Becoming Richard Pryor (10 page)

“Richard,” Mrs. Yingst asked finally, “you leave home early enough to get to school on time. Just why does this tardiness continue day after day?”

Richard played with his fatigue, converting it into a bit of shtick. “Well, you see, Mrs. Yingst, it’s like this. (
yawn
) I get on the bus. The ride makes me oh (
yawn
) so sleepy that (
yawn
) I just shut my eyes and ride on. And on. When the busman comes back to my corner a second time, he tells me to get off and get to school.” He stretched his jaws into one last yawn to close off his act.

Margaret Yingst felt sorry for the misfit in front of her. He was one of the only black kids at the school and seemed isolated on the playground, connecting with other kids only by performing his wacky pantomimes for them. So Mrs. Yingst struck a deal with him: if he arrived at school on time, he’d be rewarded with his own Friday-afternoon comedy set—ten minutes to entertain the classmates who, by and large, shunned him. He was rarely late for school again.

In the company of Lincoln: Richard dressed up for a sixth-grade field trip to Springfield, Illinois.

(Courtesy of Margaret Ruth Kelch)

For his Friday-afternoon material, Richard borrowed liberally from the rubber-faced comedians of the day. He loved Red Skelton and Sid Caesar, whom he watched avidly on his family’s new TV, and was especially inspired by Jerry Lewis, with his child-man persona and his mix of the kinetic and the clumsy. In his sixth-grade pantomimes, Richard might pretend to be holding a steaming hot bowl of soup, and then would yowl and slurp his way through the meal. His comedy was solo slapstick, Lewis
sans Martin. “Oh my, he could roll those eyes back,” remembered Yingst.

Mrs. Margaret Yingst, the first teacher who gave young Richard a stage.

(Courtesy of Margaret Ruth Kelch)

His Friday-afternoon slot soon grew into a prime-time show, with a new venue and a bigger audience. In the spring of 1953, lunchtime at Blaine-Sumner offered a veritable revue. Margaret Ruth, one of Richard’s only friends, had banded together with three other girls to form a singing group called the Glow Girls, and they helped pull in an audience for Richard. (Their name came from their signature
song, “The Glow Worm”: “When you gotta glow, you gotta glow / Glow little glow worm, glow.”) The entrance to the gym served as an amphitheater, its steps as risers for an audience of twenty-five or more kids. An alcove around the corner formed the wings of the stage, where the acts could make their dramatic entrances. The Pryor–Glow Girls double bill had a theatrical run of around fifteen impromptu performances, and won the admiration and encouragement of Mrs. Yingst.

Richard’s best friend Margaret Ruth (left) and their friend Gladys.

(Courtesy of Margaret Ruth Kelch)

Richard felt himself coming into his own. “When I heard their laughter,” he said, “I felt good about myself, which was a pretty rare feeling.” He became so comfortable with Mrs. Yingst that he teased
her about his prospects with her daughter, who was around his age. “Maybe we’ll get married,” he joked. “Then you and I will be family.” The episode with the scratch board might have sharpened Richard’s awareness of the color line that separated black boys and white girls, but it also had left him wishing to play with it.

“Oh, Richard,” Mrs. Yingst said sweetly, taking his audacity in stride. In the end, she gave him roughly the same report card as other teachers (Cs in reading, writing, and English; Ds and Fs in everything else), but in Richard’s memory, Mrs. Yingst remained a hallowed figure from his childhood, the one schoolteacher who pushed him, ever so gently, in the right direction.

Then Richard graduated from Blaine-Sumner and moved for seventh grade to the recently opened Trewyn School, and the bottom fell out again. While at Blaine-Sumner there had been a sprinkling of black students, at Trewyn Richard was the only black in a school with hundreds of students, the vast majority of whom were middle class. All the Glow Girls except Margaret Ruth had moved on to different schools, so he lost his opening act, the quartet of perky white girls who had given him cover as a performer. Mrs. Yingst was succeeded by Miss Dempsey, a gawky, bespectacled woman with dull brown hair, little sense of humor, and even less sense of understanding. And the other boys at Trewyn weren’t any more welcoming either, teasing and attacking Richard on the playground for being different.

And different, he was; the world of his family bore little resemblance to, say, the world of Margaret Ruth’s. In April 1953, his uncle Dickie was the target of a federal narcotics sting—“the first major crack-down on narcotics traffic in Peoria in many years,” according to the
Peoria Journal
. Arrested for selling heroin on North Washington Street, Dickie was slapped with heavier charges; the federal agents argued that he was the “king pin” of a multicity narcotics ring that had been under investigation for two months. They raided a house that was reported to be his headquarters, arrested the seven alleged drug addicts they found there, and upon searching the premises, came away triumphantly with twenty-nine heroin capsules, a bunch of
hypodermic needles, and a large quantity of marijuana. Dickie was sentenced to several years in a federal prison in Michigan, but considered himself lucky nonetheless: when he was apprehended on North Washington Street, he had also been carrying a box of counterfeit money and, just before being cuffed, had nonchalantly placed the box on top of a garbage can, where it remained undiscovered. The funny bills were likely connected to his old North Washington Street confrère Bris Collins, who ran a counterfeiting operation in Peoria and who, in 1954, followed Dickie to the federal penitentiary, busted in a sting of his own.

