“Pirate Jenny”

Similar to the appropriative move of the singers of “Steal Away,” who rejected the cartographies of white possession, Simone folds a lineage of African insurrection within a European “show tune.” Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill scripted “Pirate Jenny” for their satire of the Weimar Republic, The Threepenny Opera. Footnote ¹⁶ Brecht and Weill’s classic “anti-opera” typifies Brecht’s theory of distanciation (in Brecht 1957:91–99; see also Tian Reference Tian1997). The pair valued abstraction and a certain coldness in delivery, and they disparaged artists who relied on pathos and pity to impact their audiences (see Brecht 1957; Buck-Morss Reference Buck-Morss1977:40; and Brooks Reference Brooks2011:182). German studies scholar Russell Berman argues that Simone’s covers are “anything but Brechtian,” instead pronouncing “distance from distanciation” through their “proximity and precision” and “racial, regional, and class specificity” (2003:177–79). Brooks suggests that Simone is “less invested” in Brechtian ideology, refocusing our attention on Simone’s generative distortions of Brecht and Weill’s work (2011:181):

Simone’s directive to “see and hear America on a different frequency” extends spatially: a frequency literally describes the number of times an event occurs in a set unit; Simone’s “frequency” demonstrates the unrelenting quality of racial and sexual violence in the US and how that incessance shapes her and other Black women’s navigations of public space.Footnote ¹⁸ Seeing and hearing America on a different frequency also means challenging “America” as a knowable place. As Simone halts white spectators’ “romanticization of the black female singer,” she also troubles their transparent idealizations of America and its apparent geographies.

Simone sang “Pirate Jenny” third in her set, preceded by two covers: George and Ira Gershwin’s 1935 showtune “I Loves You Porgy,” her first major hit; and George Stone’s “Plain Gold Ring.”Footnote ¹⁹ “Porgy” may have lulled her audience into a false sense of security for what was to come, while “Plain Gold Ring” established a creeping, rueful ambience narrated by the “other woman.” Officially under her “hypnosis” now, Simone further disquiets her audience through “Pirate Jenny,” setting the stage for the different “frequency” of what constitutes “American,” which she would cement in her damning, closing number, “Mississippi Goddam.”

Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny” is sung by Polly Peachum, taking on Jenny the maid’s revenge fantasy on the townspeople who mistreat her. Simone transfers the setting to a “crummy Southern town,” where she is “forced to scrub floors,” while “gentlemen” watch. As in the original, Simone’s “Pirate Jenny” character sees a “black freighter” ship in the distance and imagines, or perhaps enacts, a plot to shackle and kill her subjugators. Recounting his personal connection to the song, poet-critic Hanif Abdurraqib notes that Simone’s version is “so jarring” because she understands that “black people have a different relationship with boats, with chains, with the South, with freedom and the haunting that comes with not having it” (Abdurraqib Reference Abdurraqib2017:194–95). Simone also knows well that Black women have a different relationship to “forced” domestic labor and being “watched” by the “gentlemen” who coerce them (Simone Reference Simone1964). Through her invocation of the “freighter” and forced labor, Simone summons the geographies of the slave ship and the plantation, interposing them into the concert hall. As her Jenny spites those who “gawk” at her, Simone frustrates her Carnegie audience’s easy spectatorship of her performance, reminding non-Black (and male) concertgoers of their fundamentally different, or incommensurable, relationships to the terrains she summons and the politics of display.

