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Marie Littlejohn ambled into the Roseland Community Center, one large room with linoleum floors and slabs of lighting, and walls covered in Juneteenth posters. She sits at one of the six round plastic tables, resting her cane on the chair beside her.
“This is the only place I ever wanted to live,” she said. “I hate subways and alleys. … Can’t stand them.” She was born in Tryon’s Eastside neighborhood and is still here, 85 years later.
Eastside is the historically Black part of Tryon, a town of just more than 1,500 at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains on North Carolina’s southern border. Littlejohn and several neighbors gathered at the center for a presentation on the Eastside’s biggest project: rehabilitating the childhood home of Nina Simone.
Simone, born Eunice Waymon in February 1933, grew up at 30 East Livingston Street. The family moved away when she was a child, and after several different owners over the decades, the home fell into disrepair.
In 2017, Black visual artists Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, and Adam Pendleton bought the home for $95,000. They solicited the help of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, specifically its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, for expertise. After its initial launch in February 2020, the project stalled amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The June 2023 event in the community center was meant to relaunch the physical restoration project. Representatives from the National Trust, contractors, community leaders, and members of the public–about 30 people in all–gathered to celebrate.
Each decision, from recreating the swept yard out front to revitalizing the small garden plot with native plants, is about historical integrity, speakers at the event said.
A Sotheby’s charity auction raised nearly $5.3 million for the project, more than double its $2 million goal. Tiffany Tolbert, senior director of preservation for the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, says the level of support and attention is uncommon for projects like these. (Venus Williams pitched in to select art for the auction.)
In early 2023, the Action Fund succeeded in getting the home on the National Register of Historic Places—a key step in securing its place in North Carolina’s cultural history.
Brent Leggs, executive director and senior vice president of the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, said he sees “preservation as a form of reconciliation.”
Leggs and the Action Fund also restored the Durham home of Pauli Murray, a pioneering legal scholar and civil rights activist, which opened as the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in September 2024. These projects, he hopes, tell “a truer history about the racial violence of the state.”
At the end of the meeting, Leggs announced that they would open the home to visitors later in the day. Only a few attendees made the trip up East Livingston Street.
A row of trees and shrubs stands between the front porch and the street. At that time, overgrown grass and kudzu were threatening to overtake the road, leaving barely enough parking for residents, let alone visitors. A small garden plot filled with weeds and volunteer tomatoes rested at the bottom of the yard, and the white porch sagged.
Littlejohn remembers sitting on these porch steps with Frances Waymon Fox, Nina’s younger sister and Littlejohn’s best friend. (Frances passed away in July 2023.)
The front door opens into a small living room with wood floors, brown slat walls, and ceiling paneling. The home feels bigger inside; the living room leads into two bedrooms, one of which has been painted bright blue. The other is partially stripped plaster, revealing the plywood and brick skeleton beneath. Piles of two-by-fours sit in the corner.
An old stove sits in another corner beside a Singer sewing machine with cloth still stuck under the needle. A bed with a dingy white quilt is pushed up against the living room wall, and a yellowing floral print rug covers most of the wood panel floor.
None of these furnishings is original to the home. Tolbert explained that a Tryon man bought the house in 2005 with the intention to turn it into a museum but never finished. What remains are small Ghanaian flags wedged behind the furniture; a map of the country’s capital, Accra; a baseball sitting on a corner bookshelf; and scraps of Nina Simone album covers and magazine stories laid across the beds.
An old church organ sits between two windows. On the music stand rest both Bach’s Eighteen Little Preludes and Fugues and sheet music for Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” In attempting to recreate and pay tribute, the current space accomplishes neither.
The Action Fund wants to avoid that problem entirely. The group plans to remove all the furnishings and leave the space open for different types of programming, but the question of exact use still looms over the project. The artists bought it to make a creative hub for Black artists, and perhaps a Simone pilgrimage site. Leggs said that he wants the space to be interactive, not pedagogical. Visitors suggested uses like an art gallery, a teaching center, a venue for speaker series on mental health, or artist and writer residencies.
A traditional museum, everyone agrees, would limit the possibilities. But in its current state, the house presents both truth and myth, much like Simone herself.
From N.C. to NYC
At the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, Simone paused between songs to tell the crowd about her life. She wanted, from adolescence, to be a classical pianist, she said—performing the great works in concert halls around the world. Necessity drove her to sing in jazz clubs around New York City to pay the bills.
