Bozoma Saint John | Always the Outsider

Bozoma Saint John was 12 when her family landed in Colorado Springs, where her classmates already had a picture of Africa: the child on the UNICEF magnet, flies and a distended belly, worth a penny a day. Her father held two PhDs. Her mother was a fashion designer. Nobody in that house took an American name. Bozoma was strong in math and science and Latin and was going to be a doctor — decided at 12, though she says she couldn't tell you where her parents' plan ended and her own wanting began. Then an eleventh-grade English teacher named Martha Wood assigned a creative writing exercise: describe yourself somewhere else, in the third person. Bozoma wrote it, and Mrs. Wood held the pages up and read them aloud — in a room of native speakers, some of whom had mocked her accent. The room went quiet. It was the first time anyone suggested she could be something other than what had been planned. She starts crying about it thirty seconds into this conversation. Two more people did that for her later. Spike Lee, whose phones she was answering at 23 when she gave him notes on the Bamboozled script — bad notes, she says now — and he slammed his door, and came out to say: you made some good notes, you can stay. And Ari Emanuel, the first boss who ever really saw her, who told her she wasn't Bose at Apple or Bose at Uber. She was just Bose. Did she have an agent? She also talks with David Begnaud about her husband, Peter. They were separated, after the death of their daughter Eve and the blame they'd started looking for in each other, when his cancer turned terminal. He asked her to set the divorce aside, then proposed again — sixty pounds lighter, in a jacket that no longer fit, with a Hostess cupcake instead of a wedding cake. She says yes is still the best one she's ever given.