by David Henry
An alarming headline on page 1 of the April 30, 1967, San Francisco Examiner read: “It’s All Legal. Oakland’s Black Panthers Wear Guns, Talk Revolution.” “If a Hollywood director were to choose them as stars of a movie melodrama of revolution, he would be accused of typecasting,” the story began. The writer marveled that the Panthers’ “lithe, slender, saturnine and handsome” leader—his good looks marred by the “blunt, ugly riot gun” in his hands—was “a Negro who doesn’t use that word but calls himself black.”
“What man in his right mind,” the reporter asks parenthetically, “would call himself black?”
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Eldridge Cleaver, the Panthers’ future minister of information, famously recalled undergoing a personal transformation during a meeting of the Bay Area Grassroots Organization Planning Committee at a storefront on Scott Street in San Francisco’s Fillmore District when four armed members of the Black Panther Party—Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Bobby Hutton, and Sherwin Forte—entered the room dressed in their uniform black berets, powder blue shirts, black leather jackets, black trousers, and shiny black shoes.
From the tension showing on the faces of the people before me, I thought the cops were invading the meeting, but there was a deep female gleam leaping out of one of the women’s eyes that no cop who ever lived could elicit. I recognized that gleam out of the recesses of my soul, even though I had never seen it before in my life: the total admiration of a black woman for a black man.
A black woman gazing upon a black man with a look of total admiration. That was a look Richard Pryor longed to see for himself. How many of his most biting (and most hilarious) routines describing his relations with women were laced with a crippling fear that he was despised in their eyes, that he was something less than a real man, whether manifest in the shame he felt at a black woman’s accusing glare when he went out in public with a white woman on his arm, or the indignities he suffered at the hands of police in the presence of any woman, black or white?
Richard makes the point plainly in his routine about a black couple going out for a night on the town only to be pulled over by a cop and ordered out of their car at gunpoint:
“GET OUT OF THE CAR THERE WAS A ROBBERY. A NIGGER LOOKED JUST LIKE YOU. PUT UP YOUR HANDS, TAKE YOUR PANTS DOWN, SPREAD!”
Now what nigger feel like having fun after that?
“Uh, let’s just go home, baby.”
You go home, beat your kids and shit. . . . You wonder why a nigger don’t go completely mad.
Richard would find much to admire in Eldridge Cleaver’s story involving a car donated to the Panthers by a white man in Berkeley who sympathized with the work the party was doing. The car was a big help to the party but also a headache, because it had Florida license plates. All of the Panthers’ vehicles were well known to the Oakland police. It took only a few days before word got around and they began routinely stopping the car. Cleaver usually took responsibility for driving the car because he had multiple forms of valid identification, including a driver’s license, draft card, Social Security card, and a variety of press credentials from Ramparts magazine. He even had a press card issued by the United Nations. Once, an Oakland cop stopped him demanding to know whose car it was. Cleaver told him that a white man from Florida had donated it to the Black Panther Party. “You expect me to believe that story?” the cop said. “No white man in his right mind would give the Black Panthers a car.” Cleaver had a ready reply. “Maybe this white man is crazy.”
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“Police put a hurtin’ on your ass,” Richard told the crowd at the Purple Onion, a cellar club in San Francisco’s North Beach area. “They really degrade you. White folks don’t believe that. . . . White folks get a ticket, they pull right over (white voice) ‘Yes, officer, glad to be of help.’ A nigger got to be talking ’bout, ‘I am reaching into my pocket for my license, ’cause I don’t want to be no motherfuckin’ accident.’ ”
When he recorded the routine as “Niggers vs. Police” on That Nigger’s Crazy, it spread throughout the country. Richard realized how big the record had become when he was out working on the road and people in the audience started speaking the lines right along with him.
He was understandably startled when two policemen were ushered into his dressing room before a show in Detroit. But they merely wanted to share with him their story of having pulled over a black motorist who gave them Richard’s line word for word.
