It’s OK, you can call me Nina. My parents named me Eunice… Eunice Kathleen Waymon. I was born on 21 February 1933 in Tryon, a small town in North Carolina. The land of the Cherokee. Before the white demons came and painted it red. At the place where Tryon is now there used be an Indian settlement called Xuala. The conquistadors came first, then the French and the English, and the railroad and the towns… they needed slaves for all of this.
Nina, that is how he used to call me, my first real love, from Spanish ‘niña’, girl. My name existed for him only and it remained until the end of life. As early as 1954 I played in Atlantic City. A bit earlier I had watched this French movie… what was its name, yes… Casque d’or, and she was in it, the beautiful Simone Signoret. My other name is in her honour, Simone. That is how I somehow became Nina Simone, alone against everybody, with my first performances in Midtown Bar & Grill, at Pacific Avenue, in Atlantic City.
I took that job to be able to pay for my piano lessons. Everything that I had wanted was to study the piano. To play Bach. And no matter how good I was, they did not accept me at Curtis Institute. They can claim as much as they want that it was not because of my skin colour, but I know it was. I know how they acted, I saw it all. Some things cannot be covered.
My parents were priests, They called what I played the devil’s music. I left home. My work was called jazz. But it was not jazz. Jazz is usually used by the white people to mark the music of the black by humiliating them. I would not accept that! My music is black classic. Johan Sebastian Bach brought me here. That road was ruthless, from the descendants of the slaves in Tyron, an exile in Liberia, to the reincarnation of the Egyptian queen in France. Madame Nina, Doctor Simone, call me like that!