Simone’s “Pirate Jenny” contrasts the original not just contextually, but sonically. Where actress Lotte Lenya performed the Threepenny number with technical freneticism at a noticeably faster pace, Simone is unapologetic and measured, savoring each beat of her harrowing lilt and thundering piano. Simone’s “Pirate Jenny” maintains the original’s repetitive rhythm, but introduces interpretive freedom and variance; as she shifts tempo and accents and sustains dissonant chords, Simone withholds fulfillment from the audience, increases musical tension, and reaffirms that she is in command of the melody. Through asserting her control over space and time and intentionally making her voice more challenging for audiences to track, Simone acts out what Brooks calls “a spectacular performance of subterfuge” (2011:180). Simone’s “subterfuge” conjures insurrection and white elites’ misrecognition of it, embodying the Black geographic method of “stealing away.”Footnote ²⁰

Furthermore, Simone’s performance replicates the spatial movements of maroonage: Simone’s Jenny escapes after the ship’s rebels “flat[ten]” the town, perhaps alluding to fire’s central role in many emancipation plots, including enslaved people’s organized burning of New York in 1712 (see Lepore Reference Lepore2005); the song culminates with her flight from the gentlemen’s captive gaze, as Simone/Jenny “disappears out to sea,” joining the pirates’ community. Threepenny’s Polly/Jenny prefaces the song by saying she “has no family,” only a “dream”; in her performance, Lenya adopts aloof gestures of regality, often turning a distant smile upwards and grandiosely waving her arms overhead (see Mr. Egerman 2013). In contrast, Simone’s Polly/Jenny is not playacting a fantasy, but recounting a revolutionary plot: when Simone sings “you’ll never guess to who you’re talking,” she elongates the phrase with a sneer, mocking the men who, as Brooks surmises, “fail to read the bloody revolution brewing in [their] midst” (2011:181). As she oscillates between extended utterances and sharply spoken retorts, cackles, and whispers, Simone’s voice itself becomes fugitive and evades capture. Simone raids the song and stage, supplanting African traditions of maroonage into a German theatrical standard in a grandiose classical music hall.

While her Northern crowd could have distanced themselves from the racism she sang about later on in “Mississippi Goddam,” the disconcerting “Pirate Jenny” may have been much harder to deflect. This may be why Simone presented “Pirate Jenny” first, intentionally unnerving her audience in preparation for the remainder of her set. Simone’s piano hunts the listener with its pounding, as she turns Carnegie Hall into a scene of a shipboard insurrection. Through performance, Simone ruptures the slave ship’s psychic grounds and Carnegie Hall’s spatial script. She jolts her audience out of the passive consumption the hall’s architecture of fine, front-facing red velvet chairs encourages. Reveling in vocal excess, Simone’s screeches bring to a halt the cycle of repetition that would render her body a commodity defined by its capacity for multiplication. She refuses to be the virtuosic Black songstress that her audience may desire and that the ostentatious stage’s “scenario” anticipates.

At her conclusion, Simone whispers into stillness that her victims be killed “right now.” Her decisive command counters white supremacist violence and the demand that the Black pursuit of justice “go slow,” which she would critique later in “Mississippi Goddam.” Finishing “Pirate Jenny” with a spectral shout—“That’ll learn ya!”—Simone instructs her audience how to read her body and the spaces she remaps, while refusing legibility.

“Go Limp”

If Simone’s haunting and opaque “Pirate Jenny” embodied a practice of fugitive alienation, “Go Limp,” covered two tracks later, brought the audience close as she corralled them into a call-and-response refrain not unlike a nursery rhyme in tone and content. Too roo la, too roo la, too rool li ay, Simone cued, making her Carnegie crowd mimic the tune back.

