Becoming Richard Pryor (9 page)

Third grade marked the beginning of the end for Richard’s academic career. Despite relatively decent grades (three Bs and four Cs) the year before, he took a nosedive, now ending up with two Cs, four Ds, and one F, again in “conduct.” And that was about as good as it would get. For the rest of his time in school, his grades would never rise above Cs, with an increasing concentration of Ds and Fs. Given an intelligence test, he scored a 100—perfectly average. Conventional testing could little recognize unconventional talent.

Richard’s poor grades in “conduct” were tied to his increasing propensity for mischief. Often he was simply disruptive, a prankster on the loose. He threw spitballs and went through a Tarzan phase where, from out of nowhere, he would erupt into his imitation of Johnny Weissmuller doing his yodeling call or would gibber like the chimpanzee Cheeta. But he also fell into a reverberating discovery: that he could use his failures to transfix his audience. When he was caught without his homework or when he lost his books, Richard would not make a quick, shamefaced confession and be done with it. Instead, he seized the opportunity for a disquisition about how, exactly, he’d arrived at this sorry outcome. The teacher might not like ceding control of her classroom, but the other kids delighted in Richard’s freewheeling spiels—even the ones who, outside class, attacked him on the vacant lot.

Richard started testing boundaries, treating rules as playthings,
monkeying with expectations. He tried out for, and made it onto, Irving School’s basketball team. His inspiration? The Harlem Globetrotters, who visited Peoria every year to play an exhibition game at a local high school and who, despite their name, actually hailed from Chicago. The Globetrotters were the toast of the black community at the time. They had just defeated the Minneapolis Lakers, the dominant team in the all-white world of pro basketball leagues, in two exhibition matches—victories that were as sweet as black heavyweight Joe Louis’s knockout of Max Schmeling a decade before. In his mind, Richard was channeling the spirit of Goose Tatum, “Clown Prince” of the Globetrotters and ball handler extraordinaire. At practice, he tried to dazzle and entertain his teammates rather than demonstrate basic skills. The reaction was swift. The coach felt he’d lost control of his team and would have none of it; style was not at a premium in his version of the game. Within a week, Richard was kicked off the team.

In fourth grade, Richard found trouble in a whole new way, though this time he had no idea he was crossing a line—he didn’t even know there was a line. He had noticed that, while the white boys in class kept their distance, the white girls were more welcoming; they seemed to enjoy seeing him whip out his drawing pads and sketch his cartoon characters. He fell for one girl in particular and gave her a scratch board—the kind covered with a plastic sheet that, once lifted, would erase the drawing—as a token of affection. She was thrilled. It was, she swore, her new favorite toy.

The next day, her father appeared in their classroom, scowling as he held the scratch board and demanding to know which “little nigger” had given it to his daughter. The teacher fingered Richard.

“Nigger,” the girl’s father shouted, “don’t you ever give my daughter anything.” Richard recoiled in shock. “Why was he calling me a nigger? Why did he hate me?” he wondered to himself. In his memoir he wrote, “If I was four and a half feet tall then, the girl’s daddy cut six inches off. Zap. Six inches of self-esteem gone. That was my indoctrination to the black experience in America.” The meaning of Richard’s blackness was coalescing: being a “nigger” meant keeping
his affections to himself when they involved a white girl or else face certain humiliation. The liaisons he’d observed around North Washington Street were taboo elsewhere; what happened at the Famous Door stayed at the Famous Door.

There was, however, an unexpected upside to the whole thing. For once Richard saw his father unleash his anger in his defense rather than against him. Buck came to his son’s classroom the very next day and confronted the teacher.

“How could you do that?” he asked her. “How could you not say anything to that man?”

The teacher looked down and shook her head, as if to telegraph that she was ashamed of her own behavior, and Buck softened, patting her on the back in an unusual show of tenderness. Then he turned to the little girl whom Richard adored. “Did you get his present?” Buck asked.

“Yes,” she whimpered, “but he wouldn’t let me keep it.”

At which point Richard, trying to ease her pain, interjected, “That’s okay.” Of course, it wasn’t.

This unpleasant interlude was just one of many during fourth grade, Richard’s most troubled year at Irving School. He skipped school more often and was suspended for misbehavior on a near-weekly basis. A ritual developed: Richard would act up and get sent home; a family member would drag him by the ear to the principal’s office and ask for him to be reinstated; the principal would comply; Richard would act up again and the cycle would repeat. “You could almost set your watch by it,” recalled his friend Michael Grussemeyer. By the end of that school year, Irving’s administration seems to have given up on him: a note was placed in Richard’s file reading, “S[tudent] can’t return.”

Richard’s frustrations at school pushed him deeper into the realm of private fantasy at home. He listened to his grandmother’s Doris Day records and confected a Doris Day scenario in his mind, placing himself alongside a cast of beautiful people. He played with Popsicle sticks and imagined they were living characters acting out a Holly
wood drama in front of his eyes. “I’d write a lot,” he remembered. “I’d lock myself up in my room for two or three days at a time without eating or sleeping, just writing about life.” He gathered photos of theater marquees from
Life
magazine and Peoria newspapers, then wrote “RICHIE PRYOR” on a strip of paper and pasted it onto the marquees. Flopped on his bed on the top floor of his grandmother’s brothel, he threw himself into the wildest of fantasies—that he was destined for stardom—even though he had little practical sense of how he might be plucked, like his beloved Little Beaver, out of one life and into another.

