Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  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.

  PART ONE

  UP FROM PEORIA

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Dangerous Elements

  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)

  On 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.

  Richard’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.

  Richard Pryor’s Decatur ancestors had an oblique relationship to these organizations, benefitting from their accomplishments but not investing in them personally. His kin played little role in the formal political life of the town—though they certainly absorbed the lesson that it was best to be armed if you wished to defend yourself. When the secretary of the local NAACP wrote a ten-chapter history of the city’s black population on the occasion of Decatur’s centennial in 1929, she enumerated seemingly every black family that had migrated to the city from its founding through the turn of the century, trumpeting their accomplishments as the stuff of Decatur’s progress. Yet Richard’s paternal ancestors—two large families that had arrived from Missouri and Southern Illinois and filled out the ranks of Decatur’s working poor—appear nowhere in her annals. It is as if they never existed. Their dubious achievements were too often in full view for anyone reading the police blotter, and had no place in a story about the colored race’s dogged pursuit of a better day.

  Marie’s father, Richard, had a well-earned reputation for lawlessness: he worked as a bouncer in the city’s brothels and was arrested, variously, for beating his wife, whipping his wife, assaulting someone with brass knuckles, yelling obscenities in public, and pointing a firearm at his brother. But no Pryor ancestor cut a broader swath through Decatur than Marie’s uncle “Tip,” who, like her father, made his money in Decatur
’s underground economy. A tall, wiry amputee who brandished his crutch as a weapon, Tip Carter had his finger in perhaps every illegal business in town. He bootlegged liquor industriously. He turned his own home into a gaming room and ran a pool and billiards room that doubled as a gambling den. In 1909, when Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act—the nation’s first shot in its war on drugs—Tip was among the first generation busted. Police nailed him for running an “opium joint” after finding a pipe, oil, and opium ashes among the cases of beer and whiskey in his illegal drinking hideaway.

  Named in 1910 as a “disturbing element in Decatur for twenty years,” Tip lived, alongside Marie’s father, in a demimonde where white women and black men partnered up, sometimes in pleasure and sometimes in crime. In 1899 he was arrested simply for taking a room with a white woman. Four years later he was involved, with a white female accomplice, in a robbery that was striking for its twist of personal brutality. One night, a drunken visitor from a nearby town clambered into a carriage driven by Tip. Soon two white women were invited into the carriage, too, presumably to sweeten the party. When the visitor woke up from his revelry at 2:00 a.m., he was lying on the street in a pool of blood, wearing nothing but his underclothes. His face was mauled and his mouth throbbing with unbelievable pain. According to police and a grand jury, Tip had stripped him of his clothes and all his gold—twenty-five dollars in gold money, his gold watch, and twenty-five dollars’ worth of gold in bridgework on his teeth.

  Even before being imprisoned for this act of amateur dentistry, Tip Carter had been arrested a stunning 150 times. Yet Decatur was a loose enough town, and Tip Carter a capable enough person, that he seemed rather to prosper while drifting in and out of jail. He kept himself busy and salvaged a decent reputation for getting the job done: when he threw a “cakewalk” party during the dance’s vogue, the Decatur Herald felt obliged to note that he “is himself not a cake walker, but is recognized as a good manager.”

  Decatur’s city fathers seemed to look more kindly on an illegal operation if it was well run and its violence didn’t spill over to civilians in the community. As even the local newspapers had to admit, there was a double standard of justice in Decatur: a stiffer one for blacks, a more lenient one for whites. “It is a noticeable fact that the uneducated, good-for-nothing colored man who rattles the bones for a few pennies gets himself in jail,” observed the Herald Dispatch on the occasion of one of Tip’s many gambling arrests. “The well dressed gambler who rattles bones not only for dollars but for hundreds of dollars never is locked up. He ‘gets out before he gets in’ and pursues his avocation on the same night he is arrested.” Given how the hammer could fall on you if you were black, it was important—even while running a bordello or bootlegging operation—to be conscientious, deliberate. You had to be a man, or woman, of your word. Such was the moral instruction Marie Carter received from her uncle Tip.

  On the evening of August 15, 1914, Marie Carter became Marie Pryor, the families of the bride and groom coming together at the home of the pastor of the Church of the Living God. Roy Pryor was a laborer and chauffeur. He was twenty-six; Marie, fifteen. The Pryor clan had some respectable elements—Roy’s brother William was a great supporter of the Pentecostal-based church—but Roy had a dark, willful streak that may have attracted him to the notorious Carter family, and vice versa. He was the sort to be arrested for “using bad language” in public—the second of Richard Pryor’s ancestors to be sent to jail on an obscenity charge. Four years before he married Marie, Roy had gotten into an altercation with a police officer. He had been arguing with another man in front of Decatur’s Nickelodeon when the officer ordered him to “shut up and move on.” Roy preferred not to, and instead transferred his argument to the police officer. The paddy wagon was called, and Roy sent to jail.

