Nina Simone Who Drinks Milk at the Liquor Bar is Still Singing in Liberia
by AUDREY SHIPP
in Fall 2019
Aliana Grace Bailey, "Interpreting the Body as Sculpture," 2013
"Liberia in Africa is a mere dependency of Southern slaveholders and American Colonizationalists."
– Martin Delany (1812-1885), The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
Dancing naked to strip herself of the burden of history with its weight of the middle passage, slavery, and segregation, Nina Simone was drinking champagne and reveling in the freedom of her first days in Liberia. The fifty-odd attendees at the club she was visiting egged her on, emboldening Nina for at least two hours with their clapping and shouting,which made her feel at home in the West African country. Encouraged by singer and Civil Rights activist, Miriam Makeba of South Africa, Nina had not hesitated to accept the invite in the mid 70s following the decline in the US of the Black Panther Party and the tragic assassinations of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. She accepted the invitation not only because of the suffocating social and political conditions of life in the U.S. but also because Makeba, famous for her voice and politics and referred to as “MamaAfrica,” had promised to be a matchmaker for a now-divorced Nina Simone. And who better to serve as matchmaker for Nina than fellow vocalist and activist Makeba who had been married to men of extraordinary talent and social standing such as activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and musician Hugh Masekela.
Choosing exile in Liberia was a way for Nina to distance herself from the decline in the mid-1970s of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Friend to Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin, politics had intersected with Nina’s music with the assassination of NAACP secretary Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi in June of 1963. This tragedy was followed by the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in September of the same year, resulting in the deaths of the “four little girls:” Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins. The culmination of these two events inspired Nina to write her famous song “Mississippi Goddam” and spend the next seven years working in the Civil Rights Movement, for which she credited with giving meaning to her performances.
Her activism also resulted in a change in consciousness leading to Black nationalism with Nina concluding that “in the white man’s world the black man would always lose out, so the idea of a separate black nation, whether it was in America or in Africa, made sense.”[1] But would exile solely be a personal choice or was Nina being pushed out of the US? Once Nina Simone evolved into her role as activist-performer, she was plagued by tax problems, which she perceived were the result of poor management by Andrew Stroud, her husband-manager. Yet investigations into tax filings was also a tactic used by the IRS in the 1970s to incarcerate members of the Black Panther Party. These investigations were a pretense for locking revolutionaries up so they posed no threat to the corporate state. Tax problems would prevent Simone’s entering the U.S. way beyond her years in Liberia. She had stated of other Civil Rights activists that “those not already dead were exiled, jailed, or underground,” and now in Liberia, she had become an expatriate artist and activist.[2]
Divorced from her American husband-manager, Andy, Nina arrived in Liberia with their only child, Lisa, in tow. Accustomed to the constant travel and schedule conflicts that came with concert tours, it was the birthday of the young teen on the day Nina arrived. Makeba’s access to social connections resulted in Nina being given a beach home by the daughter of the head of the country, Americo-Liberian President William Tolbert. And Makeba’s matchmaking also led to a meeting with Nina’s first lover, C.C. Dennis, a man from the inner circle of President Tolbert, who [much] to her chagrin, proved to be not much of a lover at all due to his impotence.
Born Eunice Waymon in North Carolina in 1933, Nina Simone’s intentions were never to be a singer. She was born into a musical family in which music was viewed as a gift from God. Her mom, a domestic worker, and her dad, an entrepreneurial handyman, were a familial dichotomy of the religious vs. the secular with her mom singing in the local church and her dad having a background in entertainment. The young Eunice was already a regular pianist at church at six years old, and playing the piano was what she viewed as her calling. Her talents in playing the piano at church eventually led to lessons in classical piano from a nearby neighbor Eunice referred to as her “white momma.” Yet is was also her pursuit of classical training that led the young Eunice to experience what she interpreted as one of her most lasting experiences with racism and discrimination. This occurred when she applied to the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia for classical training and was rejected. Her perception of being discriminated against followed Eunice throughout her career as she continually decried the racism and thievery inherent in the music industry. Unable to do full-time study at Curtis, Eunice pursued classical piano training on a part-time basis at Julliard in New York, the city where she would take on the stage name of Nina Simone.
To pay for her piano lessons in New York, Nina began working in bars that she perceived as both dirty and exploitative. Recently graduated from high school and having moved from North Carolina to the big city, singing in bars and doing domestic work were both ways to generate income for room and board with relatives and to pay her school fees. Yet Nina Simone never considered herself a singer so the idea of singing in a bar was a step down in at least three ways – she was not doing what she wanted to do artistically, she was being exploited musically, and the locale frequented by white men smoking and drinking, was dingy. When asked if she wanted a drink on her first day entering the bar, the young Nina’s response was to request a glass of milk. As a result, the bar’s owner paid her what Nina described as “ninety dollars a week plus tips and as much milk as a I could drink.”[3] The pianist Nina Simone credited singing with causing mental distress later in life. She complained early on that the lyrics would just stay in her head in a way that the musical instrumentation of the piano did not. Also, later in her young life, depressed about not earning enough money to pay for classical training, Nina would begin to drink alcohol just as she did on the night of her arrival when she danced naked for two hours in Liberia.
