What Happened, Miss Simone?

This excellent documentary shares the arc of Nina Simone’s life and doesn’t try to provide a definitive answer to the question, but it does provide context.

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We can see from the childhood in which she was not allowed to speak about the differences she saw when she crossed the train tracks every weekend, the racism that kept her out of a prestigious music school, the fact that she wanted to focus on civil rights music while her abusive husband wanted her to create commercial music that Nina Simone had a volcano of anger inside her that was only waiting for an event of the right magnitude to incite an eruption.

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The bombing of the church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, which killed 4 girls, set her off and the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 blew the top off. I think the fact that Black Americans didn’t burn the entire place down in retribution for the brazen, senseless violence snapped something inside her. She said herself that the King of Peace had been killed and that left only violence as an option for Black Americans to get their rights.

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From the curated clips we’re shown, a clear shift in her demeanor is obvious. She no longer smiled or seemed to enjoy herself at the piano, she started wearing her hair in natural or African styles (which was challenging to most Americans at that time), and her music became incendiary. She seemed to be looking for a fight and since it wasn’t coming on a national level, it manifested in her relationship.

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The documentary doesn’t come right out and say that her husband was psychologically and physically abusing her, but her diary entries do, again and again. At one point she was willing to kill herself to get away from her husband and out of her marriage. His behavior toward her obviously contributed to her going off the rails. She wasn't supported to live in her creative rhythm, to work and rest when it felt right for her.

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Eventually it was all too much and she left the US to live abroad. When Lauren Hill’s Miseducation Tour came to Paris in 1999, both Nina Simone and I happened to be living there. When Lauren brought a frail elderly lady on stage and announced that it was Nina Simone everyone lost their minds and my heart stopped. I remember that moment more than I remember the concert itself. Nina seemed only partially lucid and it looked like she wasn’t being taken care of, but hearing the response of the audience, I was thankful that Lauren had created an opportunity for Nina to hear how much she was still loved. I feel honored to have been in the same room with her, even if only for a few minutes.

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Nina's husband and daughter are interviewed for this film. We get the sense that her daughter has a clear understanding of her mother, both positive and negative. But her husband seems to have no guilt or remorse at all for what he did to her. When he learned what had come of her after she left America, he never reached out to give her any of her own money or put a support system in place for her. He seemed to not care about her at all, really.

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If I can speculate what happened to Nina Simone, I’d say that she was justifiably angry that she was unable to control her own destiny and that anger eventually turned inward. The only critique I have of this film is that it could have focused more on Nina's work, without the frame that something or someone was problematic.

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Nina Simone was a musical giant who created a lane of her own. She had a talent so singular and massive that racism, sexism, and even domestic violence could not keep the world from hearing and loving her and her music.

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