By Al Calloway
She was a tall, skinny, bespeckled Black girl that walked up to me back sometime in 2016, I recall. We were in the Community Room of the building I’ve lived in since 2004 and she was a member of a health screening crew belonging to some state or local non-profit group. She knew my involvement in environmental justice and conservation. She also knew my involvement with the South Florida Water Management District. I didn’t know who she was, but, clearly, she had done her homework.
That’s how I met Nancy Metayer. And when she let me know in short shrift, that she knew something about South Florida water issues, I pressed for her background information. Thereupon we became fast friends when she said she had a Master of Science degree from Johns Hopkins University. I shared that my daughter also got her master’s degree from JHU. Nancy had done her undergraduate work at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee and was working part time and doing community organizing in the non-white communities of Broward County, Florida. Nancy reminded me of Blacks in Gabon, West Africa on the equator, and Blacks I’ve met in Senegal and The Gambia, but more especially of Blacks in Haiti. So, when she said she was Haitian, I was not surprised.
Environmental science positions soon found Nancy Metayer, then Covid hit and we all retreated in fear. Years went by then Nancy appeared in the press as an elected Commissioner of Coral Springs, the wealthy city in Northwest Broward County, Florida. I was pleasantly surprised to hear she married and more surprised when in February of 2023 I went to a Coral Springs Commission meeting to ask her to speak at my coming Environmental Justice Workshop in downtown Fort Lauderdale. My surprise was that tall, skinny Nancy Metayer had filled out, swimsuit model form. Apparently, marriage had added glow to her life. Busy Commissioner Nancy Metayer-Bowen spoke at my Workshop and made new friends. She also pledged to assist our non-profit group with environmental science as an advisor to the Chairman.
On Wednesday morning, April 1st, a key associate called and shakenly informed me that Nancy Metayer-Bowen was dead and police were looking for her husband. What a shame! How close we came to either getting Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer-Bowen a seat in the Florida legislature and/or a run for Congress. What a terrible loss; she had a great future. We would have, at last, had a Black scientific mind, with legislative experience and the thoroughness she’d bring through study, poised for greatness. Mine is just one of many stories of this Sister’s rise. She was reaching for as far as she could go; shot to death by her husband!