In “Go Limp,” Nina Simone revises a protest song written for the 1958 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament by Alex Comfort, famous for his antimilitarist politics and 1972 nonfiction manual The Joy of Sex (see Rayner Reference Rayner2000; see also Place and Cohen Reference Place and Cohen2000). In both Comfort’s and Simone’s versions, the song depicts a young woman attempting to remain sexually innocent amidst the hostile advances of fellow male protestors. At the beginning of the song, the woman pacifies her mother’s worries, assuring her that she’ll return from the march a “virgin maid,” enumerating how she’ll safeguard her virtue: “with a brick in my handbag/and a smile on my face/and barbed wire in my underwear/to shed off disgrace.” By the song’s end, its protagonist has endured sexual advances from “a young man […] with a gleam in his eye,” slept three nights on a “hard classroom floor,” and, following her organizing briefing’s implicit guidance, “gone perfectly limp” for the young man. The song concludes optimistically—the narrator’s assailant has left his name and address and even though the protagonist is now pregnant, her child “won’t have to march” if she and the movement “win.” Lyrically and narratively, “Go Limp” seems to satirize the passivity and nonviolent approach of some activist groups—the speaker’s attempts to protect herself from “disgrace” are thwarted when, as the lyrics tell us, she follows the “N-A-A-C-P” ethos to “go limp” in the face of attack. Even if she puts a positive spin on it at the end of the song, the woman’s “brick” and “barbed-wire underwear” remain ineffective. “Go limp” also refers to the protest tactic of total muscular relaxation that makes it more difficult for police to carry away protestors. Protest leaders would have trained their cohorts to “go limp” when an officer tried to drag them off to be arrested, guidance that is both practical and bespeaks the state cruelty rampant at many of these incidents—only once a body is “dead weight,” or becomes heavy, does the officer register the level of force they are using. In the song, Simone’s amused tone is confusing; nonviolence is mocked, tongue-in-cheek, “go limp” is offered as a half-ironic, half-serious instructive, and meanwhile her lyrics attest to the real horrors and stakes of political organizing. Simone depicts protesting as arduous and dangerous for young women, even if worthwhile, and seems to say, by transporting the song to the NAACP setting, that nonviolent organizing circles are not the reprieve from harm they may consider themselves to be. In the lyrics, the speaker is assaulted by another marcher, insinuating gendered violence is still a reality in activist communities. This critique foreshadows Simone’s “Four Women” (1966b), which testifies to the unique oppression Black women face as a result of their Blackness and gender presentations.

Simone’s Carnegie Hall performance of “Go Limp” amplifies the song’s disorienting qualities. At the Carnegie Hall concert and on at least one other occasion, Simone feigns her own befuddlement, acting as if she forgot the song’s plot and her place in it (“Have I told you about Mama yet?” she intonates to the crowd). Simone’s almost verbatim repetitions of her “confusion” reveal her “forgetting” as part of her script. Simone prompts the audience to help her “remember,” as she encourages and praises their recitation of the song’s simplistic “too roo la, too roo la, too rool li ay” refrain (“You’ve got it! You’ve got it!” she exclaims). At one point, between the first chorus and second verse, Simone instructs the audience: “You get the gist of the song now? When we get to the chorus again, I expect you to sing with lust.” Recordings of “Go Limp” reveal that Simone desired, even advocated, for audiences’ vocal participation: she musically “holds for laughs,” often slowing down and quieting her accompaniment for them; interestingly, towards the end of the song, Simone creates a secondary voice of her own as she leaps an octave, creating a sonic space and echo that she alone can reach.

When I first heard “Go Limp,” I felt uneasy—Simone describes a woman, devoted to the civil rights movement, who chooses not to resist her own rape. She makes her audience complicit in the man’s advances, coaching them to “sing with lust,” joining in on their laughter, and, of course, leading them in a whimsical call-and-response. That Simone makes her spectators perform their amusement is key—“Go Limp” is right before “Mississippi Goddam,” which Simone does not formally introduce. Subtly, as she critiques nonviolence in both songs, she suggests that, as a political strategy, it is insufficient to effect material change (Simone [Reference Simone1991] 1993:94–95). Simone’s wariness of nonviolence is indicative of the era in which she performed; that spring, Congress had not yet passed the Civil Rights Act, in spite of major political demonstrations, including the 1963 March on Washington, and just that fall, John F. Kennedy was assassinated and white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, causing the death of four young Black girls. Along with the strategy of nonviolence, Simone seems to critique, too, the expectations white audiences historically have placed on Black performers to instruct them on race and stand in for Blues authenticity when she half-sings, half-says in an aside: “And if I have a great concert/Maybe I won’t have to sing those folk songs again.” Lamp-shading her “great concert” hall setting and expressing a fatigue at the “folk songs” stereotypically associated with her, Simone draws attention to the labor of her performance. Simone’s irreverent tone in “Go Limp” also points to the futility of performance that fails to provoke its audience. Moreover, the “Go Limp” lyrics and Simone’s theatrical “forgetfulness” suggest a practice of opacity. Though the song’s narrator goes limp and does not resist the young man’s forcefulness, she does not provide consent. Simone’s befuddling use of humor constructs a wall between the audience and herself, obstructing them from transparently “reading” her. I am reminded of Zora Neale Hurston’s “theory of tactics”:

Figure 4.

