In 1966, Simone made a dramatic, public change, one that would prove pivotal in redefining her image and her role as a cultural leader. “The first time I wore my hair African was after Pastel Blues,” she said. “It reflected black pride, and that’s when I changed it. I identified a lot with Africa, and learned what they did, and started wearing my hair in an Afro.” Her archivist and friend Roger Nupie tracked this revolutionary new look with a more regal bearing on- and offstage. Early on, he pointed out, she was wearing a wig in her photo shoots and on her album covers, as most black singers and actresses did in an effort to conform to white conventions. But Nina was the first celebrity to wear an Afro and dress in African styles. “The ‘black beauty’ thing started around those days,” he said, “and it was very important that somebody like Nina Simone came onstage and was there in a very proud African way. And from that moment, her attitude changed completely, because when she comes on it’s like ‘Here I am. Who am I? I’m an African queen’—or, as she sometimes said, the reincarnation of an Egyptian queen.” This decisive change represented a rejection of standards of white beauty—standards that Simone had been acutely aware of her whole life. In her diaries, she complains about the photographs chosen for her album covers, and her husband-manager Andrew “Andy" Stroud noted that Simone had long struggled with her self-image. “She would get very depressed at times staring into the mirror,” he said. “Even though she was so committed to the black cause and preached it and everything, most of her friends were white. So she’s crying about her hair and her other features. Before she got her teeth capped, they weren’t that nice. It came from deep inside—she was just unhappy to be black, and what she termed ugly.” In her private writings, Nina revealed this agony regarding her appearance. In one undated note, she wrote: “I can’t be white and I’m the kind of coloured girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise—if I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time wide open for them to jeer and approve of or disapprove of.” She went on to describe herself as “some- one who has been brainwashed to think everything they do is wrong . . . someone who’s been robbed of their self respect their self esteem some one’s who’s been convinced they have no right to be happy. But then why haven’t I killed myself?” The change in her outward appearance, then, was obviously about more than just style—to use a phrase becoming popular around this time, she was realising that the personal is political. The new hair coincided with her increasing interest in black pride and a growing engagement in activism. In a diary entry written in February 1966 in South Bend, Indiana, there’s a short but critical sentence scrawled at the end: “I decided today that I wanted to be more Active in civil rights.” Since Mississippi Goddam, she had been closely associated with the movement, performing at benefits and speaking out onstage. She later said, though, that she had initially been propelled into activism by raw emotion but had been slower to engage with its arguments and ideas. “The civil rights movement was something that I got into before I became fiercely political,” she said. “I was just doing it because—well, I loved it. I approved of what they were doing, but I didn’t talk about it a lot. I was just composing songs to spur them on.”
To Nina, “politics” was rooted more in her work and her example than in organising and legislating; what resonated was an idea, the model of independence and pride she practiced—as she told Vernon Jordan, “I am civil rights!”— rather than strategic action. “I didn’t educate myself very well,” she said. “I was so busy working that there wasn’t time to reflect on what I was doing.” Later, she would even claim that she was moving at such great speed that she had no real recollection of such historic events as her trip to Selma. “My mind during this time was on automatic,” she said. “I don’t remember most of this job because all I did was work, work, work. At times people’s faces are not even clear in my mind. I’m sure that stacked somewhere in the back of me when I’m not so tired is all this memory. I don’t remember doing all this.” In some ways, it was as if she was providing a soundtrack for a community that she wasn’t entirely able to connect with. “One of the things she said to me was that she really felt bad that she was not more active in marching and protesting and things like that,” said civil-rights activist Andrew Young. “And I thought how very strange and odd for her to say that. One of my friends who was there commented to me later, ‘God, she was so present—she was everywhere, in all our projects, in all our work.’ What she was doing, going around the country spreading the word of the movement—nothing was as cogent of the frailty and the humiliation and the sadness and the joy of what we did than her music. “More than any other artist, I think that her music depicted and reflected the time. It just seemed to be so very current, so very fluid, and expressed so completely the aspirations, the anxiety, the fear, the love, the rejection, the hurt, the horror, the anger of what we were feeling at the time. Her music always seemed to be so on top of our situation.” Simone’s greatest contribution in 1966 (and among her most important works ever) wasn’t focused on integration. It was a song that only her black audience could truly understand, a penetrating and scathing examination of America’s complicated attitudes toward skin tone. The song, called Four Women, had to do more with her decision to grow out her natural hair than with her participation in protests. In 1984, she gave a lengthy description of the song to Mary Anne Evans, one of the several collaborators who attempted to write a memoir with Simone. “Four Women” is four distinctive descriptions of four women. And it capsules completely the problem of the blacks in America among the women. The first woman is called Aunt Sarah. She is 