Becoming Richard Pryor (2 page)

Though a few intervals in Pryor’s life remain less documented (for instance, his time on the road in 1962), these were the great exceptions. From the time he began performing as a comic in New York City in 1963, Pryor generated copy—whether in the press, the diaries of those who knew him, the archives of the film productions he worked on, or the files of the Los Angeles district attorney and the FBI.

With these materials in hand, I could follow Pryor’s life from month to month and sometimes even day to day. The chronology of his life, formerly nebulous, could be clarified immensely; inflection points—for example, the moment he began speaking publicly of growing up in a brothel—could be isolated. Just as important, I could now place him within the larger tides of history: the boom of the home front during World War II, the struggle to desegregate the Midwest in the 1950s, the burgeoning of underground culture in
mid-1960s Greenwich Village, the rise of the Black Power movement, the opening of “New Hollywood” in the 1970s, and so on. Filled out by these larger histories, Pryor’s story took on a new resonance. He could be seen both as the exceptional comic genius he was and as a bellwether of the great changes that defined postwar American life, some of which he helped incite.

Finally, this book is different because it aims to trace, meticulously, Pryor’s evolution as an artist. A recent documentary film on Pryor took the subtitle
Omit the Logic
, as if his life were disjointed to the point of absurdity. I beg to differ: though Pryor’s life was certainly tumultuous—full of extreme swings of mood and violent reversals of fortune—it can, and does, make sense. Pryor developed as an artist in step with the times he lived through and the circles he inhabited. Many critics and audience members, at their first experience of Pryor, might have wondered, “Where did this man come from?,” but the essential truth is that he didn’t come out of nowhere. He was, first, a product of Peoria, Illinois, and of a family that was shrewd, loving, and bruising—a family of survivors. As he grew from a child into an artist, he kept himself open to everything (an important source of his genius as a performer). He learned from whoever could provide him inspiration, whether it was a garrulous wino on the street or a drama teacher at a community center, whether Jerry Lewis or Bill Cosby, Huey Newton or Mel Brooks.

In this book, I trace Pryor’s artistic education up to that point, in the late 1970s, when the roles were definitively reversed—and he became the teacher from whom everyone else learned. Another sort of biography would cover the last, sobering years of Pryor’s life more dutifully. I’ve chosen to focus on those hungry decades when Pryor was wondering who he might become and when no one, least of all Pryor himself, could anticipate what would happen next.

M
y grandmother is the lady who used to discipline me,” says a slender man in his late thirties, wearing a collarless red satin shirt, black slacks, and gold shoes. “You know, beat my ass,” he finishes with a chuckle. His face flickers between the confident look of a storyteller in control of his audience and the haunted look of a child who recalls
how
he was beaten more than
why
. Before him, at Long Beach’s Terrace Theater, sits a crowd of three thousand. They’re watching what will become, after the film is released, the most celebrated stand-up comedy performance of all time:
Richard Pryor: Live in Concert
.

“Anyone here remember those switches?” the comedian asks his audience. “You used to have to go get the tree yourself and take them leaves like that?” A roar of “yeah!” comes back at him. He demonstrates by reaching upward and groping to strip off a branch, suddenly a little boy agonizing over the task before him. For the rest of the sketch he’ll flip effortlessly, with a jazzy rhythm, between boy and man.

“I see them trees today,” he says, “I will kill one of them motherfuckers. I will stop the car—say, ‘Wait, hold it.’” He strides over to the microphone stand and starts throttling it with a rage that’s absurd—arbicidal. “‘
You ain’t never gonna grow up. You won’t be beating nobody’s ass
.’”

Then he pauses, returning to the perversity of his past and finding some belated pleasure in it: “That’s some hell of psychology—to make you go get a switch to beat your own ass with, right? My grandmother said, ‘Boy, go get me somethin’ to beat your ass with.’ And that would be the longest walk in the world.”