THE WORD MADE FLESH
Berkeley in 1971 wasn’t Hollywood. There Richard had been too black. It wasn’t even Greenwich Village where a no doubt well-intentioned comedy writer had counseled him, “Don’t mention the fact that you’re a nigger. Don’t go into such bad taste.” Here militant black men were arming themselves, taking it to the streets, excoriating him for his show-biz ambitions and exhorting him to be black above all else.
Richard was intrigued by the Black Panthers’ emphasis on education. Like Malcolm, they prized their knowledge of history. They studied not Malcolm but Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and White Skin, Black Masks; the quotations of Mao Tse-tung; Marcus Garvey; and Toussaint L’Ouverture’s 1794–1803 Haitian revolution, the uprising that became the model for third-world liberation movements from Africa to Cuba.
As much as he admired the Panthers’ ideology and courage, Richard had to confess he could never be a for-real revolutionary. He liked white women too much. He even admitted to having an erotic dream about Tricia Nixon. “I woke up. I was like ‘What the fuck?’ I mean you know you got the white-woman disease bad when you’re having dreams about Tricia Nixon, right? Cause Tricia, she can’t give her pussy away. Even the Secret Servicemen, they be like, ‘Uh, not now baby, I gotta go wash the car.’ ”
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Shelley had once berated Richard that he was incapable of loving anyone.
Not true, he said. “I love Miles.”
Now word came that Miles and Shelley had been hanging out. Richard convinced himself they weren’t sleeping together, but still, the thought of it tore him up inside. He bought a pawnshop trumpet and started blowing it on street corners. “Only I didn’t know how to play,” he said. “Not a fucking note. But I blew the motherfucker as if the shrill, discordant sounds that went screaming into the darkness would let everyone know how unhappy I felt inside.”
His performances in Berkeley clubs could be just as bizarre. Some nights, he went onstage and made strange animal noises. “Other nights I repeated a single word like ‘bitch’ or ‘motherfucker,’ but gave it fifty-seven different inflections. Each outing was like playing jazz, searching for that one perfect note that would carry me into a higher state of bliss. I never thought about what I was going to do until I did it.” In Berkeley, he might find an audience for that sort of thing, but whatever it was, it wasn’t stand-up comedy.
And then one night he stepped onstage and tried it with the word nigger. Just flat-out said it, like a man committing himself to a 12-step program.
“Hello. My name is Richard Pryor. I’m a nigger.”
He said it again.
“A nigger.“
Again and again. Just that one word, over and over, he recalled, “like a preacher singing hallelujah.” It gave him strength, he said. It robbed the word of its wretchedness and made him feel free.
“What we both like about the word,” writes Mooney, “is that it demonstrates a simple truth. White people cannot say it in front of black people without declaring themselves to be racist. . . . We are saying something that white people can’t. It’s forbidden to them but allowed to us. Ain’t too many things like that. It’s liberating.”
Flip Wilson had a similar awakening, sparked by a white friend who told him, “Look, I think you’ve got a lot to express. But you’re inhibiting yourself . . . well, because you’re a nigger. Now that’s a word I don’t use, but I want you to understand. I think black people are too self-conscious about having been slaves. All nationalities have been sla
ves, and nobody has come back faster than you people . . . I’m amazed at black people, yet they spend all that time feeling sorry for themselves. The point is, it’s over. It’s over! Damn what anybody thinks of you. Say what you have to say and help open up somebody else’s eyes.”
That, Wilson said, is when he realized how interesting being black is. “Niggers is fun!” he would say.
Not everyone felt the euphoria. Some were mortified, accusing Richard of self-hatred and “running down the race,” as if that word, in his hands, had the power to undo the decades of racial progress. What rankled others was the way he took the folkloric language of the street corners, neighborhood bars, barbershops, and pool halls and paraded it out on a public stage before mixed audiences. John A. and Dennis A. Williams, authors of If I Stop I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor, described the reaction as “like hearing a language that might be spoken only at home being shouted through the streets.”