Nina Simone, Netherlands, 1966?. (Courtesy of Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, Netherlands CC-BY-NC-ND)

With “too roo la, too roo la, too rool li ay,” and to some extent “Go Limp” as a whole, Simone gives her audience “something to play with” before she “sings her song”—in this case, “Mississippi Goddam.” Simultaneously, Simone cues her listeners to understand things are not always as they appear; “Go Limp” slips on the appearance of witty, yet flighty and fun commentary, when really the subject matter is much more dire and damning. Returning to McKittrick’s “transparent space,” this troubling sets up Simone’s geographic pièce de résistance, a sustained indictment and unsettling of the US American landscape.

“Mississippi Goddam”

Simone’s “showtune for a show that has not been written yet” is in many ways her signature song, embodying both her musical expertise and strident Black radical politics. She wrote and composed “Mississippi Goddam” in the wake of the murders of both Medgar Evers and the four Black girls in Birmingham. Simone debuted “Mississippi Goddam” shortly before her Carnegie show, however, the New York concert would mark its premiere to a wider audience.

Carrying the navigational pulse of enslaved Africans’ songs, Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” maneuvers and scores the US American landscape’s anti-Blackness. In the lyrics she tracks white supremacist violence across the South; however, she ultimately locates white terrorists’ threats across her many “paths” and daily routines: violence is chronic, seeping into and merging past, present, and future tenses. Simone’s catalog of the landscape testified to her terror and exhaustion and indicted the supposed transparency of Mississippi’s land regulation. Following the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, white Mississippians formed two organizations to counter desegregation. The first was the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency proposed by the Mississippi House of Representatives and approved in 1956, which notably investigated and retaliated, via physical violence and economic recompense, against Black Mississippians even cursorily involved in the civil rights struggle. A white planter and plantation owner, Robert Patterson, initiated the second state-sanctioned white supremacist organization in 1960s Mississippi: motivated in part by his own claims to land in the delta, as well as fear that Black citizens would “outnumber” him, Patterson created the Citizens’ Council, which collaborated with “elected officials, members of law enforcement, and White [sic] business leaders […] to detect and discourage local civil rights activity through the collective economic power that its members held” (Rolph Reference Rolph2019). Though the Citizens’ Council started with Patterson in Indianola, Mississippi, its influence quickly spread beyond the state, and members created chapters in surrounding Southern states, as well as in Northern cities including Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles (McMillen Reference McMillen1971:138). The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission funded the Citizens’ Council, donating a total of $193,500 from 1960–64, and Medgar Evers’s murderer Byron De La Beckwith was an active member of both the Council and the Ku Klux Klan (MDAH n.d.). I provide this context not to rehearse how acute racial injustice was in 1960s Mississippi, although it is important to remember the depth of state-incentivized persecution of Black Southerners during a US American era often heralded for its progress, but to underscore even more the geographical incision of Simone’s protest song. In explicitly naming anti-Blackness as persistently everywhere, mundane in its extremity, Simone more accurately maps 1960s Mississippi than state-manufactured maps of the region. Or, put differently, her song gets at a truth about place that aerial, paper maps elide. Consider these lyrics from the first verse of “Mississippi Goddam”:

