Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone

21. This Ain’t No Geraldine Up Here ~ 1972

21. This Ain’t No Geraldine Up Here ~ 1972 ~ W ashington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall was nearly filled to its 3,800-seat capacity February 12 for Nina’s first performance in the city in several years. It was not lost on her that three decades earlier the Daughters of the American Revolution , who ran the hall, had barred Marian Anderson, the heroic contralto , from singing there because she was black. It was equally well known, like spring following winter, that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had stepped in to ensure that not only could Anderson sing in Washington, she could have her concert at the city’s prized outdoor venue, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. So Nina’s departure from her usual opening number on this Saturday night in 1972 was especially noteworthy. She walked briskly onstage toward the piano, but instead of sitting down to play, she stopped and asked everyone to sing “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” which she again proclaimed the black national anthem. Her spirits were not diminished because the majority black crowd seemed unsure of the words. She simply spoke each line first and then conducted the singing. Nina tried to balance every performance now, seeking to apportion her art and her anger into a workable whole. She might miss the mark, but her calculation showed in the songs she chose, the musicians she brought with her, what she wore, and what she said. “You have to know when to push, and, you know, when to not,” she observed. “No one can tell you, though.” At Constitution Hall she put plenty of bite in her program, crystalized by “All Hid.” Nina transformed a rhyme that black children chanted while playing hide-and-seek into pointed commentary on the tensions between the black community and local police departments . Instead of twenty-four robins knocking at one’s door, as the chant goes, she put twenty-four policemen at the door and the people inside ending up “in a cooling bin.” Though the audience gave Nina a standing ovation at the end of the night, MC Bob “Nighthawk” Terry, a local black disc jockey, worried that she might have gone too far. “I just want to tell my white brothers they should not feel excluded,” he said. The crowd booed, but Washington Star reviewer John Segraves, a white man, understood . If not feeling entirely excluded, Segraves was disappointed. “Oh, Nina Simone, what has happened to one of the most distinctive styles ever to keep a crowd in awe?” he wondered. He missed the Nina “who used to sit, half hidden behind her huge grand piano all murky and mysterious, doling out the lush lyrics and the pretty single notes as if they were special gifts to her hushed audience.” Segraves conceded that when Nina turned militant, when she got up from the piano and danced her sultry steps, the audience “bought it all.” The evening “became more crusade than concert,” Segraves said, “which I consider sorrowful because I came prepared to hear one of the truly fine pop vocalists and pianists in America.” Nina hardly saw the two as mutually exclusive. “I’ve always thought that I was shaking people up, but now I want to go at it more,” she explained in one interview. “I want to go at it more deliberately . I want to go at it more coldly. I want to shake people up so bad, that when they leave a nightclub where I performed, I just want them to be to pieces, and we’re all reelin’. That’s my idea of a great 266 · p r i n c e s s n o i r e performance, when I have pleased me and pleased them, and everybody ’s feeling like everything’s all right.” Nina’s reception March 31 at the Rainbow Sign in Berkeley, a new social center for the area’s black community, proved her point, the crowd only too happy to be part of her plan. Before the first show, the mayor had even proclaimed “Nina Simone Day,” citing her “stunning influence over black people” and “her resolute convictions to do something about what’s wrong with the world.” A member of the Bay Area Urban League announced he was starting a campaign to make “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” officially declared a new black national anthem, though the lack...