Arvette Carter held her 2-year-old granddaughter in her arms at the Superdome in New Orleans, convinced the little girl was dying.
No one in the family of seven had eaten for two days after Hurricane Katrina, and baby Sade was dehydrated, turning colors, vomiting and slipping in and out of consciousness.
“I knew we was losing her,” Carter said, shaking her head at the memories of shootings, fires, stampedes and people dying right in front of the four chairs the family had staked out in the overcrowded facility.
Sade’s mom, Shantell Jones, 25, said the scene was “worse than hell.”
Just more than a week later, Sade, her hair in four tiny pigtails, ran from room to room with her 5-year-old twin brothers in a home donated to them and filled with items to help the family start over in Iowa City.
A network of friends who knew Arvette’s husband, Warren, as an oyster shucker at the Bourbon House on Bourbon Street, worked to bring the family to safety.
“I knew of angels, but now I finally got to experience what angels really are,” said Carter, 43, whose family arrived Monday in Iowa City.
Warren Carter, 43, watched his three grandchildren explore the duplex in the Peninsula Neighborhood the family will call home.
The kids found beds, backpacks full of school supplies, books, clothes and toys they immediately tore out of the cardboard and plastic.
Sade’s eyes lit up when she saw a present wrapped in bright yellow paper on her new bed. Her first move was to hang a pink leotard and tutu on a white plastic hanger in her closet.
“You guys have just uplifted my family,” Warren Carter said, hanging back in the hallway.
The grownups had their own surprises. Stacked inside the refrigerator were containers of homemade cornbread, black-eyed peas, sweet potato pie, ochre and other Southern comfort foods to make the family feel at home in the Midwest. Hot sauce from Alabama sat beside the sink.
“Yeah, that goes on just about anything,” Warren Carter said.
The home and everything in it were arranged by a group of college friends, including LeAnn and Dave Tatman of West Branch, University Hospitals employees who enlisted the help of their coworkers.
It all started when one friend, Jeff Simpson of Nebraska, sent Warren a text message after the storm to see if his family was all right. It was the only message the family was able to receive because phone service was out in New Orleans.
“I continue to read that text message,” Warren Carter said. “It gave me strength. It gave me hope.”
After traveling to Houston and being turned away because the Astrodome was overcrowded, the family contacted Simpson.
Simpson and other friends put the family up at a hotel in Houston and arranged to bring them to the Midwest via a rented van and rides from friends.
The friends were able to secure two units in a new duplex so the entire family could have its own space, rent free, from the Greater Iowa City Housing Fellowship.
After the first night in his new home, Warren Carter called the help his friends offered a “miracle.”
“We were able to sleep again. It just felt good to smile and laugh again. Those are the things you take for granted,” he said. “Where we walked from was so dark.”
Arvette Carter, a lifelong New Orleans resident, said she and Warren won’t return to the city she said was overrun by crime before the storm.
Instead, there already are signs of a new life forming in Iowa City. The twins, Darrell and Darelle, start kindergarten today at Horace Mann Elementary School.
Warren Carter will start a job Thursday at Hy-Vee. There’s word that the twins’ dad, 26-year-old Darrell Williams, might have a job lined up at a lumberyard. Arvette Carter, who worked at the Ritz Carlton, probably can find a job at a local affiliate.
“They say the winters are cold here, but that’s OK,” Warren Carter said, adding that the family’s not even concerned about the material things it lost when their homes were submerged by floodwaters.
“We gained more. We gained friendship, trust. We pray every night for other people down there, that they get a miracle too.”