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AAPRC Weekly: Nicci Carter

Nicci Carter
Former coordinator of southern region marketing
Hpnotiq
New Orleans LA/Houston TX

It seems Nicci Carter has been surviving storms her entire life. Hurricane Katrina is the latest. The New Orleans-born publicist was orphaned at age eight and survived a marriage to an abusive drug dealer. In spite of that rough start, though, Carter not only survived, but thrived. She studied media arts at Tulane University, and went on to cut her teeth as a publicist for the popular New Orleans rapper, Mystikal (an old friend). She also wound up handling media and promotions for other Crescent City hip hop stars like Juvenile and Baby. Then, in 2002, she was hired by Heaven Hill Distilleries to oversee the southern region marketing for the liqueur Hpnotiq.

Before that last turbulent weekend in August, Carter lived a comfortable, independent life. She owned a home near New Orleans’ Lake Pontchartrain and a rental property. Her daughter, 15-year-old Rudy, attended an exclusive, private high school with a concentration in foreign languages.

On Sunday, August 28, though, all of that changed. With Hurricane Katrina bearing down on New Orleans, the city’s mayor ordered a mandatory evacuation. Everyone who didn’t or couldn’t evacuate had to be off the streets by the six o’clock curfew. Carter had a car that wasn’t quite up to the rigorous reality of evacuation (a recent failed investment had left her with a cash flow problem and her car needed a costly repair). Friends offered Carter and her daughter a ride out of town, but she couldn’t accept. Carter’s 84-year-old grandmother, an Alzheimer’s patient, and an aunt and her two children were stranded as well. Carter couldn’t leave them behind. They were all the family she had left. No one they knew had room in their vehicle for six extra people.

Up until the last minute it seemed their only option would be the city’s soon-to-be-infamous shelter of last resort –– the Superdome. But the Dome had been used as a storm shelter once before, with chaotic results, and Carter resisted taking her family there. She decided they would ride it out at her home in the city’s Lakeview neighborhood.

Then, local newscasters started recommending that residents put picks and axes in the attics of their homes so they could hack their way out through the roof if necessary. Carter got nervous. She couldn’t find any such tools in her garage. When she heard a shelter had just opened at a high school in neighboring Jefferson Parish (county), Carter gathered some insurance papers, a few days worth of food and clothing and got her loved ones to the shelter just before the curfew. “We went to Bonnabel High School assuming it was just going to be for a day,” Carter remembers. “It wasn’t long before we realized nobody was going back.”

Like most New Orleanians, Carter had lived with the threat of “the big one” for as long as she could remember. It seemed even local government officials assumed Katrina would end as so many other storms had –- with some wind damage, some flooding and everyone back home in a few days. At the high school-turned-shelter where Carter and her family gathered, Carter says there were at least 120 elderly residents and no provisions or emergency officials on site (except a volunteer nurse). As happened throughout the region, conditions quickly deteriorated. Several feet of floodwater surrounded the school. There was no electricity, no air conditioning, no water.

When the floodwaters receded some, Carter says the younger evacuees broke into a nearby grocery store and returned with food. Finding or looting –- either way those provisions were the only food the shelter’s evacuees would get.

A day or so later, Carter says a local pastor found another shelter that had a generator and electricity, so Carter and her family made their way there. Conditions improved only slightly. There was air conditioning, but, she says, still no help from local or federal government. People got pots and propane tanks and cooked grits and other supplies they found at local grocery stores. Carter says that when the National Guard and Red Cross did show up, they didn’t bring food. They came to drop off dying, elderly patients (the shelter was near New Orleans’ Armstrong International Airport, where evacuees were being triaged). “While I was there they brought this 80-year-old guy… everybody thought he was going to die…We were begging, begging the EMS people to take this guy with them and they said ‘no, we’re only taking patients who are critically ill and who can be saved…’ I’ll never forget, his name was Thomas McCalister…They put him in the back so that he could die. I sat with him and talked with him and gave him water… Some of the elderly people who were there didn’t have medication, they didn’t have insulin and nobody was there to help them. I never, never would have been able to imagine that… It was worse than Third World.”

On September 5, a week after Hurricane Katrina swept much of her life away, Carter and her family made their way to Baton Rouge. From there a friend of Carter’s who’d made it to Houston rented a van and drove back to Baton Rouge to pick them up.

Since then, Carter has taken it day by day, watching her new life unfold. She’s encountered random acts of extraordinary kindness: her friend Lydia Harris helped Carter and her family secure an apartment in Houston and paid the first month’s rent. She copes with debilitating depression: some mornings, getting out of bed is a major accomplishment. Lately, she’s been overwhelmed by a surge of love and longing for her hometown. “Originally, I thought: all the family I have is kind of with me already and…home is just wherever you say it is. As long as the people who are closest to you are with you…But, that’s not necessarily true,” Carter says of the prospect of starting over in Houston. “I miss everything about New Orleans. I miss everything about it. I had no idea I would grieve it like this. I kept an apartment in New York several years ago. When I was a teenager I went to high school in California, but it’s never been anything like this. Every day that goes by I’m grieving more and more and more.”

Two weeks before she spoke with The Monthly, Carter returned to New Orleans to get her first up-close look at what the storm left behind. She found evidence that there’d been 10 feet of water in her home. “Oh my God. There was just so much devastation. Lakeview looked like a war zone,” she says of the experience. “A lot of the pundits are conceding that there isn’t much to come back to, but even what little there is –– is kind of the only thing I feel a part of.”

The journey home may take a while. For now, Carter’s daughter lives with a friend and their family in downtown Houston because it’s close to a private arts high school, similar to the one she attended in New Orleans. Carter, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with her grandmother, aunt and her aunt’s two children, navigates the maze of FEMA, insurance claims and the struggle to rebuild her life at home while living in a city 350 miles away. She’s thinking about getting back to work and says there’s the possibility of a project with a former client who’s preparing to launch a book. Mostly, Carter reminds herself that though what’s happened is bad, it’s not the worse she’s ever been through.

At age eight she lost both her parents in separate homicides and, later, says she was forced to marry a man 19 years her senior, a drug dealer who abused her and once nearly beat her to death with a hammer. She was able to build a new life for herself and her daughter when he was convicted and sent to jail. From the very beginning of this ordeal, she says, she has reminded herself, her daughter and the people around her that they can make it. “I had just finished reading Joel Osteen’s book, Your Best Life Now, and something in there really stuck,” Carter remembers. “He told a story about a little kid in church and his mom was trying to force him to sit down. Ultimately his mom reached over and forcibly held him down. The little kid looks up at his mom, smiling, and says: ‘I’m still standing up on the inside.’ I shared that with my daughter because she felt like this is just utter devastation… I had to remind her of us being in places that seemed this dark before and how important it was to just stand up on the inside.”

AAPRC’s Mission
The African-American Public Relations Collective (AAPRC) is an assemblage of professionals who provide communication conduits among clients, journalists, media and our communities. We come together as a collective because we recognize the importance of building those same conduits amongst ourselves.

A great deal of what we do is professional development––updating our skills, keeping pace with technology, refining and streamlining processes, providing a forum to tackle the issues that impact our work environment––but we believe our professional lives benefit most from the forging of effective alliances. Connected to one another, we possess the power of a nationwide body of committed, knowledgeable practitioners with an eye on the future.

As we move into the 21st century at lightning speed, mass media and its potent messages occupy an ever-larger part of our daily lives and our collective psyche. The AAPRC is focused on helping our members gain a deeper understanding of media’s force and supporting their growth as powerful participants in the global communications network.

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By Gwendolyn Quinn on 11/15/2005[read on] [4 comments]

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