Bringing to mind Christina Sharpe’s notion of “the weather,” or the everyday “climate of anti-Blackness” (2016:106), Simone implores her predominantly white Northern audience to witness what, for her, is all around. Anti-Blackness constitutes Simone’s very “air,” altering its pressure like an eardrum ready to burst from the sheer force of altitude. Simone’s characterization of the “weather” she endures as a Black woman aptly renders the “air” of white supremacy, which permeates each level of the “goddam” Mississippian climate. Simone further explored the pervasiveness of racial and gendered violence in subsequent performances of “Mississippi Goddam,” in which she updated lyrics to cite current events, including protests and riots in St. Augustine, Selma, and Watts, Los Angeles, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Through these alterations, Simone reveals her unrest is not limited to Mississippi, while also, to repeat an earlier phrase, adding details to a “sonic archive” of Black history.

Figure 5.

Record sleeve for the single release of “Mississippi Goddam” by Nina Simone, from the album Nina Simone in Concert. (Courtesy of Carnegie Hall Rose Archives)

Even though Simone concentrates her ire on Mississippi, she destabilizes the presumption that anti-Black geographies are solely the terrain of the “goddam” Deep South by disrupting Carnegie Hall’s typically decorous environment and appealing to her audience directly: “Can’t you see it/Can’t you feel it?” She demands listeners pay disciplined attention to what for her is the weather of US American existence. Furthermore, Simone disturbs linear time and place with her script-flipping repetitions of “too slow”: calling out the racist rhetoric that positions Black people as “too slow,” she argues that justice is “too slow.” “Slowness” functions on multiple levels as yet another intervention in white, upper-class culture’s investment in propriety. Politely pursuing “slow” change is an inadequate means of material social transformation. This argument manifests most clearly in Simone’s third verse:

Note the change of address in this verse: Simone goes from calling out those who persecute civil rights activists as communists, a strategy deployed constantly by the Citizens’ Council and Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, to saying that “you lied to me all these years.” While the “they” who accuse protestors of “a communist plot” more likely refers to those with political authority and influence, such as Citizens’ Council members, the “you” Simone confronts is the Carnegie Hall audience. She turns to them, as she has throughout the set and as was customary of her performance style, to reproach the very “lady-like” behavior expected of Carnegie Hall performers. Her critique is unmistakably one concerning performance; taking on the idiom to “wash and clean [her] ears” and the directive to “talk real fine just like a lady,” Simone contests (white) audiences’ attempts to “civilize” and control her manners of listening and speaking, while rebuking racist discourse that depicts Black people as dirty and impure (in need of washing), inarticulate (“talk real fine”), and, for Black women in particular, overly masculine (“like a lady”). Here, Simone also condemns Black respectability politics as counterproductive reactions to stereotype. By transitioning from “they” to “you,” Simone confronts her Northern crowd and the white hegemonic space of Carnegie Hall.

Simone’s vexation at her surroundings is consistent throughout “Mississippi Goddam.” She declares early in the song “I don’t belong here/I don’t belong there,” immediately after pleading to the “lord” to “have mercy on this land of mine.” In this stanza, she explores her uneasy relationship to the US American land. Simone resolutely does not “belong here” nor “there”; she feels out of place throughout the country, perhaps due to the daily danger for Blacks in the US, which she testifies to in the song, and her very presence in America being a product of her ancestors’ enslavement. And yet she prays, singing: “this land of mine.” Even though Simone feels alienated from the land where she resides, she claims it as her own. Simone’s map underscores both the relentless, reiterative danger she faces in her daily navigation of space and her profoundly ambivalent relationship to place itself. America’s grounds are haunted by the ever-present specter of violence and unanswered prayers for Simone.

Simone emphasizes language’s limitations in “Mississippi Goddam.” And yet she uses language to damn Mississippi: “The double work of Simone’s curse,” Brooks argues, is “to engage in a fraught relationship with a God that she now rejects and yet simultaneously needs in order to fulfill her condemnation of the South” (2011:188). Her “damn” is an Austinian utterance and act. By “damning” the US American South, Simone does something to the land. She acts upon it. Simone may be “damning” her listeners as well; however, she may also be opening up space for them to issue their own “damning” of America, in all their incommensurable entrances into their cursing. Her “goddam” also reveals the futility of language. Simone is so disturbed by “Mississippi” that the structure of her sentence falls apart: instead of naming Mississippi’s emotional or physical impact on her as she does for the other states, she just says “goddam.” The failure of language to testify to the effects of violence would be explored through her screams and howls just a few years later with “Four Women.”