She was born in a musical home, with her mother a vaudeville actress turned minister and her father a honky-tonk pianist who also worked as a barber and dry-cleaner. All eight Waymon children took piano lessons. At 16, she moved to New York to attend Juilliard for a one-year program on scholarship. After she was denied entry to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (which she always said was due to racist admission policies, a claim Curtis has denied), she made money playing at Midtown Bar & Grill in Atlantic City.
One gets the sense of a deep restlessness in Simone’s life. There is the much-repeated story of the time when, after not receiving adequate payment, she fired a gun at a record label executive. Fans retell tales like these to show she was tough, prone to aggressive outbursts, and they hint at the singer’s darker, despairing side.
“I’m a pianist,” she told the audience in Montreux. “I’m not a singer. I never was. That was an accident.” It was one of many tensions that plagued her life and fame as she tried to maintain her artistic integrity with her growing commercial success and its obligations, and as she lost faith in the promise of the Civil Rights Movement to which her fame was tied.
She wrote the protest song “Mississippi Goddam” in a fit of rage after hearing news of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed four girls in Birmingham, Alabama. In the tumult of 1968, a few months after the assassination of her friend Martin Luther King Jr., she recorded Nina Simone and Piano! The album is 10 tracks of her solo piano and voice, all American standards and showtunes. Her voice betrays a different kind of anguish from her protest songs–a personal sense of heartbreak that nearly makes every line dissolve into tears.
After several decades of touring and recording in the United States, Simone spent time in Barbados and Liberia before settling in France, joining a movement of Black artists escaping post-Jim Crow racism. She died there in 2003 at the age of 70.
She wrote in her 1991 autobiography that she left America to escape the disappointment in the lack of progress. “The protest years were over not just for me but for a whole generation,” she laments, “and in music, just like in politics, many of the greatest talents were dead or in exile and their place was filled by third-rate imitators.”
Her political despair was mingled with personal angst. As her fame had grown through the 1960s, she felt she had lost a handle on her life. “I had done things I couldn’t explain to the people I loved most: Daddy, Momma, my sisters,” she wrote. “I couldn’t go home without explaining myself, and I didn’t know how. The truth was I had no home anymore.”
The More Things Change
Sitting in a rocking chair in the living room of the Waymon home, Leggs asked his colleagues whether their public account of Simone’s legacy should include frank discussions of her mental health.
He is particularly interested in the effect small-town Southern life had on people like the Waymons. “What about programming in the home that focuses on the mental and emotional toll of growing up Black in this town?” he asks. “What about that walk she and her brother made every day across the tracks? What does that do to a person?”
Samuel Waymon knows. He is the youngest of the Waymon children and a musician living in Nyack, New York. He calls himself “the catch basin” for all the stories and the spirits— of his sister’s and the family’s—that he has absorbed in his 79 years. He is Nina Simone’s last living sibling, 11 years her junior. He toured with her, managed her, and played in her band for decades.
In many ways, he has dedicated his later life to carrying his sister’s legacy. He still performs tribute concerts for her, and his stock phrases about his time with Simone, whom he calls Eunice, suggest just how many times he has scrapped with reporters who come around, sniffing for one new story about his sister from those performing years. “You know, I’ve said this many times before,” he tells me as he introduces himself to yet another reporter, as both an admonishment and a source of pride.
He seems more excited to talk about Tryon itself, about what has changed since his boyhood, and what hasn’t. “First of all,” he told me, “we didn’t call it the Eastside.” They didn’t call it anything, only “the neighborhood,” occasionally the “lower side of the tracks.” In 1940, the town population increased by a third in 10 years, and the area was quickly industrializing.
He remembers walking to the white part of town, just like his sister did, for piano lessons with Miss Mazzy. He recalls members of white churches visiting St. Luke Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, where his mother was a minister, on the first Sunday of each month.
But as the conversation continues, he acknowledges the “darker side of Tryon.” He remembers cross-burnings on the end of his street, and he tells a story about finding three white men assaulting a Black child in the woods outside of town. After he intervened, the men threatened to castrate him. Once he got home, he told his father about the attack, but not his mother. It would have been too much for her. He said he knew the attackers because he recognized their voices.