104, she’s dark-skinned, woolly hair like me, her back is down to here from carrying all them damn shit all her life. And she lives in Harlem, she talks with a southern dialect, and she’s old and feeble now, she can barely make it. She knows who she is, and we have seen her all over America. All black people have seen her. The first words are “My skin is black, my arms are long, my hair is woolly, my back is strong. Strong enough to take the pain that’s been inflicted again and again, what do they call me? My name is Aunt Sarah”—and “Aunt” is important, it comes from “Auntie,” like the whites used to call the mammies to suckle their babies. Everybody black heard it and they knew what I didn’t say and what I did say. Whites heard it too, but the blacks really got mad behind it. Second woman, “My skin is yellow, and my hair is long. Between two worlds I do belong, my father was rich and white, he raped my mother late one night. What do they call me? My name is Saffronia.” I don’t know where I got that name, it’s just a common name down South. That gets
all them yellow bitches who think that they’re better because they have long hair and their skin is yellow. What I’m doing is getting rid of the load ’cause I have been just burdened down with all these problems. It’s bad enough to be born black in America, but to be burdened down with the problems within it is too much. The third woman, “My skin is tan, and my hair is all right, it’s fine”—so she imply she don’t give a damn, it’s fine. “My hips invite you, daddy, and my mouth is like wine. Whose little girl am I? Well, yours, if you got enough money to buy. What do they call me? My name is of course Sweet Thang.” The last woman—and it’s all done with music and there is a big rumble, and a very big pause and very fierce. And she reminds me of the Israelis and Stokely Carmichael. “My skin is brown, my manner is tough, I’ll kill the first mother I see because my life has been too rough. I’m awfully bitter these days because my parents were slaves, what do they call me?” And then, you expect her to say “King Kong,” then she goes “My name is”—and she says it fiercely—“Peaches.” All my songs, the important ones, have razor cuts, I call them, at the end. I cut you, I make you think and it’s immediate. So the whole thing was that she’s gone to Africa, she’s got her ass together. Her name is Thandewye, look that’s my name, so they expected that. “My name is Peaches,” and you say, “My God, she probably was the sweetest of all.” She turned. I sing it angrily and that also is a cut because it just doesn’t make no sense. That’s it. When any black woman hears that song, she either starts crying or she wants to go out and kill somebody. ’Cause all I did was I just took them and said, all right, there is the problem. Every black in the world who heard that fucking song knew what it meant. It’s personal to thirtytwo million blacks out there. Simone said that images of the four women came to her on an airplane, and that she wrote the song but kept it to herself for a full year before performing it. She waited even longer to record it and featured it as a track on the 1966 album Wild Is the Wind. According to her daughter Lisa Simone, Andy told her that he assisted in the composition of this landmark song. “Dad claims, and I’m inclined to believe this, that he helped her write that song,” she said. “Sweet Thing is a prostitute, so she was asking him questions about different females. I’m sure she came up with the music all by herself, but in terms of the characters and the breakdown of those different characters, Dad and her did it together, according to him.” Al Schackman, Simone’s music director, knew exactly which woman represented Simone herself. “Nina was Peaches,” he said. “ ‘You don’t mess with me,’ ‘I’ll kill every motherfucker I see,’ and that’s the last woman that you hear. Peaches is the part of the persona that Nina became. You did not want to mess with her—she pulled out a knife in a second, she didn’t take any of the shit that the other three did or play the white folks’ games that the others did.” Percussionist Leopoldo Fleming, who played with Simone for many years, noted that part of the power of Four Women was the dramatic, stately music moving with the different characters, reflecting the shifting moods. “I could feel the emotions of the four women,” he said. “You use different dynamics in the number. It doesn’t stay on one level. There is the harshness of some, and then there is the tenderness of the other. It’s like drama, and you have to use different colours in it.” To Attallah Shabazz (Malcolm X’s daughter, who grew up alongside Lisa Simone), the song was a tough but empathetic critique for a population rarely given the chance to engage in accurate
self-reflection. “‘Four Women’ was an opportunity for black women to do an internal look at how we coexist,” she said. “She had the ability to tell a story, herself, and be all women while writing it —she didn’t change, she was the same person, but became all of them. And we all know one or two of those women, and so you feel represented. It’s introducing you to yourselves.” But that hard-hitting look in the mirror wasn’t welcomed by everyone. Though Wild Is the Wind hit number 12 on the black charts, many black radio stations would not play Four Women. Simone said, “I thought it was stupid for black radio stations to ban the song. I should think they would have been the ones who would have supported it.” The song was also sometimes met with confusion or dismissed by the audience when she performed it live. In a diary entry from February 20, 1966, she wrote that at an appearance in front of a black and Puerto Rican crowd at New York’s Hilton Hotel she was “very hurt when they giggled” at her performance of Four Women. “Black people thought it was insulting,” said Roger Nupie. “Her message was ‘I just depict the four different types, and you have to think about it.’ And that was probably too difficult for the audience. Now it’s different—now it’s regarded as one of the most important songs in the civil rights movement.”