Nina: A Story of Nina Simone by Traci N. Todd (review)

Eunice Kathleen Waymon was a musical prodigy, playing Daddy’s “good-time jazz” on the old upright, then switching seamlessly to church music when her mother, a minister, came through the door. Such a talent couldn’t be ignored, even in 1930s North Carolina; although Mama’s white employer wouldn’t allow her son to play with a little Black girl, she nonetheless arranged for Eunice’s lessons, and by the end of high school Eunice, enraptured by Bach, was on her way to Juilliard. After rejection by the Curtis Institute, likely due to racial bias, a discouraged Eunice took her music down a new path—playing in noisy clubs, changing her name to Nina Simone to keep Mama from discovering her night job, and discovering her voice as a potent instrument for razor-edged social critique. Todd moves effortlessly between silky narration marked by subtle wordplay (“But fame was still new to Nina. She worked so hard to keep that spotlight lit, and she was exhausted. How could she join a movement when she could barely move?”), and pointed references to Simone’s musical activism (“But Nina was done being polite. As far as she could tell, politeness had gotten her people nothing”). Robinson’s collage compositions convey critical civil rights context in scenes playing out atop Simone’s grand piano strings, often fiery images that contrast with the pictures of Simone’s childhood origin story and her front-stage panache. Several shoutouts to specific songs are embedded in the text, but the generous endnotes that supplement the biography do not supply titles or recordings. That’s a missed opportunity, but nothing that will stop kids from pawing through grandparents’ LPs to hear the real deal.