Jabari Asim, author of The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why, similarly observed that Pryor had “devised a new style that was raw, obscene, and often delivered while its creator seemed to teeter on the verge of weeping or violence. . . . To blacks with middle-class sensibilities . . . he was as embarrassing as he was funny, like a witty but uncontrollable cousin who you just knew was going to act up in front of audiences.”
It didn’t help that white commentators were nearly universal in lauding his new raw and racial style. Mark Jacobson declared Richard’s use of the n-word a “masterstroke.”
“When Pryor says it, it means something different,” Time magazine insisted.
Depending on his inflection, or even the tilt of his mouth, it can mean simply black. Or it can mean a hip black, wise in the ways of the street. Occasionally nigger can even mean white in Pryor’s reverse English lexicon. However he defines it, Pryor is certain of one thing. He is proudly assertively a nigger, the first comedian to speak in the raw, brutal, but wildly hilarious language of the street.
Today, forty-some years after his N-word epiphany, audiences and middle American hip-hop listeners are well versed in the N-word’s variant spellings and nuanced meanings. In commentaries penned by scolds and advocates alike, the N-word’s prevalence in contemporary popular culture is traced back to Richard Pryor.
Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy sets the stage in his book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word:
While the hip comedians of the 1950s and 1960s—Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell, Mort Sahl, Godfrey Cambridge, Moms Mabley, Redd Foxx—told sexually risqué or politically barbed jokes, nigger for the most part remained off-limits.
All that changed with the emergence of Richard Pryor.
It’s not that Richard was the first comedian to embrace the N-word. Dick Gregory hoped to declaw the slur in 1964 when he titled his memoir Nigger, though Gregory’s use of the word had nowhere near the impact that Pryor’s would. Gregory’s was a powerful and influential book, but as Woody Guthrie said when asked about the success of his 1943 memoir, Bound for Glory, no book, no matter how good, could ever get a hall full of people shouting and stomping and clapping along the way his songs could. Richard served the word up live, playing off the highly charged reactions of integrated audiences. Some nights the crowds were hostile, sometimes jubilant, sometimes chilly, but never lukewarm. Richard’s move was a spontaneous one, hatched in the moment, with no thought of the outcome. Inspired by the black poets’ use of vernacular rhythms and street language, and the Panthers’ insistence on being authentically and unapologetically black, he seized the word with the same heedless urgency the French dramatist Antonin Artaud had demanded of creators in his time, “like a victim burning at the stake, signaling through the flames.”
Lenny Bruce, in his own way, got there ahead of Gregory, once pausing between nightclub bits to ask, “Are there any niggers here tonight?” He filled the stunned silence that followed saying, “I know that one nigger who works here—I see him back there. Oh, there’s two niggers, customers, and, uh, aha! Between those niggers sits one kike—man, thank God for the kike! Uh, two kikes. That’s three niggers, two kikes, and one spic. One spic—two, three spics. One mick. One mick, one spic, one hick, thick, funky, spunky boogey.” He went on like an auctioneer, tallying up the kikes, spics, guineas, greaseballs, Yids, boogies, and Polacks before he got to his point. “The point? That the word’s suppression gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. If President Kennedy got on television and said, ‘Tonight I’d like to introduce the niggers in my cabinet,’ and he yelled ‘niggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggernigger’ at every nigger he saw, ‘boogeyboogeyboogeyboogeyboogey, niggerniggerniggernigger’ till nigger didn’t mean anything any more, till nigger lost its meaning—you’d never make any four-year-old nigger cry when he came home from school.”
Maybe.
Richard knew it would take more than familiarity or frequency of use to scrub that particular word of its bloody history. Sure, if you say almost any word enough times in a row like that the sheer monotony of repetition will drain it of its sense and meaning. But not nigger. It just digs in deeper. “That word,” Dave Chappelle would attest, “is a doozy.”