Like the men in his life, Richard felt marked, too. One afternoon he came to Miss Dempsey with his clothes torn, his lower lip smudged with blood, and his cheeks wet with tears. “What happened?” she asked.

“Those kids out there called me a nigger,” Richard said.

Miss Dempsey answered loud enough so others could hear her, in a tone that was perfectly matter-of-fact: “Well, Richard, that’s what you are. Why are you so upset?” Lunchtime was drawing to a close; she couldn’t be bothered. She pointed him to sit at his desk with the other students.

The experience was no doubt chastening for Richard, but perhaps less unnerving than this: the same Miss Dempsey who acted as if it were normal for Richard to be a “nigger,” also acted as if it were normal for him to be an entertainer. And so she followed the precedent, established by Mrs. Yingst, of ceding her classroom floor to Richard for his weekly monologues. His performances at Trewyn were double-edged, moments of triumph that he purchased at the price of heightened ambivalence. Part of him needed an audience that another part of him begrudged.

The neediness was evident to his one ally in Miss Dempsey’s class, ex–Glow Girl Margaret Ruth. “He wanted to be included, he wanted to be part of the group, he wanted to be in everything,” she recalled. He came, alone, to all of Trewyn’s basketball games and sock hops. In eighth grade, he ran to become his homeroom’s elected
representative for Student Council—and won. But except when he lit up for his comedy routines, he looked defeated, as if the social isolation was taking its toll. When the school day ended, he would walk home with Margaret and choke up. “Why did I have to be born black?” he asked, leaning on her for comfort.

Though well meaning, Margaret herself played a role in deepening his pain. When her mother, who was southern born and bred, spied Richard and Margaret walking home together, she had a conniption over their association, and so Margaret pulled away from Richard. Their walks continued, but the two of them would separate before she neared her family’s house; boundaries had to be maintained. And when Richard discovered that Margaret had feelings for another student, a white boy, he took it not only as a personal rejection but also as a fresh racial insult. Sitting next to her on a three-hour-long bus ride for a school field trip, he kept circling back to a single theme: if only he were white, he said, then she might have fallen for him. If only.

Richard hated Trewyn so much that he was willing to risk the wrath of his grandmother to escape the dreaded place. One day, Marie received a phone call from Richard’s school, advising her that Richard had not been in Miss Dempsey’s class for twenty-odd days. That was strange, Marie thought; she hadn’t noticed a change in Richard’s school-day routine. In the morning, she would give him money for lunch and he would leave with books under his arms; in the afternoon, he would return home and act as if he’d had another fine day at Trewyn. So Marie put a black policewoman on Richard’s tail. The policewoman tracked him down to a vacant lot covered with horseweed, whose tall shoots offered good camouflage for a thirteen-year-old on the lam. Richard was bedded down in the weeds, whiling away his hours with the assistance of a superhero comic book and some soda and cigarettes he’d bought with his lunch money. Marie was none too pleased.

Richard escaped Trewyn permanently in late 1954, when, for unclear reasons, he moved out of his grandmother’s home on the edge of Peoria’s valley and into his father’s home downtown. He was placed
in Roosevelt Junior High, his sixth school in seven years. Suddenly Richard was in a much blacker element: Roosevelt was closely split between white and black students. Still, in another sense, he never left Blaine-Sumner or Trewyn behind. His later crossover comedy returned to the psychic scenes of his sixth- and seventh-grade classrooms, where there were no other black faces in the room and he had to play to an audience that could not intuit where he was coming from. When he saw whites in his audience, he might wonder if he was performing for the likes of Mrs. Yingst or the likes of Miss Dempsey, and then devise tests—little barbed teases, like his gambit with Mrs. Yingst over her daughter—to sort the two groups apart. For the right kind of person, the barb was an invitation to a friendship that had the flavor of a conspiracy. For the wrong kind of person, it was simply a barb, and was meant to stick under the skin.

I
n the spring of 1955, Richard walked into the George Washington Carver Community Center, a squat, unassuming brick building that had formerly housed the phone company’s maintenance division. He was looking for Carver’s Youth Theater Guild; he found, in Miss Juliette Whittaker, the person who showed him his future.

Carver was, in the words of teacher Kathryn Timmes, “the Mecca of the black community.” Situated at the heart of the neighborhood where three-quarters of black Peorians lived, the center opened in 1944 as a “teenage hangout” and, by Richard’s arrival, had become much more. Black kids at Peoria public schools tended to be, like Richard, excluded from the mainstream of social life, so they converged at Carver after school and on weekends to find a world of their own. Carver had its own proms, its own carnivals, its own athletic teams. Young children played checkers or marbles or basketball, sang in its “Cherub Choir,” learned to tap dance, or worked on crafts. Teenagers shot pool, played chess and Ping-Pong, joined jazz bands such as the Rhythm Rockets or the Blue Dukes, and learned the basics of everything from modern dance and set design to cooking and sewing.