Nina Simone: Constructing a Legacy

Tom Maxwell
10 min readJul 3, 2020
Nina Simone’s statue in Tryon, North Carolina

There’s a bronze statue of a Black woman in downtown Tryon, North Carolina. Her likeness bears the same expression the subject often wore in life: a kind of fixed, half resigned, half-exasperated glare. The statue sits in a small town square, its hands poised over an undulating keyboard. In its bronze heart sits half of Nina Simone’s ashes.

Tom Maxwell

Written by Tom Maxwell

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Tom‘s work has appeared in Longreads, The Oxford American, Bitter Southerner, Slate, Salon, and Southern Cultures, among others. He usually writes about music.