charged albums. All that flurry came on the heels of a decade-long resurgence: two biographies, a poetry collection, several plays, a biopic, and the constant sampling of her signature sound by Kanye West. Just this past spring of 2018, she was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, while her birthplace home—which four renowned black artists, Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher, and Julie Mehretu, had purchased in 2017—was named a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, one of only two in North Carolina. At Tryon’s city limits, I smirk at the sign that triumphantly declares “Welcome to the Friendliest Town in the South.” Simone, born here as Eunice Waymon in 1933, and her family left Tryon’s segregation behind in the 1950s, to pursue her ambition of becoming a premier classical pianist and
their collective dream of racial freedom. Until now, Tryon has been ambivalent about its most famous resident. In 2010, after much controversy about its concept, funding, and location, an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Simone, by Zenos Frudakis, was erected in the town. The Tryon sculptor William Behrends, best known for creating the statue of the black baseball player Jackie Robinson and his teammate Pee Wee Reese in Coney Island, even wrote an opinion piece in the Tryon Daily Bulletin castigating not just the design of the project but its subject’s “fundamental citizenship” as unfit for their town. Specifically, Behrends wrote, “There’s no doubt that Nina was a notewor thy musical talent, but her loyalty, both to her birthplace (Tryon) and her homeland (America) have legitimately been called into question.” He concluded, “That troubled me deeply.” The “Nina Simone
Sculpture” now stands at the top of Trade Street, near the town’s center and half a block away from Owen’s pharmacy, the drugstore that the singer had stopped in as a girl “to observe the mixture of indifference and disdain that I provoked in white customers,” as she would later recall in her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You.1 Despite her largerthan-life presence in Tryon, the town continues to be deeply divided by race. Most of Tryon’s African-American residents live on the town’s east side, a densely populated section that houses the historic Tryon Cemetery and St. Luke CME, Nina’s family church. Diagonally across from the church, at the top of a culde-sac, stands 30 East Livingston Street. Blue and battleship gray, surrounded by overgrown grass and imposing magnolia trees, this ((0-squarefoot clapboard house, with its lack of plumbing and
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