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Hurricane Katrina

A body finds peace at last

His shrouded form was an icon of Katrina. Saturday, family laid his body and their history to rest.

By AARON SHAROCKMAN
Published October 16, 2005

	[AP photo]
	Xavier Bowie's girlfriend Evelyn Turner cries alongside his body after he died in New Orleans on Aug. 30. Bowie, who had lung cancer, died when he ran out of oxygen amid Hurricane Katrina's floods.

BELLE GLADE - Kathleen Bowie waited six weeks to mourn her husband, a trucker she met and married in less than a month, and someone she still loved though he kept girlfriends most everywhere he traveled.

She, like many others, had seen the picture of his death in New Orleans - stiff on a plywood board, wrapped in a green bed sheet, surrounded by flood waters. Xavier Bowie died the day after the storm when his liquid oxygen tank ran out. A girlfriend ferried his shrouded corpse on a plywood raft in search of help.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people focused so much on saving the living, there was no time to treasure the dead.

Saturday, under a white, flat roof in a Baptist Church on another town's Canal Street, the Bowie family could finally say goodbye.

Xavier Bowie, 57, drinker, carouser, Baptist. Died Aug. 30, 2005, New Orleans. Buried Oct. 15, 2005, Belle Glade.

One of his sons, Xavier Bowie Jr. saw him in New Orleans along with his mother not more than a week before he died. His father had been diagnosed with lung cancer nine months earlier. His silver hair had fallen out from chemotherapy.

"We had our differences," Bowie Jr., 33, said. "But we talked for two hours ... I made peace with my father."

Death heals wounds, but not scars.

Xavier Bowie drove trucks after four years in the Navy. First at the Glades Sugar Mill, in Belle Glade, then around the country. He was a partier by accounts, perfect for New Orleans, his family agreed.

A year ago he nearly died after a night of gambling and drinking. On the drive home, he made a wrong turn. He was jumped, hit in the head with a pipe, "and left for dead," said son Jim Bowie, 32, who visited him shortly afterward.

That was the last time Jim Bowie saw his father.

Twenty years ago Xavier Bowie left his four sons and daughter, Alisha Hall, in Belle Glade with their mother, his wife Kathleen.

"He could be tough," said Jim Bowie, who admitted there was a lot about his father he never understood.

Added his sister, Hall, "We had our good times, and bad times of course."

Family members recalled both on Saturday during a 90-minute service at Mount Calvary Baptist Church. The Rev. Skylyn Hagins, an old friend, spoke with a driving cadence, mixing scripture with memories of Bowie.

Son Anthony Bowie, 31, who now lives in Wesley Chapel, read a poem while brass ceiling fans rattled overhead. Xavier Bowie Jr. wept.

"Katrina did not kill him," said the Rev. Hagins. "God called him home."

The image of Bowie's death, however, became an immediate icon of Hurricane Katrina's devastation. It was also how his sons realized their father had died.

It was one of the first pictures that described the human toll from the flood. It filled the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, along with this paper and dozens of others.

In the picture, Evelyn Turner, who describes herself as Bowie's common-law wife, sits on the plywood, wiping tears away with a white washcloth with mud caked to her right knee.

Bowie was diagnosed with lung cancer in December. He ran out of bottled oxygen the day after Katrina flooded Bowie's New Orleans neighborhood. Turner, 54, waded out from their house on Annette Street for help.

By the time she returned, Bowie was dead.

Turner, who is now staying with relatives in Shreveport and did not attend Saturday's funeral, then wrapped Bowie in a sheet. With the help of friends, she floated him down the main road.

There, she met a man in a flatbed truck who took the two of them to the corner of Poydras Street and Loyola Avenue. They rested him on a grassy bank at the foot of City Hall, a block from the Superdome and waist-high water.

"I could feel that something happened," said Jim Bowie, whose aunt, Ethel Bowie Thompson, died of lung cancer while living in New Orleans last November. Xavier Bowie had moved to New Orleans to live with his sister. "I just knew he wouldn't make it."

The road home was a six-week circuitous trip for a lifelong truck driver who, in his profession, was certainly used to such things.

From the grass in front of City Hall, Xavier Bowie's body was taken to St. Gabriel, a city to the west of New Orleans that became a clearinghouse for the Louisiana's dead. There, it sat for weeks.

Jim Bowie tried to make the drive once to rescue his father's body, but he only made it as far as Columbus, Ga., before the approach of Hurricane Rita turned him away.

Xavier Bowie's body finally made it back to Florida on Tuesday, arriving by train.

At Foreverglades Cemetery on Saturday, his family gathered under a green tent, laying 15 white carnations over his stainless steel casket.

Then, just after 1 p.m., three men in light brown shirts lowered the casket into a vault below the ground as sugarcane waved in the background, and a piece of the sun broke through a cloudy sky.

Aaron Sharockman can be reached at 727 445-4160 or asharockman@sptimes.com

[Last modified October 16, 2005, 01:49:34]