On the bright side, Richard had someone new in his corner at home: a stepmother named Viola Anna Hurst, whom everyone called Ann. Born in New Orleans in 1921, Ann had arrived in Peoria after the war and slipped into work as a prostitute at China Bee’s, the classiest black brothel in town. She was a freckled Creole, so light-skinned she might have passed for white if she had wanted to, and dressed smartly, forties style, in wide-brimmed hats and elegant dresses cinched with belts. Sociable and lively, she charmed her North Washington Street neighbor Buck, who married her on August 16, 1950. For a while Ann assumed some responsibility for taking care of Richard: more often than not, she was the one who pleaded with the principal to let Richard return from suspension during fourth grade. Richard, already familiar with mothers who made their living on the horizontal, took quickly to calling her “Mom.” He liked the look of her and was heartened by the fact that, compared with Marie or Buck, she was no disciplinarian.

But Ann had her principles, and tried to instill them in Richard. A practicing Catholic, she took Richard to catechism on weekends and helped enroll him in a private Catholic school for fifth grade, since Irving was no longer an option. The school offered the promise of a fresh start, and Richard seemed to welcome that. He made new friends, took school seriously, and impressed his teachers with his intelligence. Halfway into the school year, though, a whispering campaign put an end to his fresh start. Someone complained about how Richard’s family made its living, and the school told Richard he was no longer welcome there.

Sociable: Richard’s stepmother Ann (second from left) at a Peoria nightclub, circa 1950, with saxophonist Vy Burnside, trumpeter Tiny Davis, and an unidentified friend.

(Courtesy of Barbara McGee)

“Why’d they kick me out of school? What did I do?” he asked Marie, devastated. “Nothing, baby,” Marie replied. “Some people just don’t know right from wrong, even though they think they wrote the book.”

A
s Richard struggled in school, his elders were facing a stiff headwind of their own. Just as the politics of wartime Peoria had favored the expansion of the brothel business, so the politics of postwar Peoria favored its contraction. To survive, the family would have to improvise: the 300 block of North Washington Street, which the Pryors called home, would soon be demolished, and the heart of the red-light district would go with it.

The reversal of fortune began in February 1945, when Peoria’s
longtime mayor was defeated by a reform candidate in an election where the middle-class bluffs outvoted the working-class valley by 15 percent. Shortly thereafter, the new mayor cleared out the city’s slot machines and started putting the squeeze on casino gambling. Then, in July 1948, the reformers picked up more steam when the head of a local syndicate was murdered outside his favorite tavern by a sharpshooter hiding in some nearby underbrush. The gangster’s widow avenged his death by releasing a bombshell to the press: a recording of an emissary from the county attorney’s office in the process of extorting a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bribe from her late husband. Suddenly, the “bad morals” of Peoria were everywhere, impossible to ignore. After the county attorney was indicted by a grand jury, Illinois’s attorney general launched a sweeping investigation into gambling and prostitution in Peoria, aiming to eliminate organized vice root and branch. Although a rump of gamblers resisted—the home of the new county attorney was bombed a year after his predecessor’s indictment—the casino world, which had been the most profitable sector of Peoria’s underground economy, soon became a ghost of its former self.

With gambling out of the way, the reformers targeted prostitution as the next social evil to be scrubbed from the valley. Their cause was joined by a large number of ex-GIs returning to Peoria with hopes of raising families there. Seasoned by their military experience, these men became, collectively, a powerful force for reform: they felt it was their patriotic duty to serve their city by cleaning it up. They won seats on the city council and the county board of supervisors, breaking the hammerlock that an older generation had long held on local politics. They longed to put madams like China Bee and Marie Pryor on notice: when the reformers finally captured city hall in full in 1953, within its first few months in office the new administration made a point of launching thirty-five raids on established brothels.

Before that moment of complete electoral triumph, the reformers hit upon a less explicit strategy for destroying the red-light district: they could help the government build an interstate highway through
it. Since the early 1940s, Peorians had been clamoring for the construction of a second bridge connecting Peoria to East Peoria. In 1951, the State Highway Division recommended that the project begin at North Washington Street on the Peoria side. The Pryors and their fellow residents of the 300 block, the black-oriented portion of the red-light district, found themselves at the very center of construction. Fourteen buildings, all within the vicinity of the district, were demolished in the initial phase, and no one seems to have paused with the bulldozer. Richard’s block was “blight.” Three-quarters of its dwellings lacked a private bathroom or were deemed dilapidated by the 1950 U.S. Census; one in six had no running water.

For the underground entrepreneurs of 300 North Washington Street, the construction of the bridge meant the end of their neighborhood. In late 1951, Marie and her family left behind her brothels at 313 and 317 North Washington Street, a few steps ahead of the wrecking ball. The Famous Door had closed two years before, along with a beauty shop Marie had run next to it for two years. With the disintegration of the friendly relationship between Peoria’s police and its madams, the family needed to regroup. Marie chose to move her family to the 2400 block of South Adams—four and a half miles away from the old red-light district, in an undeveloped part of town that had few black residents but offered cheaper rents and less ramshackle housing stock. The family loosened up, subdividing into its various specialties. Richard’s grandfather devoted himself to his new pool hall; Richard’s uncle Dickie turned to drug running and counterfeiting; Buck and Ann remained connected to prostitution; and Marie went back to bootlegging, hanging up her spurs as a madam at age fifty-two.

An era, Marie’s era, was drawing to a close. Richard enrolled in the nearly all-white Blaine-Sumner elementary school, smarting from his most recent expulsion, and reached for another chance at a fresh start.

Peoria, 1952–1956

M
rs. Margaret Yingst, sixth-grade teacher at Blaine-Sumner elementary school and a woman who looked and dressed like an older version of Snow White, had a problem on her hands. When she took attendance after the ringing of the morning bell, there was usually a hitch at the
P
s. “Richard Pryor? Richard?” No answer. Half an hour later, Richard ambled into class and sat down at a desk in the first row. He looked ragged, as if he’d been up half the night.