This is excerpted from Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power and is published with permission by UNC Press.
The type of Sunday that found Langston Hughes appearing in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1949 typically meant something significant for Mary Burnette.
The eldest of three children, Mary had settled with her family in Black Mountain, North Carolina, after living in both Ohio and California. On Saturdays, she slept overnight at Allen High School, in nearby Asheville, to wake early enough to make the bus trips for the school’s glee club events.
For big occasions such as this Sunday, she often wore an elegant necklace to complement the flowing waves in her straightened hair. Throughout the winter of this, her senior year, she roomed with junior class president Eunice Waymon. Thinking of those Sunday excursions, Burnette recalled the exemplary piano player as a “marvelous talent that had exceled every piano teacher she had ever had.” Once when sixteen-year-old Eunice was asked to produce an A-flat for her music teacher, “she gave her the sound [in her voice] without even touching the piano. She had perfect pitch.”
During the week, Mary’s mornings were passed on the thirty-minute bus ride in from Black Mountain while Eunice—whom the world would one day know as Nina Simone—, a boarder at the school, woke at 5:30 a.m. to practice piano in a private room. It was little wonder that many of her classmates were “a little jealous of her because of her talent. But they couldn’t touch her: If they’d have practiced all night and all day, they couldn’t touch Eunice. She was just a tremendously gifted person.”
At glee club events, Mary and her classmates sang while Eunice played: “We were inspired by her confidence and flawless performance at the piano. I assure you I was watching the pianist more closely than our director. . . . I watched Eunice so closely. I seem to remember her looking at us, her face expressionless, as a signal to say, ‘Ok, get ready!’” How good was she? Mary asserted, “I believe she could have played ‘Moonlight Sonata’ blindfolded.”
One Sunday visit to a little country church was particularly memorable. Eunice was always given time during the performance to demonstrate her prowess, and she found ways to showcase her skills while playing her piano solo. With her short, straightened hair, curled at the edges and covering her ears, Eunice was so trained for action that, even at rest in photographs, her fingertips pointed slightly up, ready to be pressed down on ivory keys.
That afternoon, when she was playing a piece by J. S. Bach, her classmates all noticed that the church floor beneath the upright piano was uneven and warped. The singers could not turn away from her unrestrained approach to the keys as the piano rocked away and then back as if it were a boat floating in deep waters. The church hostess, observing with an even keener eye than her peers to note how her congregation was receiving such a demonstration, told the rest of the singers, “That girl’s a-gonna turn that piano over on herself.”
Eunice Waymon sat in the Allen High School auditorium in Asheville, North Carolina, knowing that she had been given the honor of introducing guest poet and lecturer Langston Hughes. This moment was the culmination of the work she and her fellow members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had put into organizing the event where Hughes would read his “Poems of Negro Life.” As junior class president, NAACP chapter treasurer, and president of the drama club, sixteen-year-old Eunice was the obvious choice to take center stage, Burnette recalled.
Eunice was born and raised fifty-four miles away in tiny Tryon, North Carolina, where her mother, Kate, was a minister whose Baptist church was so close to the family’s home that young Eunice walked the two blocks to play on Sundays as early as the age of six. Sneaking turns at more popular music whenever it was just her father J. D. at home, the sixth of the eight Waymon children was not enamored of either gospel or boogie-woogie; instead, her lifelong unwavering passion for composers such as Bach indicated her earnest intent to become a classical concert pianist.
One of the defining moments in young Eunice’s life occurred when her instructor Muriel Mazzanovich arranged a public recital for her star student. Entering the Lanier Library in Tryon in 1944, Kate and J. D. Waymon were seated in the front row. Just as eleven-year-old Eunice took the stage to begin playing classical standards, however, her parents were relocated to the back of the library, moved to maintain racial norms.
According to Kate, Eunice wanted her parents close enough to see her truly dynamic hands in action. Eunice announced to the entire audience that if her parents could not sit “where they can see my hands, I will not play. You can kick me, beat me, anything you want, I will not play.” With her parents returned to their original seats, Eunice began her program.
