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AI: Well, so that was quite, in a short amount of time, quite of an adjustment when you had been considering Wisconsin or Delaware and then kind of fairly quickly switched and changed to go to Kansas. And then somewhere in there you had come back to Seattle for a short time before going to Kansas? Or how did that work?

RS: No.

AI: No. So, when you drove to Kansas?

RS: Oh, okay, okay. I know what you're getting at. Bea and I decided that as long as we were on the West Coast, that we should see the rest of the parts of the country that we had never seen before, despite the fact we were traveling a lot, but there were all sort of in those Northeastern states. So we decided we would go on a camping trip with my best friend at Syracuse, Joe Pacheco, who was a Portuguese American guy, also gay. And I say that because he came out about the last two months that he was at Syracuse and he told me about it. He had been holding it all that time. And it was very difficult for him. But that really sort of galvanized our friendship as well, that he could tell me about it. And so we decided we'd go on this extended camping trip before we went to Kansas. And then what we wanted to do was we'd start from New England and we would follow the Atlantic coastline all the way down into Florida, around the Gulf, across (Texas) to San Diego and up Highway 1, all the way to Seattle and that we would camp all the way. And we did that. And it took about three months to do it.

MT: Excuse me. Did you have any children at that time?

RS: No, but Bea was pregnant and we didn't know that until we got to Seattle. So the three of us did that, And Bea and I slept in my Volkswagen bus and Joe had his little tent that he set up, and we took off and it was a very, very adventure-filled trip. Towards the very beginning of the trip we decided to meet one of my good friends in North Carolina. And this is kind of an interesting story. His name was Alston Purvis and his father was the famous G-man named Melvin Purvis that killed John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson. And I met Alston Purvis up here in Seattle in graduate school. He quit when I quit. He went to Yale and I went to Syracuse. So all the time I was at Syracuse we'd get together either in New Haven or he'd come up to Syracuse. So when I finally graduated, and he graduated, he decided that he wanted us to come down and meet his mother, because his father, Melvin, had committed suicide. And so we thought, well, great, because we're going right down the Carolina coast, Florence wasn't too far away.

So Bea, Joe and I, by the time, after about the second week we had worked our way to, to South Carolina, went to Florence. And we had this whole series of really bad experiences, right on the streets, of people, like, blocking us off, and making us stop and going around them, and it got so frightening that we decided -- because we were about four hours early, before we were supposed to be at his mother's door. And Alston was still in New Haven. And so we decided to go in to see a movie. And we got harassed in the movie. First of all, they wouldn't take our money. And then they took our money and they wouldn't give us our ticket. And I thought we were gonna get in a big fight right there in the lobby of this movie theater. So we sat in the movie and watched this movie, frightened to death. We get out, get harassed again. And we just, like, go for the car. And we go over to Mrs. Purvis's house. And we apologize for being there an hour early but, we didn't tell her what had happened or anything because here's this, it's a tradition, right? And so she opens the door and she says, "Oh my God," she says, "here's Alston's friends." And she said, "Come on in." And we go inside there, and it's this huge Southern mansion. And it was customary, I guess, when you had guests over, to take all your silverware out and put it on display. And so each room had this big round table filled with all this silverware. And first thing she said was, "I have to apologize, because our nigger maids are sick." And she says, "And I planned this dinner party for you," and she said, "We're trying to get some other niggers to come and cook the dinner for us." And Bea and I are just sort of standing there wondering, "Holy cow, what did we get ourselves into here?" And she says, "Well," she said, "let's chat a while, because Alston isn't due in for a few hours yet." And she says, "You gotta tell me what part of Japan you people are from." Says, "Well, were not from Japan, we're from Seattle," etcetera, you know. And right in the middle, she says, "Well, what kind of religion y'all have back there?" And it was clear that she wasn't listening to anything that we were saying. And so she starts talking about, she starts making these phone calls trying to get another maid to come over to finish cleaning because there were thirty people coming over for dinner that night to meet "Alston's friends from Japan." And then she needed a couple to do the cooking.

And so, finally Alston shows up and Alston says, he's laughing because he knew this was gonna happen. And he says, "But there's one woman I want you to meet, you're gonna like, and that's my Aunt Fran." And so eventually people started coming for cocktails. And all these people coming up and it's clear that we're the people from Japan. And at that point Bea and I had sort of given up and we're just making up answers to these people about the kind of religion we had and all this sort of stuff. Aunt Fran comes over, finally, and Alston says, "This is my Aunt Fran." And he had billed her as being this sophisticated one in the family because she had been to Europe several times and she was a retired school teacher. And she came in front of me, squarely stood in front of me and she says, "I'm Fran." And she said, "What's your name?" And I said, "I'm Roger." And she said, "Say your name again." And I said, "Roger." And she said, "I'm Fran." And I said, "Yes." And she said, "Well, I guess my name must sound as weird to you as yours does to me." [Laughs]. So that was sort of the high point of the socializing.

And then we all sat down and we had dinner and drinks and everything and then, all of a sudden it was time for everyone to get real defensive about who they were. And they started picking on Joe, because Joe was dark-skinned. He's Portuguese. And they started asking him questions about, "What part of Portugal are you from?" "Not that I ever been there," and all, you know, and so we're just rolling our eyes and getting rather tired of playing this role. And so someone finally says, "It's time for nigger jokes." "Yeah!" And so they just started around the room. And all, everyone had a new nigger joke to tell. The maids come in and they tell their jokes. And we're just sitting in there. And Alston is just, he's like, at this point knew that we were starting to get upset, but he couldn't start this -- I mean, he couldn't stop it at this point as everyone's going around the room. And they're very good friends with Strom, Senator Strom Thurmond. And there was one of the Purvis relatives there that himself was running for office and jumped right in there with his nigger joke. But they went, we must have heard twenty-five. And then followed by, "You people don't understand the situation here. You see how we get along with our maids and you people up North couldn't do this. We have this special sort of relationship with our Negroes," as they called them. So anyway, we were there for a total of three days and pretty much tolerated this whole experience. So that was one of the, you know, another one of the sort of, high point/low points of the trip, of that extended camping trip.

<End Segment 42> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.