http://www.laprogressive.com/2008/09/17/is-sarah-palin-a-racist-well-she-ended-our-conversation-when-she-learned-i-was-black/In May 1990, the orchestra was touring Alaska and played in Anchorage. While there, the 28-year old Royal and a small group of other musicians from the orchestra went into a fast food joint near the airport for a bite to eat.
“I saw a great looking young lady and, as lots of travelling musicians do, I struck up a conversation with her,” Royal recounted to me after my original piece on Palin was published. “She told me her name was Sarah.”
Royal admits he was hitting on her and, he claims, she knew it. Picking up women is a regular activity for most musicians, especially when on the road. The reason this particular conversation stuck in his mind is because she said that while she wasn’t much into jazz, she played the flute.
“This is why I remembered talking with her,” Royal states.
He told Sarah about talking about the Modern Jazz Quartet as an example of not strictly jazz style music but could still be cool. “I was trying to keep the conversation going,” Royal says, “so I mentioned some of the musicians, including Percy Heath.”
“She quickly let me know that Heath was her name too,” Royal recounts.
Royal claims that she mentioned going to school in Hawaii but did not say anything about being married or being pregnant. “I would remember that. Anyway, it was May 1990 and she was just a couple of months pregnant and wouldn’t have shown.”
Royal felt he was making progress with Sarah Heath and when a couple of his musician friends approached, he waved them off. “But she saw them and got weird.”
“Sarah asked me if they were with me. I asked her what was up because she was obviously a little weird after seeing them,” states Royal, who has Native American blood in his ancestry is a fairly light skinned while his buddies were much darker.
“I don’t mean any harm,” Royal says Sarah told him, which is exactly what she meant but he recalls her saying that she doesn’t do black guys.
“I said ‘I’m Black,’” Royal relates, to which Sarah replied with, “Well, you aren’t really black. You’re like …”
Royal remembers her voice trailed off as if not knowing what to say next as the reality of the situation sunk in on her. “Then she got real confused and the conversation ended rather quickly and uncomfortably.”
So how did this long-ago, failed pick-up come back to Royal’s mind some 18 years later?
“I followed the conventions but never connected Sarah Palin to the Sarah Heath I hit on,” he says, “because there was no physical resemblance and the last name was different. It was from watching an MSNBC story on her that I saw the photos and learned her family name.”
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