- New York Times
If you wanted to make a pilgrimage to the childhood home of W.E.B. Du Bois in Massachusetts or Malcolm X
in Nebraska, you’d have to settle for a historical marker: The houses
of those civil rights activists were lost before preservationists could
save them, as many important African-American historical sites have
been.
It’s
a fate that easily could have met a humble three-room clapboard perched
on a rise in this tiny, pretty town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge
Mountains, unknown even to many residents until a few years ago. For
those who knew that 30 East Livingston Street was the birthplace of
Tryon’s most famous resident — the singer, soul legend and civil rights
icon Nina Simone — the house’s appearance on the market late last year
crystallized fears that its existence, as stubborn as that of Simone
herself, might be coming to an end.
And that, unexpectedly, is where the New York art world entered the picture.
Over the last month, four prominent African-American artists — the conceptualist Adam Pendleton, the sculptor and painter Rashid Johnson, the collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher and the abstract painter Julie Mehretu
— quietly got together, pooled their money and bested competing bids to
snatch the house up for $95,000. They describe the purchase as an act
of art but also of politics, a gratifying chance to respond to what they
see as a deepening racial divide in America, when Simone’s fiery
example of culture warrior seems more potent than ever.
“It wasn’t long after the election that this all began to happen, and I
was desperate like a lot of people to be engaged, and this felt like
exactly the right way,” said Mr. Johnson, 39, whose work, like that of
Ms. Gallagher and Mr. Pendleton, often directly engages issues of race
and political power. (Mr. Johnson recently signed on to direct a feature
film based on “Native Son,” Richard Wright’s classic novel of racial
oppression.) “My feeling when I learned that this house existed was just
an incredible urgency to make sure it didn’t go away.”
Simone died in 2003, at 70, but her presence may be felt even more strongly now
than it was during many years of a life marked by struggles with mental
illness and marital abuse. She has been the subject of three films in
the last two years; President Obama tweeted
that one of her songs was in rotation on his summer 2016 playlist, and
Ford (to the disapproval of many fans) used her anthem “I Wish I Knew
How It Would Feel to Be Free” in an ad during this year’s Super Bowl.
She
was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on Feb. 21, 1933, the sixth child of
John Divine Waymon, a dry-cleaning shop owner and handyman, and Mary
Kate Waymon, a Methodist minister, who had come to Tryon in the late
1920s during a short-lived period when their family was prospering
financially.
Simone was delivered in the house, and she retained fond memories of the
family’s years there, despite the number of children packed into its
660 square feet, with no running water. She remembered her mother
hoisting her onto the kitchen counter and giving her “an empty jam-jar
to cut out the biscuit shapes in the dough, singing all the while,” as
she wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You.” (Simone adopted her stage name in the 1950s while working at a divey nightclub, trying to keep that fact from her mother.)
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