Her time at Allen would lead to an eight-week summer stint at the Juilliard School in July 1950 and to a formal audition in Philadelphia at the Curtis Institute of Music in April 1951. Half of Allen High School’s instructors, all women, were white. And the students, numbering approximately 150 girls from grades nine through twelve, were all Black. Founded in 1889, the school was overseen by the women’s division of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church. Eunice boarded at the main dormitory, spending off-weekends visiting with her serious boyfriend, Edney Whiteside. Chaperoned constantly, the very compliant Eunice and her hometown sweetheart—sharing a soda with separate straws on their dates—had future plans for marriage.
As Eunice surveyed the students from the auditorium stage at Allen, her focus likely strayed far from the absent Edney, who couldn’t attend the all-girls school. She was about to meet her first example of Black artistic success. If she sought to calm herself before her introduction of Hughes, she could have called upon the same deep breaths required before playing fugues and sonatas. She had advanced so far beyond her school music teacher that she was supplementing her studies with two private instructors in Asheville, one of whom had studied formally in Europe. And she had clear ambitions to be somebody in this world, somebody as famous as the poet now sharing the stage.
While there isn’t any concrete evidence documenting exactly what Eunice did or did not perform either that afternoon at 1:30 p.m. or that evening for outside guests at 8:30 p.m., a poem Hughes wrote in response to his visit clearly demonstrates that he heard Eunice play. It would have been natural for the school to showcase one of its star pupils to the community, given that Eunice was living on campus in the dorms with no home to return to for the evening.
Furthermore, an unmistakable pattern emerges from the week: Every institution that hosted Hughes included music on the program along with his poetry. On the two days just before his time in Asheville, fourteen-year-old Fannie Lou Tomlin performed “Boy Like You” and W. M. Warren sang Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in Winston-Salem, and Hughes remembered Delores Fullman as a “Negro Girl Singer from Chicago” from his stop at Black Mountain College. Hughes himself expected music to be on the program in Asheville, having sent three of his own songs and suavely alerted the school: “There may be music both before and after my portion of the program if you so desire.”
Though Hughes kept meticulous notes documenting his appearances, it appears that the three consecutive events (and back-to-back red-eye train trips?) prevented him from recording any personal notes about his Tuesday in Asheville. This omission was remarkably rare. In fact, of the six appearances Hughes made that week in 1949, only his day in Asheville went undocumented by either an entry on his part or a substantive newspaper report chronicling any of his events.
Instead, he did something better: He put all his energies into writing a poem about the young prodigy he encountered. Yes, even at sixteen years old, Eunice Waymon made an indelible impression on Langston Hughes.
Unlike at the school, anticipation in town had not been building all week. On Friday, February 4, a tiny notice in the Asheville Citizen-Times announcing Hughes’s visit was buried on page 3. Published for the newspaper’s mostly white readers, Sunday’s three sentences trumpeted an announcement from librarian Irene Hendrick that the “Asheville Colored Library will have special exhibits and displays of books by Negro authors” with a specific section “arranged of the books of Langston Hughes.”
After speaking in Winston-Salem on Sunday and at Black Mountain College on Monday, on Tuesday Hughes was driven into Asheville by Barbara Drier for his three speaking events there. He would finish his week of engagements by speaking in Wilson, North Carolina, and in Washington, DC, before headlining a three-day celebration in Boston, where he would be the keynote speaker at the year’s largest Negro History Week celebration in America. Such was the popularity and prestige of Langston Hughes in 1949.
Contrasting sharply with his reception in every other city he visited this week, no reporter was sent to cover any of Hughes’s three events in Asheville, surprising given that admission to Hughes’s night event (also in the Allen High School auditorium) required a five-dollar entry fee, roughly sixty dollars today, with all proceeds benefiting the “Colored Library.” Though Hughes spoke to Allen students at 1:30 p.m., the general public at 8:30 pm, and even in between at Asheville’s Capital Press Club, where the guests included members of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union local chapter (meeting at their union hall), the town press was much more interested to share the news that local author Thomas Wolfe’s home had just been officially acquired for preservation.
