Introduction

INTRODUCTION “ re you ready, black people?” In the summer of 1969— before, during, and after A the “three days of peace and music” being held at Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York— another all- star outdoor music festival was taking place in Mount Morris Park, north- east of Manhattan’s Central Park. The Harlem Cultural Fes- tival, also sometimes called the “Black Woodstock,” happened over the course of six Sunday afternoons from June 29 to Au- gust 24, with legends like B.B. King, the Staple Singers, and Sly & the Family Stone playing to an estimated one hundred thousand concert goers. Tony Lawrence, a New York nightclub singer and some- time movie actor, was the producer, promoter, and host of the events. On campuses and in black neighborhoods throughout the country, unrest and upheaval were at a fever pitch, so while the city’s mayor John Lindsay spoke at the event (and was intro- duced as a “blue- eyed soul brother”), the New York Police De- partment refused to provide security for the concerts. In their stead, a delegation of Black Panthers managed the crowds. At one of the July shows, Jesse Jackson addressed the throngs of people. “As I look out at us rejoice today,” he said, “I was hoping it would be in preparation for the major fight we as a people have on our hands here in this nation. Some of you are laughing because you don’t know any better, and others laughing because you are too mean to cry. But you need to know that 2 ALAN LIGHT some mean stuff is going down. A lot of you can’t read news- papers. A lot of you can’t read books, because our schools have been mean and left us illiterate or semiliterate. But you have the mental capacity to read the signs of the times.” It was a time of joy and danger, of liberation and fear, test- ing the opportunities and the limits of empowerment. And no performance over those six summer Sundays would capture the moment, in all its contrasts, more than the appearance of Nina Simone. Are you ready to smash white things? Burn buildings? Are you ready? Are you ready to build black things? Simone’s concert came near the end of the series, on Au- gust 17. Just a few weeks earlier, she had recorded “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” inspired by the memory of her friend and mentor Lorraine Hansberry, an anthem of hope for the future of a civil rights movement that had already been battered and ripped apart by murders, philosophical and tactical divisions, and government interference; still, the song would be named the “Black National Anthem” by the Congress of Racial Equal- ity and covered by Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway. When she took the stage at Mount Morris Park— in a long yellow- and- black- print dress, her hair teased into a sort of Afro- bouffant, massive silver earrings dangling to her neck— she made explicit the tensions and the possibilities of an event celebrating black culture and black pride in the aftermath of the riots that had erupted in urban areas during the previous summers. Backed by a loose but propulsive and earnest- looking group of musicians wearing dashikis, she dug into a set focused on pro- WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? 3 test material of various moods: the brand- new “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”; “Four Women,” her controversial examina- tion of the black female experience, and the insidious power held by varying black skin tones, in America; a fiery new song titled “Revolution,” with the refrain “Don’t you know it’s going to be all right,” borrowed from the Beatles’ hit of the same name; the joyous “Ain’t Got No— I Got Life” medley, from the “American Tribal Love- Rock Musical” Hair, which had opened on Broadway the previous year and was still running, about sev- enty blocks south of the Harlem stage. But it was the final number of her performance, a recita- tion of “Are You Ready, Black People?,” the battle cry written by David Nelson of the proto- rap group the Last Poets, that would define Simone’s performance for history. “I did not memorize enough, so I have to read it,” she told the crowd. “It’s for you.” And as her band banged out a rhythm on the congas and chanted, “Yes, I’m ready,” in response to the poem’s ques- tions, she bit down on Nelson’s words. Are you ready to change yourself ?— You know what I’m talking about. Are you ready to go inside yourself and change yourself ? The Harlem audience yelled its approval. They shouted af- firmations at the challenge to “smash white things,” to “go inside yourself and change yourself.” Simone built the poem to a climax, then said quietly, “See you later.” She left the stage as the band kept the groove going. But once again, on that day and the days that followed, true revolutionary action failed to materialize; the chaos the crowd chanted about did not ensue. And whether or not she still lit- erally believed in her music’s power to inspire social or politi- 4 ALAN LIGHT cal change, soon thereafter, Nina Simone— who often referred to herself as “the only singer in the civil rights movement”— would reach a breaking point in her frustration with America and with what she saw as the dwindling potential of true black progress. “We had no leaders,” she would say in 1989. “Lorraine Hans- berry was dead, Langston Hughes was dead, Eldridge Cleaver was in jail. Paul Robeson was long since been dead, Stokely Carmichael was gone, Malcolm X was dead, and Martin Luther King was dead. We had nobody left.” On top of the scarcity of true visionaries, Simone was also disappointed with the men in the Student Non- violent Coor- dinating Committee, who she had been hoping would take up arms and lead a real revolution. “I became very disillusioned about it all,” she recalled. “I felt that there was no more movement anymore, and that I wasn’t part of anything.” Earlier in her life, she had invested years into the dream of becoming America’s first great black classical pianist; after the disap- pointment of abandoning that aspiration, she was losing hope in her second grand ambition— the struggle for racial equality that had dominated her recent work. Only a few years after the Harlem Cultural Festival, Nina Simone would renounce her country, living out most of her final decades drifting in exile through the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. Although she had steadily produced albums between Little Girl Blue— the 1958 debut that made her a sensation— and (the presciently titled) It Is Finished in 1974, she released just three more studio albums before her death on April 21, 2003. After her reign as one of the culture’s most influential art- ists— as a singer and an activist— Simone’s later life began as a sad, disturbing saga. She spent years struggling against manag- ers and record labels, trying to wrest control of her work from them. She frequently fought with those closest to her. She found WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? 5 and lost various loves, real and imagined, and her sometimes- obsessive quest for another husband dominated her thoughts until her last days. (“Most of my love affairs were too blind and too desperate,” she said. “That’s how I lost them.”) But her final act also had its triumphs. Following many inconsistent years, she would ultimately emerge— against all odds— as a financially solvent, beloved icon. She would appear on stages until the last year of her life, often entertaining lengthy standing ovations after a show. “What I hear about Nina is either ‘Her music is fantastic’ or ‘Oh, she was a difficult person,’ ” said Gerrit De Bruin, her close and trusted companion throughout the tumultuous 1980s and ’90s. “But she was a very lovely person as well, a very loving person. If she hadn’t been such a genius, nothing would have happened. She would have been in the gutter, a bag lady or whatever. But the world accepted a lot because it was the genius artist Nina.” Most of this troubled existence, of course, had to do with her specific circumstances: being a piano prodigy who grew up in the rural and segregated South, with complicated relation- ships to her family, her music, and her sexuality. Her mother was a traveling minister who, Simone always felt, cared more about her parishioners than her daughter, while her beloved father eventually (inevitably?) disappointed her late in his life, causing her to disown him before his death. Her letters and di- aries reveal a woman who feared her own husband, questioned her sexual preference, battled depression. But it’s hard not to look at Nina Simone’s triumphant, tor- tured life as, in some ways, a reflection of her time, her race, her gender. If she was both brilliant and unstable, did she not live through a moment in history that was also brilliant and u n s t a b l e ? Attallah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s daughters— whose 6 ALAN LIGHT family lived next door to Simone’s family for several years in Mount Vernon, New York— put it another way. Simone “was not at odds with the times,” she said. “The times were at odds with her. When a person moves to their own kind of clock, spirit, flow, you’re always in congress with yourself.

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