Here is the story I hope we tell: Nina Simone’s blackness didn’t wash off at the end of a day. Nina Simone sang “Sinnerman” for ten minutes in 1965, and the whole earth trembled. Nina Simone played the piano like she was cocking a gun. Nina Simone was dark, and beautiful, and her hair piled high to heaven. Nina Simone survived what she could of the civil rights era, and then got the fuck out. Nina Simone rode away on the troubled ocean, standing on the deck of a black ship, looking back while a whole country burned, swallowing itself.