Nina’s foray into life in Liberia was not her first time seeking respite for personal or political reasons by traveling to a Black-majority country. Immediately following her divorce, Nina had escaped to Barbados for emotional healing. And during the actual marriage, she had joined a music tour to Nigeria during which she was overwhelmed with the emotional realization of having arrived in Africa for the first time. It was upon her departure that she felt the cruelty of leaving Africa after such a brief stay. With her exit hastened by the admonitions of her then new husband who had stayed in New York, Nina reflected, “All I could do was promise myself that one day I would return.”[4] Thus, with this arrival on the African continent again, and this time in Liberia, Nina sought the homeland which the United States had never yielded to her. Like her dance on the first night of her arrival, she felt Liberia was a place she could finally be culturally and politically free.
The founding of the nation of Nina Simone’s exile was as Professor George Klay Kieh states an exercise in neo-colonialism as defined by the former revolutionary leader of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. More specifically, establishing Liberia was an opportunity for the United States to exercise power without responsibility and to engage in exploitation while facing few or no consequences. Liberia was established in 1822 by the U.S. American Colonization Society (ACS), a Christian organization of former slave owners whose task was to tackle the U.S. race problem. The race problem was what some whites perceived as too many Blacks on American shores and surplus labor in relation to the needs of U.S. production at that time. The ACS sent a total of 19,000 African Americans to Liberia with the goal of bringing Christianity to the sixteen ethnic groups in the region. This goal, plus their experience as colonial subjects to white Americans, created in the Black Americo-Liberians a sense of superiority to the formerly equal indigenous Africans which would eventually lead to the downfall of the Americos. As they garnered political power, the Black Americo-Liberians formed separate communities from which they excluded indigenous Africans. They required that the indigenous convert to Christianity in order to be citizens of the new Liberian nation. The Americos would be the dominant force in political power in Liberia for more than a century.[5]
It was at the end of this century that Nina Simone had arrived. President Tolbert, whose daughter had given Nina a home for the artist’s exile from the U.S., was the last Americo-Liberian president. He and his successor, President Samuel Doe of the indigenous Krahn ethnic group, were both clients of U.S. geopolitics in the region. Yet the U.S. perceived Tolbert as going too far in at least two areas— his relations with the then USSR and his political solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement in Miriam Makeba’s native South Africa. As a result, a U.S.-orchestrated coup to overthrow the Tolbert government unfolded in April 1980 following Nina’s exile in the country. President Tolbert was assassinated in his presidential mansion by the same opposition group that carried out the famous execution on the beach of ten of Tolbert’s government officials. Amongst those executed, as Nina would become aware, were the son of her impotent lover (C.C.) and the man who initially took her to the club where, on the first night of her arrival, she had danced freely and nude for hours on end.
Following her years in Liberia, Nina Simone eventually moved to Europe for the duration of her exile with regular trips back to the United States. Still evading the tax problems that plagued her, she chose Europe as a location for her daughter, Lisa, to pursue her high school studies. And what became of her beloved Liberia? It continued as a CIA post until 1989. It was also home to 50 U.S. companies with Firestone, whose profits in 1951 were the largest: three times the income of the Liberian treasury. Following the 1980 coup of Nina’s benefactor, the Americo-Liberian Tolbert, by the U.S.-backed Doe, the country experienced years of economic and ethnic destabilization and endured a costly civil war from 1989 until 1996 that resulted in the deaths of 250,000 people.
Nina Simone, iconic artist and political activist in exile, was deceased in 2003 in France, far from her close-knit, familial beginnings as Eunice Waymon in North Carolina. Far from the youthful innocence of her first years of drinking milk in New York bars. Distant from the freedom to revel in Black pride and freedom as she had done in Liberia, she died a champion against injustice, a Pan Africanist and internationalist “fighting for the rights of my brothers and sisters everywhere; America, Africa, all over the world.”[6] The musical notes from her piano linger in our souls, perennial. Her words of admonition that we rally for the oppressed are ever present.
References
[1] Nina Simone, I Put a Spell on You: TheAutobiography of Nina Simone (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992)
[2] Ibid, 115.
[3] Ibid, 50.
[4] Ibid, 81.
[5] George Klay Kieh, “Neo-Colonialism: American Foreign Policy and the First Liberian Civil War,” The Journal of Pan African Studies 5 (2012): 164-84; Earl Conteh-Morgan and Shireen Kadivar, “Ethnopolitical Violence in the Liberian Civil War,” Journal of Conflict Studies 15 (Spring 1995): 5-153; Heneryatta Ballah and Clemente K. Abrokwaa, “Ethnicity, Politics and Social Conflict: The Quest for Peace in Liberia,” Penn State McNair Journal 10 (2003): 52-69.
[6] Ibid, 176.
Born in Los Angeles, Audrey Shipp is an essayist and poet whose family origins include Mississippi, Tennessee, and Chicago. Amongst several goals, she aims to connect her writing to that of the international Black Diaspora. Her most recent writing has appeared in Litro Magazine and Linden Avenue Literary Journal, and her bilingual poetry appeared in "Americas Review" (Arte-Publico Press), formerly published by the University of Houston. She holds an M.Ed. and B.A. in English from UCLA and an M.A. in English from Cal State LA. Audrey teaches English and ESL in a public high school in Los Angeles. Her blog is at audreyshipp.net.