re not home and I miss you too much.’ And I got really worried, my love was leaving me.”
As graduation approached, she was working feverishly, practicing longer, and hearing from Edney less often. Mrs. Mazzanovich was encouraging her to go to New York’s Juilliard School of Music, but Edney had issued her an ultimatum. “He told me, ‘If we don’t get married in June, it’s not gonna happen. If you go to New York, you’re never coming back and I know it.’ ”
Eunice and Edney never slept together. “We petted all the time and we waited for our parents to approve our going to bed,” she said. “I was deeply in love with him—he could look at me and I’d get hot.
“I never got over the fact that Edney and I never went to bed. We should have done it years before. I had those feelings from the time I was twelve.”
It soon became clear, though, that even her strong attraction to her childhood sweetheart wasn’t enough to stop her from pursuing a career as a classical pianist, and she decided to move to New York. In a last-ditch effort to keep Eunice from leaving, Edney made an attempt at overpowering her sexually, an attack made more bizarre by the cavalier way she brushed it off in later retellings. “He tried to rape me, but he didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Somebody had talked about raping; he didn’t know what to do and it was pitiful. He was just trying to keep me there any way he could.”
Eunice was offered a scholarship to the world-renowned music school at the liberal arts college Oberlin. Mrs. Miller advised Mary Kate Waymon that she should accept the offer so that she could be around kids her own age with different interests, perhaps the closest thing to a normal college experience that someone with Eunice’s talent could have. But the Eunice Waymon Fund benefactors and Mrs. Mazzy continued to insist that she pursue the conservatory focus of Juilliard, so the teenager had a big decision to make.
Edney attended her Allen High graduation—at which she spoke as the class valedictorian—but because he knew that he was losing her to her musical aspirations he decided to marry Annie May after all. The demise of this relationship would stay with Simone forever and, in some ways, shape the person she would become. Years later, after she had become famous, she even came back to Tryon to declare that now she was ready to be with him, but by then Edney Whiteside was a broken-down, middle-aged man, in no way suited for the life she was leading.
The way that things played out with Edney would become familiar to Nina over the years, with a string of different lovers; she would fall deeply in love, then hesitate or sabotage the situation, propelled out of those relationships by the emotional explosion. Sometimes she was afraid to get hurt; other times she was unwilling to compromise her own desires. But always, she would later second-guess herself and her heart and attempt to rekindle the flame, only to find that her efforts left her even more shattered, wounded, or angry.
Nina’s failure to make Edney her own would haunt her well into her adult life. “How did Eunice Waymon, protected by the customs and comforts of the Black South, emerge as today’s brilliant, obsidian gem, Nina Simone?” asked Maya Angelou in 1970.
“ ‘I found a youthful love and lost it,’ Nina said. ‘That was the turning point. I lost love and found a career. . . . [But] I’m a long way from compensating for what I gave up.’ ”
CHAPTER 3
I had been looked down all my life, being colored. Now I had the added stigma of show business.
Despite Mrs. Miller’s case for Oberlin, following her graduation Eunice opted to move to New York City. She would spend the summer of 1950 there, studying intensely prior to the auditions for music conservatories. The plan was to attend Juilliard for six weeks, with her primary focus on preparing for the examination for a scholarship at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute.
She moved in with a friend of her mother’s, another female preacher named Mrs. Steinermayer, who lived in Harlem on 145th Street. Shy and overwhelmed by the city, Eunice didn’t stray far from the Steinermayer apartment and didn’t make many friends. She did apparently meet a few men during this time, though—including a boyfriend named Chico. He was the first to call her by the nickname “Niña,” using its Spanish pronunciation, as a term of endearment.
Mostly, though, her time was occupied by work at Juilliard. She studied with a teacher named Carl Friedberg, whom she held in the highest esteem, working on repertoire by Beethoven, Bach, and Handel and perfecting her finger placement and posture. She had a lesson with Friedberg once a week but spent four or five hours a day practicing.
A month after she moved north, the rest of the Waymon family relocated to Philadelphia in order to be closer to her, operating under the assumption (or at least the hope) that she would land the invitation to attend Curtis. After a long summer of preparation and dedication, she sat for her exam in August.
Though she was pleased with the performance she delivered, Eunice Waymon was denied the scholarship. For the rest of her life, she maintained that she didn’t know the reason for her rejection but that eventually those around her made it clear that it was because she was black and female. Her brother Carrol was particularly vocal about this theory.
“There was some talk about they were not going to accept an unknown black for Curtis, and [that] even if they had accepted a black, it would have been a male,” said Carrol. “But not a little black girl, unknown, and more than that, a very poor black unknown. The people in the know suspected it was simply because she was black. It was a double, race and poverty . . . had she been a rich kid and black, it might have been different, but not a little poor black girl.”
In retellings of the story, Simone would sometimes alter key details depending on the point she was trying to make. “I went to Curtis and I passed the test,” she said in 1984. “I know it was good—I was, at that time, kind of humble. Not too much these days. I was playing Czerny and Liszt and Rachmaninoff and Bach, and I knew it was good.
“I didn’t understand why I didn’t get that scholarship for anything. And there were people around me who knew about my talent as well, and they said, ‘Nina, it’s because you are black.’ And that shocked me.”
Sometimes she placed the focus of her rejection from Curtis not on the institute but on Juilliard, implying that it was a failure of the program she completed to prepare for the exam. In 1970, she presented the situation this way:
“ ‘When I was seventeen, I left my love to go north and study. I had gone to the Juilliard School, in New York City, for a summer’s course, and at seventeen I went back to compete for a scholarship.’ Pause. ‘I was not accepted.’ ”
And while sometimes she made a point of saying that she had received a scholarship for her summer studies at Juilliard, she also claimed the opposite. In 1967