“Four Women”

The lyrics of “Four Women,” organized in four stanzas, follow four Black women, each representing an anti-Black female stereotype. Each stanza concludes with the refrain, “What do they call me? My name is…” (Simone 1965; see Mr. Wolf 2022). The women—Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches, in order—all correlate to what Patricia Hill Collins theorizes as “controlling images” ([1990] 2002:69–96). Simone invokes the “mammy,” “tragic mulatto,” “Jezebel,” and “Sapphire,” respectively. Hortense Spillers initiates her landmark essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” quoted above, with the same structure as Simone’s “Four Women.” Both treatises deconstruct how white dominant culture marks the Black female body through a history of sexual violation, which is evidenced through the creation of the very tropes both Spillers and Simone investigate.Footnote ²²

Figure 6.

Nina Simone performs “Four Women” in the Netherlands, 25 December 1965. (Mr. Wolf 2022; screenshot by TDR)

Simone draws a historic continuum between these stereotypical figures in relationship to sexual violence and what Kimberly Juanita Brown terms the “afterimages” of enslavement (2015:1–6). Through Simone’s insurgent final and prolonged note—her wailing hold on “My name is Peaches”—she takes the song’s peak of suspension and rupture and uses it to embody a sonics of dissent (Simone Reference Simone1966b; see also Spillers Reference Spillers1987:81). Simone’s fleshy rebellion counters catastrophe’s singular grammar, as Simone gathers meaning from Black feminist collectivity and through her interruption of her own body as “marked” text (Spillers Reference Spillers1987:65).

In filmed performances of “Four Women,” including one in Holland from 1965, Simone settles into the piano. Gesturing to her own natural hair, she says, “one of these women has hair like mine,” setting up her own positionality and prompting audiences to perhaps reflect on theirs (see Mr. Wolf 2022). Her song starts with Aunt Sarah as she sings: “My skin is black/My arms long/My hair is wooly/My back is strong/Strong enough to take the pain/Inflicted again and again/What do they call me?/My name is Aunt Sarah.” Simone’s straightforward instrumental composition directs the audience’s focus to her lyrics, which follow the above pattern for each woman. With the character of Aunt Sarah—the enslaved laborer, made to be simultaneously asexual and always available for sexual violation—Simone enunciates a beginning “which precedes [her]” (see Broom Reference Broom2019).Footnote ²³ By initiating her song with Aunt Sarah, Simone instructs her listeners—many of whom would have been well-meaning white civil rights activists—that an accounting for the crimes against these “four women” must commence with what Spillers calls the inaugural “materialized scene of unprotected female flesh—of female flesh ‘ungendered’” (1987:68). Spillers argues two decades after Simone that assigning gender and particularly white womanhood’s “matriarchist value” to Black women represents “a fatal misunderstanding” (80). Thus, Spillers articulates that violation against the gendered female must be read differently in the context of Blackness and Black flesh’s “ungendering” at the “suspended” site of the Middle Passage (80). Simone’s scene with Aunt Sarah harkens back to Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester, whose infamous scream was Douglass’s “blood-stained gate, [his] entrance to the hell of slavery” ([1845] 2011:6). Just as Simone’s beginning precedes her, Douglass’s initiation into slavery’s rupturing “hell” precedes him—enunciated through sound, or what Fred Moten theorizes as “proof that objects resist” (2003:1). Simone and Douglass’s recollections of their “aunts” point towards a catastrophic grammar that does not conclude, but repeats through marking another “captive body” (Spillers Reference Spillers1987:67).