He pivots so the crowd can see him in profile, a boy inching forward with a frozen look of fear on his face. “You be thinking all kind of shit ’cause you know you done fucked up, Jack,” he says. The boy turns his eyes upward as if in prayer, and whimpers, “‘Maybe it’ll snow before I get there. Maybe she’ll have a heart attack and won’t be able to whup me. I don’t want to get no whuppin’ ’cause it’s going to tear it up.’”

“You get them switches and they start cutting the wind on the way home. Make you start crying before you get in the house,” the comic says.

Shwoo-shwoo
.

“Ma-ma!” The boy’s whimper has opened into a full-on wail.

Shwoo-shwoo
.

“‘Ma-ma
!
I don’t want. . . . Mama, please! Mama, please!’” The boy starts darting from one place to another, cowering while dodging blows that seem to rain over his entire body. “Mamapleasemamapleasemamaplease!” he howls, his voice the same pitch as a baby’s scream.

At this point the routine takes the less expected tack. It would be easy for the comic, looking back at the beatings that framed his childhood, to paint his grandmother as the villain of this tale. He does not. When he plays her, his voice assumes a honeyed drawl, a more confident register, as if he were relishing her strength.

“‘Get your ass out of bed!
’” his grandmother hollers when the boy tries to escape her wrath by putting himself to bed early. “‘
Put your hand down! Don’t you run from me! Don’t you run from me!
’” Then, giving one downward clout to her grandson’s body with every syllable: “‘
Long . . . as . . . you . . . black, don’t . . . you . . . run . . . from . . . me!
’” The crowd roars at this last line—at the wallop of it, the double truth
about the boy’s life it relays. Try as he might, there’s no outrunning the twin forces of his fate, the squeeze of his race and the squeeze of his grandmother’s discipline.

The next morning, the boy faces the woman who struck him, and is given a lesson in the peculiarity of love. “‘Morning, Mama,’” he says softly, his mouth fixed in a grimace from the welt that has taken over his face. “‘Come here, baby,’” she says, then looks at his bruises tenderly, fixing them up. “‘You see, you shouldn’t do that, goddamn it. I told you not to—just sit still now.’” She’s still administering to the bruises when Richard Pryor delivers the last line of the sketch in her voice: “‘And next time you do it, I’m going to tear your ass up again.’”

The comedian laughs, waits for the applause to die down, moves on. The instabilities of his childhood—the confusions of love and violence—have shaped him into the kind of person who is never at home with peace. A tangle of competing impulses, he cycles not just through moods but through whole personalities, of which the ingenuous child and the avenging adult figure among the most prominent. Offstage, these personalities flow through him with a volatility that makes him hard to handle, if not bewildering. One of his many wives, a few months into her short-lived marriage to him, says that getting to know him is like getting to know “25 or 30 different people.” Onstage, he is mesmerizing. You feel, in the audience, that you’re plugged into the socket of life—that you’re seeing not a single man onstage but rather an entire world in roiling motion, animated through a taut experiment in creative chaos and artistic control.

For the comedian, though, the stakes are more personal. The stage is the place where he can set his contradictions in motion and play the full array of his many selves. If he’s having a good night—if the “comedy gods” smile upon him, if he finds his form—Richard Pryor can own all these personalities as much as they own him.

Decatur, 1899–1931

The matriarch on the town: Maria Carter Bryant, Richard Pryor’s grandmother, in a Peoria tavern with her son Dickie, circa 1945.

(Courtesy of Barbara McGee)

O
n the morning of October 19, 1929, a twenty-nine-year-old black woman named Marie Carter Bryant walked into a confectionary in Decatur, Illinois, with trouble on her mind. She’d just heard that a young black boy, probably one of her sons, had been slapped in the confectionary, only a few blocks from her home, and she brought with her a sort of cudgel for the purpose of evening the score. When she found Helen Pappas, one half of the Greek American couple who ran the store, behind the counter, Marie unloaded her fury: a battery of blows to Pappas’s head that opened up a flesh wound. Pappas ran out of the store in a panic. Marie held her ground.

