COMMUNITY & CULTURE
THE MELTING POT
Gail Boker
B y T r i s h M u y c o - To b i n
A
fter almost 12 years of living in the United States, Gail Boker
made it official and became an American citizen in early 2018.
The year has brought plenty of other celebrations,
including a new role at Washington University, where she’s
worked for 10 years, and her daughter’s first year in college.
But Boker’s journey to get to this place in her life was most
unconventional. Her story begins in the Caribbean, on the twin-island
Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, in a small village called Princess Town.
“We grew up really poor … there were days we didn’t eat,” she recalled.
“The things that are considered fancy here - going to the beach, learning
to dive, going fishing - those were part of survival for me growing up. I
remember killing a chicken at the age of 6. One chicken would feed the
house for the entire week. It was very different.”
Boker added that while her family endured hardships in her younger
years, growing up on the island is an indelible experience.
“We grew up with the community and the culture,” she explained.
“Most people from Trinidad and Tobago know the islands really well.”
Let’s just say that Boker also knew the islands really, really well. In her
early 20s, she began working as a tourism research and development officer
for the Tobago House of Assembly. Part of her job was to monitor the dive
shops throughout the islands - and that is how her path crossed with Kevin
Boker, an American who had come to Tobago for a friend’s wedding, and
somehow ended up purchasing a scuba diving shop in the process.
“I conducted best practices for the dive shops, and in one of my
reviews, one of the shops fell short,” she recalled. “I knew that it was a
shop owned by an American, but I did not know him at the time.”
And while the two corresponded back and forth to resolve the issue,
it took an overseas business trip for them to actually meet face-to-face.
“There was a tourism dive show in England … and lo and behold, the
American showed up!” Boker said jokingly, and added that it was then
that Kevin began to “stalk” her. “He started showing up at shows, coming
to stakeholders’ meetings … and we started having real conversations.
Never in my life did I think I would ever have a great conversation with
an American - you always heard about the ‘ugly American tourist ... ’
“But for the same reason you can’t judge an entire population of
people, I found that Kevin was very much unlike that,” she said.
It was in London where Boker remembers becoming convinced that
her American suitor was the real deal.
“We went to this Greek restaurant, and as soon as we walked in the door,
the owner saw him and welcomed him like a son,” she said. “Kevin had lived
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GAZELLE
in London before, but it had been at least five years since he’d been back. It
was at that moment that I realized, ‘Wow, you must have done something
right … that people remember you by just walking through the door.’”
As if their romance wasn’t atypical enough, the couple’s 2006
wedding offered another interesting twist: They got married at a
courthouse in Orlando, Florida, one November day, in matching red
T-shirts that said “Tobago House of Assembly.”
“He asked me to marry him - it happened really fast. I married the
person who would become my best friend,” Boker said.
Shortly after tying the knot, the newlyweds moved to St. Louis
(where Kevin is from) with Boker’s young daughter, Milli.
“I was going through a child custody case with Milli, who was going
on 6. I knew that I wanted to be with my daughter, and I wanted her
to live with me. I also knew that Trinidad and Tobago wasn’t where I
needed to be. I was thinking about college and all these other things that
I wanted to do,” she explained.
One of the first things on Boker’s to-do list was to get her daughter
into a school.
“We got her into a private girls’ school in St. Louis, but we had to pull her
out of the school - for diversity reasons, or lack thereof,” she said. “The school
was commemorating Black History Month by showing clips of Dr. Martin
Luther King and what happened to blacks during the civil rights movement.
“For an international black kid - seeing what people who looked just
like her classmates did to somebody who looked just like her - that was
incredibly traumatic,” she said.
While the incident left her shocked and taken aback, it was even more
difficult to have a conversation about it with her young daughter.
“In Trinidad and Tobago, we lived in a black-dominated society, but
we were also so mixed … we had a cornucopia of people from different
regions of the world, all mixed together - mine is East Indian, Arawak,
African, Chinese and Spanish - so the issue wasn’t so much black and
white,” she said. “Around the time of the 2007 presidential election,
things got heated up some more, and she came home and told me her
classmates said she can’t be president because she’s black.”
It was then that Boker decided she wanted to create a more
supportive environment for her daughter.
“I never experienced such a thing before, and I didn’t know how to
make it happen. But it shows how representation matters. She needed
to see successful people who looked like her. I tried finding a black
pediatrician, a black dentist … anyone who was in a position to show