It all came back to what Malcolm X had said when a “ ‘token-integrated’ black Ph.D. associate professor” stood up during a question-and-answer period to challenge his characterization of white attitudes, accusing Malcolm of being a “divisive demagogue” and practicing reverse racism. Finally, Malcolm asked the professor if he knew what whites called black people with Ph.Ds.
“He said something like, ‘I believe that I happen not to be aware of that’—you know, one of these ultra-proper-talking Negroes.
“And,” Malcolm said, “I laid the word down on him, loud: Nigger!”
That was it. No matter what Richard or any other black person at that time might achieve, no matter how much white people might praise or pay him, Richard Pryor knew that, behind his back, he would always be a nigger.
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By the end of Richard’s time in Berkeley, Huey Newton had begun his downward spiral, demoralized by party infighting that was only exacerbated by FBI efforts to divide and conquer the Panthers through a campaign of misinformation. Eldridge Cleaver, then living in exile in Algiers, received mounds of FBI-forged letters, supposedly from party members, challenging Newton’s leadership and urging Cleaver to take control before Huey decided to force him out.
Speaking in the 1980s, Huey recalled that, during this time, he would often have spurts of brilliant clarity but then would become entirely incoherent and rambling, that he was committing reactionary suicide, killing himself with cocaine and heroin.
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After leaving an Oakland party together late one night, Huey and his girlfriend went back to Richard’s apartment, doing more blow and making big plans, when Huey fell into a dark mood. The tension had begun mounting, Richard recalled, when Newton’s girlfriend started coming onto him and he did nothing to discourage her. Huey was convinced that, by and by, he would surely end up behind bars. He was terrified of prison. “Everyone’s going to want to fuck me,” he said. “But if they put their dick in my mouth, I’ll bite it off.” “That’s a plan,” Richard said, “but right before you bite, you know, you’re going to taste that dick in your mouth and wonder whether or not you like it.” Newton leaped up from his chair like—well, like a panther—fists flying, pummeling Richard about the head.
It could have been a lot worse. Both men were high, both had guns. In that moment, Richard knew it was time to pack up what he’d found in Berkeley and take it back to L.A. Why force himself into the mold of a radical poet or militant activist when he knew he could “stir up more shit on stage”?
In truth, he’d been moving in that direction ever since his Las Vegas walk-off—a personal awakening that the press agents and keepers of the cultural narrative had labored to characterize as a breakdown, a disaster, a tragedy. A career once bright with
promise reduced to ruins.
The Catholic writer, mystic, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton made the observation that “there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think.” Keeping a journal showed him that his latest spiritual insight or self-discovery generally turned out to be a repeat of something he’d discovered years before.
Richard had already awakened to the same self-discovery several times, going back at least as far as those late nights watching TV in Peoria while spattering his in-laws’ living room with spitballs and scheming how he would ever get up from that couch to take his place alongside Redd Foxx and Dick Gregory on the other side of that screen. Same thing when he heard a Lenny Bruce LP for the first time. Same as when he stared out at that Las Vegas crowd and opened his mouth to find nothing would come out but “What the fuck am I doing here?”
He always awoke to the same thought: cut the bullshit, speak the truths he had the gift to see, give voice to those characters in his imagination clamoring to come out and say their say.
But after each revelation, he backslid to the safety of easy money and easier laughs. The irony, of course, is that when he finally did give free rein to his voice, he would get bigger laughs than anyone. And the money would be insane.
He reached the same awakening in Berkeley. Only this time it would stick. The times were right and he was ready. The times were calling for a Richard Pryor.
Perhaps he had heard about Eldridge Cleaver’s embrace of Brother Merton, while reading Seven Storey Mountain in solitary confinement at Folsom prison, Merton who averred that all sin is “the refusal to be what we were created to be.”