It was unusual, to say the least, for a black woman to assault a white shopkeeper in 1920s Decatur. The city’s black citizens were expected to stay “in their place”—in a small area south of downtown, and on the lower rungs of the local economy—and they were expected to be quiet about it. When Marie unsettled those expectations with her cudgel, the Decatur police responded as if a bank had been robbed. Five policemen were summoned to rush the confectionary and subdue her. They found her inside, biding her time before their arrival, and arrested her on a charge of assault.

Marie Bryant was Richard Pryor’s grandmother, the woman who raised him and took up residence in his psyche ever afterward, imprinting upon him her pride, cunning, and raw, bottom-dog outlook on the world. Born to a poor family that lived outside respectability, abused by her husband as a teenager, Marie had transformed herself by 1929 into a force of nature: a woman who protected herself with her own big hands and took no guff from anyone, whether they were lovers, husbands, shop owners, or policemen. A bootlegger in Decatur, she became a still more daunting presence when she moved eighty miles to Peoria, Illinois, where, as a madam in that city’s thriving red-light district, she kept order in her establishments by threatening to pull out a straight razor she reportedly stashed in her bra.

The riddle of Richard Pryor’s personality begins with the story of Marie and her hard-won transformation into a woman to be respected—if not out of esteem, then out of fear. The true story of her upbringing rivals any story that her grandson told from the stage.

R
ichard’s “Mama” was born Rithie Marie Carter on October 31, 1899. Of the nine children her mother had birthed by 1900, only three survived—a punishing ratio even for a black woman at the turn of the century.

Marie’s grandfather Abner Piper had been a Union volunteer in the Civil War and, paralyzed later in life, lived at home with Marie when she was a young child. He was one of many black veterans who bore witness to the limits of what the Union victory had achieved
for blacks in northern cities like Decatur, the self-styled “Pride of the Prairie.” Decatur had been carved out of the fertile farmland of Central Illinois, where the prairie grasses grew so tall and thick that early settlers felt as if they were alone in an ocean of stuff, and it prospered by attracting cereal mills and breweries, furniture makers and textile plants. It was a city that celebrated its local manufacturing, a town that took pride in having invented the flyswatter and the refrigerated soda fountain. But black Decaturites were shunted to a shabby part of town and kept on the margins of its economy. Black women usually worked as domestic servants or laundresses. Black men were all-purpose laborers who, like Marie’s relations, worked intermittently as hod carriers, teamsters, cooks, janitors, and the like.

Even more troublingly, blacks were subject to the vigilante justice of lynch law—made to feel that their lives were cheap and that a single case of mistaken identification could put them in the fatal clutch of a noose. The lynching of Samuel Bush in 1893 had left a deep stamp in the memory of local blacks. Police arrested Bush, an itinerant laborer from Mississippi, after a two-week search for a man who had attacked a couple of white women. Bush protested his innocence, yet many of the county’s leading white citizens rushed the jail to kidnap him, backed by a mob of a thousand. The mob stripped Bush naked, strung him to a telephone pole, and hanged him. Sheriff’s deputies stood nearby, intervening only after the hanging itself, when members of the mob tried to riddle Bush’s dead body with bullets. That was where white lawmen in Decatur drew the line—at the desecration of a body they had let twist in the wind.

The lynching was meant to cow the city’s black population into submission, but black Decaturites took a more productive lesson from it. A year later, after a black porter was arrested for attempting to rape a nineteen-year-old white domestic worker, a hundred blacks with rifles and army muskets patrolled the central business district, on the lookout for the first sign that a lynch mob was forming. For three days and nights, defying hostile coverage in the press, they guarded the streets surrounding the courthouse where the prisoner was being
kept. The feared lynch mob never materialized; even the father of the victim urged local whites to let justice take its course. This astonishing act of armed self-defense was part of a broader history of local blacks mobilizing to advance their interests and protect their rights. Black political organizations, such as the Afro-American Protective League, the Negro Liberty League, and the NAACP, abounded in Decatur from the 1890s through the 1920s.