Three years ago, when I arrived at Vanderbilt University for my Master of Fine Arts in poetry, I felt less than, like an imposter-inadequate because I hadn’t majored in English during college. I took a cue from Simone’s life and went to Tryon anyway, without permission. And for me, North Carolina was a type of Southern Mecca, a sacred site I knew I had to reckon and wrestle with by making a pilgrimage, paying homage to my family’s slave roots, facing the damage that made me. A place she had to leave so she could start. ![]() But Tryon was a closed door, a place that couldn’t contain her dazzling, global future. What does it mean to see yourself everywhere and not know where you come from? What does it truly mean to be from a place-to be from North Carolina? For Nina Simone, born as Eunice Waymon, Tryon was a beginning, where her origin story started, where she learned to play Bach and Beethoven from Miss Mazzy, a white lady who lived a mile away in the Gillette Woods and had no children, but treated Simone as a daughter. And doesn’t Nina’s voice seem as if it comes from everywhere, entirely Southern but also diasporic, ancient even, as if it were already present, hovering above the waters before the world was built like the face of God? What does it mean for me, as a Black writer, to not have acute access to the source of my inspiration? I’ve never been to Africa, and yet, the handprints and rhythms of the continent saturate all of my poems. And I had often heard this defiant refusal in Nina’s music: wavering inside her signature contralto like grit-dark silk, unlocking a broader notion, to me, about the psychological mood of disallowance. Now what was I going to do with mine?Īs an artist, processing rejection is part of the contract. She had faced countless closed doors during her career. I was devastated, but it felt as though Nina were already testing my resolve. Several months ago, when I decided to take a trip to North Carolina, I sent a long email to the artists explaining my intent-to look for Nina, to locate my ancestors-and I received a swift reply that read: I’m afraid the house is not accessible. In 2017, four African-American artists-Adam Pendleton, Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson, and Julie Mehretu-bought her house as an act of political preservation after the 2016 presidential election. I envisioned myself, like Alice Walker looking for Zora Neale Hurston’s unmarked grave, shouting Nina in the derelict home, hoping somehow she would appear, gloriously phantasmagoric, and answer all of my incessant probing questions. I wanted to start where she started, imagining her daddy playing jazz standards on the piano, her mama cooking something good and greasy in the cramped kitchen with siblings zooming around. I wanted to start with the wild weeds and the creaking wood on the front porch, walking up to Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, North Carolina. Finding the artist by facing the damage that made me
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