Of all the locations Hughes was invited to speak during Negro History Week in 1949, Allen High School may have been the most surprising. The progressive school was governed by funds from the Methodist Church and deliberately featured a racially integrated staff.
After Hughes’s assistant Nate White reached out to the school by form letter, it was agreed that Hughes would give two performances at the school. His fee was $150. School superintendent Claire Lennon wanted both her students and the general public to attend, and she knew that the “auditorium will not be large enough to accommodate all these at one time.” While Hughes was invited to stay on Allen’s campus at one of the “guest rooms,” he in fact ended up spending the night at the Lennons’ home.
As for the anticipation of Hughes’s appearance, Hughes learned from Lennon that “our girls are very much excited.” Eunice’s roommate Mary Burnette recalled that “Allen could acknowledge ‘Negro History Week.’ We were studying Negro History, and our text was written by Carter G. Woodson. This is weird because here in this thoroughly segregated city, where Black schools themselves are not mentioning Negro History, and are not teaching Negro History, this school, Allen can do it, openly. It was not mentioned at any of the integrated schools I went to [earlier] in California or Ohio, but this little school of Allen can do it openly . . . even in Black Mountain, NC, the teachers were very cautious.” Allen High School’s choice to celebrate Negro History Week made the institution unique.
Hughes stepped to the podium surrounded not only by Allen students, “a lively group of girls,” and their all-female faculty, but also students from neighboring Black schools. Hughes recalled “having been to almost every other large city in North Carolina,” but this was his first and only appearance in Asheville.
Choosing spontaneity because he did not wish to “fall into a rut,” Hughes did not present “a set routine of poems” but rather found a way to “weave them into my talk.” Hughes presented one of his most iconic poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” It begins by asserting how a connection to the famous rivers of the world builds unity with one’s race:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow
of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Crossing time till the Euphrates, Congo, Nile, and Mississippi have each been surrealistically traveled by the voice of an “I” that is quietly becoming collective; the poem ends by once again reasserting, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” For Hughes, “soul” would come to epitomize something far less spiritual and more complex. As esteemed scholar of both Hughes and music Tony Bolden has explained, “Decades before recordings of modern jazz and rhythm and blues popularized the concept of soul in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively, Hughes’s contemporaries regarded him as an exemplar.”
Eunice, seated onstage rather than in the audience throughout the reading, observed how Hughes performed by substituting a podium for a piano. She may have struggled to believe that a man so short could arrive with such stature. Moreover, his singsong voice and ability to sprinkle in an occasional throat-giggle must have made the poet feel closer rather than distant. He was so unlike her idol, Hazel Scott, whose pictures hung on her dorm room wall. The famous Black pianist, who played everything from classical to boogie-woogie, parlayed her good looks and charisma into a career in film and onstage that earned her a salary equivalent to a million dollars a year today.
This very year, Hazel Scott would demonstrate that she had more in common with the politically inclined Hughes than might be imagined. She drew unwanted attention. In fact, when she and a companion were refused service in a restaurant in Pasco, Washington, in 1949, Scott brought suit and inspired civil rights organizations to successfully pressure the state of Washington to pass legislation outlawing discrimination in public accommodations.
In listening to the music of Scott, and now greeting and hearing Hughes, Eunice was introduced to the idea that there were many ways to become famous. As a young Black woman, she was now learning this from her personal encounter with the first-ever successful Black artist she had ever introduced.
Mary Burnette remembers watching Hughes from the front row of the auditorium: “When Langston Hughes was reading, it was customary for the reader to downplay any emotion. He’s just reading and not putting any emotion into his reading. It was impressive to see someone of his caliber. I was impressed with his reading.” Even without visible emotion, Hughes’s language during this single appearance had a remarkable effect on Burnette. In fact, she later earned an MA in literature, for which she formally studied Hughes’s poetry: “When I started to study English, I wanted to read all of Langston Hughes, I was particularly fascinated with his use of dialect.”
When Burnette’s Black friends asked her why she loved poetry, she read aloud to them from the works of Langston Hughes.
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