After Aunt Sarah, Simone adopts the roles of Saffronia and Sweet Thing, whose stories both illustrate racial capitalism’s dependence on the sexual exploitation of Black women. Saffronia, who has “yellow” skin and lives “between two worlds,” recounts: “my father was rich and white/he forced my mother late one night.” Simone’s Saffronia indirectly references partus sequiter ventrum, the 1662 Virginia law that decreed a child’s enslaved status followed their mother’s; this absolved white enslavers who raped Black women and in fact further incentivized them because any children resulting from the rape would increase the enslaver’s capital by generating more human property (see Morgan Reference Morgan2018; and Getman Reference Getman1984). Saffronia uses her own body as the text that betrays this sordid history; her mother’s rape is proven by Saffronia’s skin. Simone’s next character, Sweet Thing, represents a sex worker, with lines like: “Whose little girl am I?/Anyone who has money to buy.” Though sex work is work, when placed alongside the rest of the women in this song, it seems as though Simone is making a point about the limited options afforded Black women in a culture that devalues them and reduces them to a body, or sweet “thing.” Both Sweet Thing’s and Saffronia’s names allude to the dynamics in which the hypersexualized Black woman’s body is turned into a commodity, a process bell hooks terms “eating the other” (1992:21–22). Sweet Thing invokes the circulation and consumption of sugar, which was central to the slave trade and became synonymous with Black female flesh. Kara Walker explores this conflation in her 2014 art piece, A Subtlety: Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a larger-than-life-size installation of a “mammy” sphinx figure made entirely of sugar in an old Domino warehouse. Saffron is a spice used to add flavor in dishes, thus Saffronia speaks to the operation “within commodity culture, [in which] ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture,” as bell hooks argues (hooks 1992:21). Both Sweet Thing and Saffronia make plain how the commodification and sexual violation of Black women are rooted in histories of and present iterations of African enslavement.

Finally, and most crucially, Simone brings her audience back to Aunt Sarah at the song’s conclusion: her voice now closer to a militant howl, she cries out, “I’m awfully bitter these days/Because my parents were slaves.” “Four Women” has a seemingly chronological structure, with each “controlling image” occupying a sequential moment in US American history. Simone places them in relationship to each other and brings them into the present tense (“My skin is…” “What do they call me?” “My name is…”) to show that these racist tropes and their effects endure and, though sang chronologically, are not linear. Simone locates her “parents” as enslaved, condensing her genealogy to show that Aunt Sarah and the afterlives of slavery remain in the present. With her final verse, Simone halts the rhyme scheme with “I’ll kill the first mother I see!” and challenges the song’s repetitive structure by only stating her name once—this time with an elongated, defiant scream. In extending “Peaches” to the point of excess, Simone talks back to the white supremacist systems that would see her body as solely a site of production (see Tuck and Yang 2012). “Excess” is taken up on Simone’s own terms, her belt both sustained and controlled as she seizes back the name that would identify her only through her sex.Footnote ²⁴ While “Four Women” up until this point follows a relatively static rhythm and smaller range, engendering a hypnotic quality, Simone breaks her song’s spell, suspending “My name is…” and hovering at her voice’s crackle, until she finally gives her voice over to screaming resolve. Simone’s scream folds into Aunt Hester’s within what Fred Moten calls “scene[s] of objection” (2003:1). Simone transgresses across registers, perspectives, and generations, forming what Brooks calls a fugitivity that “announce[s] itself in shifting and subjective positions, and which, in turn, creates a productive excess that obfuscates the putative transparency of the black female singer” (2011:181). At her performance’s apex, Simone “stands in the flesh” and sounds against the dominant order, which would read her scream’s “provocative intensity” as “nothing but the call of a wild animal,” as Edourd Glissant critiques ([1989] 1997:123–24; see also Spillers Reference Spillers1987:81; and Moten Reference Moten2003:8). Simone’s recalcitrant scream instead extends the insurgent language of her ancestors to name the reiterations of violence that mark their bodies, while breaking these cycles open wide.