Embroidered by the Hand of God

If you ask Nina Whitson how to pronounce her name, she’ll give you two answers.

“Neen-ah is the Northern version and Nine-ah is the Southern version,” she says.(She prefers Nine-ah, but call her whatever you want to; she doesn’t mind).Raised in the South, Nina used to walk beside her father in the cotton fields near Berry, Alabama. This was during the Depression. Her mother made her a sack out of a fertilizer bag, and young Nina—only nine or ten years old—would take some of the cotton her father picked and place it in that sack. When it came time for weighing, Nina says that her father would weigh hers with his. These were the days of sharecropping, when men eked out a living from the ground and prayed to just get by.Nina’s mother soon died and her father Archie was left with the responsibility of raising six children: Louis, Vicky, James, Nathaniel, Charles, Nina, and Phelan. Nina remembers idyllic days at her grandmother’s house, where she “got away with everything.” She attended Berry schools before they were integrated, and was bused to Fayette County High School, where she graduated.The Whitsons were avid churchgoers, attending Berry Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church. “I was raised in a Christian home,” recalls Nina. “When my mother died, daddy became our caretaker.”Soon thereafter, Nina became, as she says with a laugh, a “domestic engineer.” That’s housekeeping, to you and me. “I did that for seven years—cleaning up and babysitting. Cooking!” Nina recalls. She also worked at a garment factory for a while, but that vocation did not appeal to her. So Nina moved to New York in her mid-twenties to take a live-in job as a file clerk at Spiegel’s Catalog Company. It wasn’t long before she moved again, this time to Cleveland, Ohio to live with her sister, where she did housekeeping for her family.Nina returned to Alabama—this time to stay—when her father fell ill. She got a job in Fayette working for the Weems Furniture Company. Eventually Nina found the job that would take her through the next 23 years of her life. She became the cook at Fayette Medical Center. There, Nina became famous for her cornbread made from Cream of Wheat, which happened by accident.“One time I was cookin’ cornbread and we ran out of corn meal. I told the dietician and she told me to run across the street to Winn Dixie. I said, ‘I ain’t runnin’ across the street—you run across the street! She wouldn’t do it, so I found some Cream of Wheat in the pantry. Let me tell you, that was the best cornbread you ever tasted! But the next day when I went to cook breakfast, we didn’t have no Cream of Wheat!”Nina has never married, and she’s totally fine with it. “One day a man came to the house and asked my daddy, ‘Can I marry her?’ My daddy came to me and asked if I would marry him and I said, ‘I ain’t marryin’ him!” Nina claims that her four overprotective, older brothers, who meant well, made dating a bit difficult. But Nina doesn’t regret not getting married—“Not at all, not at all”—and claims she has made it alright by herself through all of these years.Now 83, Nina resides at Ridgeview Health Services in Jasper. It has been her home for 8 years now, and as she says, “I’ll be here for the rest of my life.”Nina has spent a lifetime doing good things for other people. Perhaps this was encouraged by a dream she once had. Listen as she tells it:“I had a dream one time. I was asleep in a corner of my living room. My face was toward the wall. The door to the bedroom was open and I could see a window. The curtain was solid white and I saw an image of the Lord’s face. He said, “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.”What did that dream mean to Nina?“It meant that I needed to keep livin’ the life I was livin’. I never was a rowdy person. I wasn’t a partier.”Not until she got to the nursing home.Nina is active at Ridgeview. Her days usually begin early, around 9:00, when she gathers for Bible trivia (she’s apparently really good) or the Gaither Gospel Hour. Wednesdays she’s there for popcorn and a movie (or bingo). This year, she dressed up for a Halloween party as a devil, which she indeed is not. She has also participated in the Miss Ridgeview Contest, but she is most famous around Ridgeview for her embroidery and crocheting.“That’s my hobby. My pastime. It keeps me out of trouble,” she snickers.Nina recently crocheted a picture of The Last Supper, which hangs in the Ridgeview cafeteria. She has also made handkerchiefs, pillow cases, table runners, and tablecloths, beckoned from as far away as Tyler, Texas. Her newest project is participating in fundraising for a seven-year-old named Bradley. “We pitched in our pennies and we’ve raised over $150,” Nina says.As Nina sits in her wheelchair in her fuchsia sweat suit and pink Velcro shoes, her Christmas tree pin glistens. Her glasses are perched on the bridge of her nose and her hands are clasped in front of her. Her black hair, with sprouts of grey, is fixed, and her unlined face deceives the 83 years she has spent on this earth. She has an infectious laugh. Her dark eyes sparkle and there isn’t a hint of guilt or regret as she tells the stories of her life.That’s because from the cotton fields near Berry to Ridgeview Nursing Home, Nina Whitson has lived a life that embodies her favorite scripture, written in the Psalms:Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. When Nina Whitson gets to heaven, it won’t matter too much if her name is pronounced Neen-ah or Nine-ah. It will be written in the Book of Life just the same. 78