As town reels from tornado, family finds its way home
As a deadly tornado barreled toward their home in the Mississippi Delta, Ida Cartlidge only had time to scoop up her 1-year-old son, Nolan, and hold him close.
Cartlidge huddled with her husband and three sons on the living room floor of their Rolling Fork mobile home, its thin walls all that separated the family from 200 mph winds.
“I was holding my baby so tight. I said `Baby, I'm probably hurting you right now, but I just can't let you go,'” she recalled.
Then the tornado hit, and the home was gone. The twister launched Cartlidge into the air and pulled Nolan from her arms. She remembers seeing him floating above her, as though both were suspended in the air.
She landed with a thud. Miraculously, Nolan fell on her chest. He was the only family member to escape the storm unscathed.
The tornado that destroyed Cartlidge's home last March killed 14 of Rolling Fork's roughly 1,700 residents and reduced the town to rubble as it charted a merciless path across one of the country's poorest regions. For the people there, a complicated story of struggle and resilience has emerged in the year since the storm changed everything and exposed vulnerabilities many survivors had been dealing with long before March 2023.
The Cartlidge family spent the next year in a cramped motel room in search of a more permanent home.
“There's still a lot of suffering,” Sen. Joseph Thomas, who represents Rolling Fork in the state Legislature, said in a recent interview. “And you're looking at an area that was already depressed.”
Rolling Fork is in Sharkey County, where the poverty rate hovers around 35% — nearly double Mississippi's roughly 19% rate and triple the nation's nearly 12% rate, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Before the storm, Cartlidge, 33, and her husband, Charles Jones, 59, had forged a quiet life in a long, narrow three-bedroom, two-bath mobile home with their sons: Jakavien, 13, Amarii, 12, and Nolan. She worked in customer service for an appliance company and Jones was a mechanic for a local auto parts shop.
Cartlidge suffered a crushed pelvis and broken shoulder in the tornado. Jakavien punctured a lung and shattered bones in his spine and shoulder blade. Amarri had deep lacerations on his back and ankles. Jones injured his ribs and spine.
The mobile home park where they lived was also home to most of the 14 people who died in the tornado.