Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone

10. You Can’t Let Them Humiliate You ~ January 1961–December 13, 1961

10. You Can’t Let Them Humiliate You ~ January 1961–December 13, 1961 ~ N ina’s weeklong booking at the Apollo Theater in February was her second at the storied venue. She had appeared there in the spring of 1959 but at the bottom of a jazz bill, playing solo piano for $350. This time Nina, with her trio, was the headliner, and she was earning exactly ten times more. “Friends said I might have trouble with the crowd because the Apollo was well known for giving artists a rough time,” she recalled. But Nina hardly flinched from the challenge. She had already shown she could dish out “a rough time,” too. “So the two of us getting together was kind of a championship boxing match with the Apollo as the champ and me the contender.” Opening night, February 10, Nina prepared a comfortably polished set but with enough room for the spontaneous moment. In the past few months, she had discovered the music of Oscar Brown Jr., and spent time with him when she and the trio were in Chicago in September. She had already performed his “Brown Baby” as an encore at the Hunter College concert earlier in the year. Now Nina made “Work Song” (music by Nat Adderley, lyrics by Brown) an integral part of her set. It was about the travails of men on a chain gang, and Nina felt compelled to tell the audience her brother had been on a chain gang, too, perhaps referring to her brother John’s voluntary stint with the Civilian Conservation Corps when he was a teenager. Some of the audience giggled—or at least Nina thought they did. She dropped all pretense of politeness. “For the very first time in your lives, act like ladies and gentlemen at the Apollo,” she snapped. An uneasy quiet spread over the crowd, and Nina performed her song. More trouble ensued as the trio prepared to play “Falling in Love with Love.” Bobby couldn’t get a special sound effects device attached to his drums to work properly. New York Citizen Call writers Ted Handy and Ralph Matthews Jr. were sitting close enough to see Nina glowering while Bobby tried feverishly to fix the problem. Matthews had come to see Horace Silver and Sonny Stitt, but Nina made the most vivid impression with what he could only describe as her “pure and powerful hostility” toward the audience and her musicians . Ted Handy thought she was needling Bobby when she sarcastically ordered the Apollo technician to change the lighting: “a white spot on my drummer, and a small baby blue one for me.” “Falling in Love” was finally performed, and Nina closed her set with “I Love You, Porgy.” The sustained applause suggested the audience didn’t hold a grudge. But on the way out a few patrons complained to Handy, who groused that “this was one of the most nerve-wracking and unnecessary moments in the history of show business.” Nina didn’t care what anyone else thought. “If you can get an audience to like you, that’s fine,” she said later. “If you can’t, then you must get them to respect you. You cannot let them humiliate you.” Matthews was so taken aback by Nina’s behavior that he devoted an entire installment of his “Mainstream” column to the evening. “The audience, while exuberant, was by no stretch of the imagination disrespectful of her talent,” he wrote. “I would say after the fact 108 · p r i n c e s s n o i r e that the audience was overly generous . . . and for Miss Simone to suggest that we were less than polite to her suggests to me that the behavior problem is hers, not that of the audience she faced . . . [She] seems to be a very angry young woman.” as soon as they finished at the Apollo, Nina and the trio along with Art D’Lugoff, now acting as her manager, went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to play an afternoon event February 18 at the University of North Carolina. Although Chapel Hill, with its leafy campus, elegant brick buildings, and well-tended stores, was much bigger than Tryon, it, too, prided itself on being a bastion of liberal thought, a place where modernity thrived amid history. But the same racial stratifications of Tryon existed here, too. Chapel Hill’s blacks mostly found work...