One of the many things I love about Nina Simone
When I was a freshman in college, the non-academic employees went out on strike and I worked with a group of students supporting them. One morning I was sent over with breakfast donuts for maids walking a picket line in front of a dorm. "Walking" is a bit of a misnomer, as is "line." There were only three women, and most of the time they sat on a cement planter and drank coffee out of the most enormous thermos I ever saw in my life. It looked like a weapon -- a plaid missile. Out of nowhere, one of the women started asking me questions that at first seemed rude and suspicious. The gist of the questions seemed to be "Who the hell are you, girl? What do you have to do with us?" But eventually I realized the questions weren't suspicious at all. The woman just had a brusque way about her -- and maybe a little mistrust of self-righteous, liberal students -- that made her scary at first. She asked me a lot of questions about my family and my plans (I told her I was thinking of dropping out of school; she told me I wasn't going to do anything of the kind), and I answered them honestly. When you come from a background like mine, and you find yourself answering questions without worrying about how the answer will be perceived, you can trust you've found a good person, without entirely knowing how you know that. She told me she had a son a few years older than I was and that he was in prison. That surprised me. Not that she had a son in prison. I knew quite a few people who had kids or brothers or sisters in prison. One of my best friends from junior high was married to a guy who was convicted of murder when she was sixteen and hugely pregnant. I just never heard anybody admit that to a stranger so matter-of-factly. When I was a kid, it was the kind of thing you heard about from a third party, and never mentioned in front of the family of the kid doing time. (I didn't even know about my friend's husband until I heard another friend making fun of her getting dressed all fine to go up and visit him. I just noticed she'd stop talking about him, and figured he'd skipped out on her.) I remember being so pulled in by the way the woman on the picket line talked about her son -- not making excuses for him, but obviously not the least bit embarrassed by him either. I didn't think anybody I knew could manage that moral balance, and it seemed to me to define the meaning of love. As we were talking, a truck turned into the dorm driveway and the three women jumped up and grabbed their signs. The woman I had just been talking to, the one with the intimidating edge who, little by little, I had grown to like, started screaming epithets in a deep, terrible voice, and I saw the driver hunch down in his seat like he was trying not to be seen. A voice to shame a truck driver. Honestly, at eighteen, I'd never seen anything that cool in my life. I was impressed. Over the years I've said a number of times, only half kidding, that that woman had the voice of God. Okay, maybe God wouldn't call anybody a "scab" (and a few worse things), but nevertheless, there was something holy in that woman's voice. There was a goodness in it, if you got to know it, it stemmed from justice, it didn't give evil an inch to play with, but it got under the skin of strong men, filling them with the knowledge that they're doing the wrong thing, and better get straight.
Holy.
Nina Simone had that voice, too. I'm listening to one of her most powerful songs -- "Sinnerman." It's about as uncompromising and Old Testament as popular music ever gets.
Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All on them day.
It's not just the lyrics. There's something chilly and stern in Nina Simone's voice. Righteous. A call to justice without mercy. Put a face on it, and it would be a Byzantine Jesus, which, in many of her portraits, Nina Simone resembled. You hear that coldness most clearly in her more political songs, like "Mississippi Goddam," (where she prods an audience to embarrassed laughter, and then admonishes, "...and I mean every word of it") or in the cold fury of "Pirate Jenny." This is what real moral clarity sounds like. And in "Sinnerman," even more clearly than in her political songs, Miss Simone insists there's no exit. Evil has consequences. That's just the way it is, child, no point in glossing over it.
But the song switches point of view in the second verse.
Well, I run to the rock. Please hide me.
I run to the rock. Please hide me.
I run to the rock. Please hide me, lord.
All on them day.
But the rock cried out, "I can't hide you."
The rock cried out, "I can't hide you.
The rock cried out, "I ain't gonna hide you, gal,
All on them day."
The lyrics are pleading, but the singer's voice isn't. A lesser singer -- and a more ingratiating woman -- would wrap it in compassion for the sinner. But Nina takes sin seriously, and understands its tenacity and its abiding faith in its own resources. The voice remains weirdly composed, convinced there's a way out, until finally, all avenues exhausted, the "sinner" returns to God.
But the Lord said, "Go to the devil."
The Lord said, "Go to the devil."
He said, "Go to the devil."
All on them day.
That verse stuns me every time -- and I've been listening to the song since I was in high school. The way she hangs on to the word "said," hisses the 's,' and snarls "Go to the devil" -- does it sound strange if I say there's something liberating in that bitterness? I went to Catholic school in the sixties, mostly post-Vatican II, a little after the era of the infamous ruler-wielding nuns. I had Kumbaya-singing nuns. Nuns with an absolute faith in big, open-hearted, loving, forgiving Jesus, and not much time for an angry, righteous God hissing, "Go to the devil." I adore those nuns to this day, and that gentle Christianity remains the core of what I have faith in, but from Nina Simone I learned that righteous and unmovable anger is a part of morality as well. My peasant Irish Catholicism has a history of ranging from moral mush to moral rigor mortis without ever making the acquaintance of moral authority. I love Nina Simone because no one ever sang with such moral authority.
Weirdly, I've always thought of "Sinnerman" as a political song, maybe because the first time I heard it was on The Best of Nina Simone, the first album I bought by her, when I was about 16. The tracks have been rearranged and added to on the CD, but on my old vinyl copy, "Sinnerman" immediately follows "Mississippi Goddam," and I've always heard them as related songs, so that the sinner trying to hide from the consequences of his sin is not, in my mind, some guy getting drunk on Saturday night, but the segregationists of the preceding song -- life-crushing bastards -- because that same theme of the consequences of sin that can't be escaped pervades "Mississippi Goddam."
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here
I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer.
In "Mississippi Goddam," the woman longing for justice stops believing in prayer, and in "Sinnerman," the sinner calls out repulsively, hypocritically, "Don't you see me prayin', don't you see me down here prayin'?" (which prompts God's soul-lifting "go to the devil.") The two songs fit together in so many ways, upholding the value of righteous anger, grabbing prayer back from the hypocrites and returning it to those demanding justice. All of Nina Simone's justice-demanding songs have something prayerful in them, and something essential. I wish there were far more to come from her divine -- literally divine -- voice.
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