When he talks about today’s Tryon, he tries to be optimistic. But, he admits, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Trade Street, the main drag, with its Nina Simone Plaza and bronze statue of the artist, features novelty shops and cafes of a typical vacation mountain town. But the lower side of the tracks doesn’t seem to have benefited from the town’s tourist revenue. The 2020 census shows Tryon is about 12 percent Black, almost half of the proportion of Black residents 20 years before. The town is aging and whitening, and Waymon says the change is palpable. The Eastside is shrinking. Yet its profile, thanks to this project, is rising.
Paying Tribute
At the community relaunch meeting two years ago, the out-of-towners outnumbered the locals. And of the Tryon residents, only a handful were from the Eastside neighborhood.
Many residents said they were excited for the project’s potential to bring tourists to the town and highlight its greatest export. And, they say, it is an opportunity to confront those darker parts of its history and, possibly, take a small step in correcting past injustices. One woman suggested that the National Trust should provide parking on the other side of the train tracks, so that visitors would walk, like Simone and her siblings, from the white part of town to the Black side.
Another visitor said that the National Trust should create a network between this home and the birthplaces of other famous jazz artists in North Carolina, all of whom left the state in childhood or adolescence. We must, he argued, link Simone’s upbringing to John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Max Roach, and others, who found their fame elsewhere and never really returned.
Tolbert, it turns out, worked on the John and Alice Coltrane Home project in New York for the National Trust. That project’s special appeal, she said, was its direct influence on the Coltranes’ work. John composed “A Love Supreme” in the attic office. Simone’s house has no such connection to her work. During the height of her fame, the home sat empty on East Livingston Street. Her family had long since moved away.
When Eastside residents spoke up at the June meeting, most were less concerned with the symbolic power of the home than with the logistics. It was still their neighborhood, after all, and not just the setting of a memorial to Simone. Leggs admits developing excitement for the project has been harder than he expected.
“I’m a bit concerned about the parking,” Littlejohn told him. School buses don’t come through the Eastside because the roads are too narrow and winding, she explained. Even the traffic from this meeting seemed to fill up the neighborhood. After several decades of shrinking, these few roads are not ready—physically—for growth.
Waymon recalled returning to Tryon in 2018 to perform a tribute concert for his sister, to celebrate the newly completed Nina Simone Plaza downtown. He passed five men sitting on an Eastside porch and asked them to come to the concert. They didn’t even know it was happening. And they weren’t sure they would attend. These honors and tributes, the men told him, come around from the white folks from time to time, and they pass just as quickly. All the hubbub had nothing to do with them.
“We need to have people of color to come out,” he told them, “to support one of our own.” After a discussion, most of them promised to come. Sure enough, that night, he saw the same five men in the crowd. His speech had worked, and he bought them a round of drinks after it was over.
Waymon tells this story like a parable in the Gospel of Nina, and those men were delivered. But one would expect that he must evangelize to the casual listeners, not just the residents of her neighborhood. And door-to-door preaching can’t be the most effective method. He supposes that the Eastside folks are most concerned that Simone’s home will become one more project that idealizes the individual and neglects the community.
Tolbert stressed that the National Trust will prioritize the community in its plans. The Trust hopes to complete the construction portion of the restoration by September, so public programming remains a long way off, but Tolbert wants to feature local artists and have Eastside residents leading the effort.
The National Trust is also partnering with locals to develop a “cultural district” in Tryon, which they say will support local businesses and revitalization in the Eastside, but the organization has yet to release details on the plans.
Since the beginning of the preservation process, the Action Fund has tried to engage community members in conversation about the best uses of the home. Tolbert and her colleagues held virtual consultations with Eastside residents, and Eastside leaders have done their best to invite their neighbors’ involvement. Most importantly, the Trust is still looking for a long-term homeowner. Ideally, she says, someone from the Eastside could take it on, but those discussions remain speculative.
The Action Fund specializes in preserving sites in Black history—including many in North Carolina. But the Nina Simone Childhood Home presents a special combination of challenge and opportunity. The project must, like the Murray home, honor and educate about the tangled history of 20th century Black life in North Carolina.
And, while her music and myth are large enough to fill the home, the National Trust team is adamant that the home not be just a memorial, but a community venue.
Simone’s only surviving sibling said he has no real ideas for the space itself. Sam Waymon only hopes that they spend some of the nearly $5.3 million they have raised on the community. “Then,” he said, “I think the community would be more apt to welcome any intrusion.”
Correction: The titles for both Leggs and Tolbert have been updated. The expected date for completing the construction portion of the restoration has also been updated.
Christiana Wayne is a writer living in Durham, N.C.