  Marie and Roy’s marriage soon produced a child, LeRoy Jr., or “Bucky,” born in June of the following year. But from the start Marie found herself on the wrong end of her husband’s temper. Sixteen months after their wedding, Marie attended a “grand ball” without the company of Roy. Mad with jealousy, he assaulted her and threatened to kill her. (Charges were filed; Roy pled guilty and paid a fine of $5.30.) Two years later, Marie had Roy arrested on another assault charge. In yet another incident, perhaps related to domestic violence, her brother Jim swore out a warrant for Roy’s arrest, charging him with carrying a revolver.

  Marie possessed a fighting spirit: she refused to be passively enmeshed in an abusive relationship. In this way, she took after her mother, aunt, and sister-in-law, who had all fought their husbands’ abuse with a number of instruments at their disposal, bringing in the law when they weren’t simply reaching for the closest household weapon. When Marie was four, her uncle Tip attacked his wife and paid a high price: his wife struck him on the head with a common hammer, bloodying him so much that Tip claimed to the police, believably, that he had been kicked by a horse. When Marie was six, her mother, Julia, came home to discover her father “on a ripsnorter,” having consumed more than a pint of whiskey. When he refused to let his wife into the house, she called the police to put him in jail.

  After she married Roy, Marie could refer to the example of her sister-in-law Blanche Carter, stuck in a volatile marriage with Marie’s brother Jim. A madam herself, Blanche held her own in a marriage to a man well known in Decatur for his nitroglycerine temperament. After her husband struck her with a club and opened up two deep gashes in her head, she pressed assault charges. In another drag-out fight, in 1916, she went even further: after her husband broke a chair over her head and threw a lamp at her, she snatched up a bread knife and plunged it into his back. It was, the Decatur Review reported several years later, “the only time that he ever got the worst of it in a fight.” Jim’s wounds healed, but the marriage continued to unravel. Two years later, Jim shot an elderly man who refused to let the married Jim court his seventeen-year-old daughter at a dance—an incident that led the Decatur Review to argue for the incarceration of all the human powder kegs in town. (“Why wait until they kill?” the Review pleaded.) Blanche Carter had had enough: she filed for divorce not long thereafter. Perhaps it was one thing to be abused, and quite another to have your husband making a criminal fool of himself in pursuit of a younger woman.

  Marie looked around at the women she knew, then, and saw the battle before her with her husband Roy: how to hold on to her life and her children in the presence of a man who could explode at any time? Yet she managed the impressive feat of outmaneuvering her formidable husband on at least one significant occasion. It was November 18, 1916—half a year after her sister-in-law stabbed her brother Jim in a fight. Her own husband was no longer living with her, having moved out shortly after she gave birth to Bucky, Richard Pryor’s father. On a Saturday night, she took their year-old baby to a “gathering of the colored brethren” at a local meeting hall, and her husband showed up. Roy played with the baby and then (his crucial mistake) started to carry Bucky home with him. Not so fast: Marie brought the law into the picture. She pressed assault charges against her husband, which meant that he would be put in jail and the baby released back to the guardian who was not incarcerated—in this case, his mother, Marie.

  It’s a curious thing to consider: Marie was willing to use the police against her husband, repeatedly, but not willing to divorce him just yet. Marie and Roy had three more children together—Maxine in 1918, Richard (or Dickie) in 1920, and William in 1921. Here she was following the lead of her mother, Julia, who stuck out her marriage to Marie’s father well past his abandonment of the family, his liaisons with other women, his return to the family, and his continued abuse. But then Julia died, on May 4, 1921; she’d been married for thirty-three years, since the age of nineteen. Perhaps the death of Marie’s mother triggered some second thoughts about what it meant to remain with a dangerous man for one’s whole adult life. Roy had continued to get in hot water with the law—he’d been arrested in a sting on their home for running a gaming house the
re—and there was realistically no end to the struggle.

  In April 1922, Marie filed for divorce from Roy, charging him with cruelty and asking for full custody of their four children. The children ended up with Marie. A few years later, while working as a cook at a restaurant, Roy got into an argument with his boss and assaulted him with a heavy cooking utensil; the restaurant owner responded with a fusillade of knives, forks, and plates, and when they didn’t connect, he threatened Roy’s life with a gun while Roy hid behind the stove. (An inquiry by the state’s attorney determined that Roy was at fault.) In 1928, in another matter, Roy pled guilty to grand larceny and was given probation. By that point, the vicissitudes of his life may have been of little interest to Marie. She had a new man and a family to protect. Her children kept Roy’s last name, but she went back to her maiden name of Carter. She was done.

  The new man was Thomas Bryant, a light-skinned black man who wore wire-rimmed spectacles, a pencil-thin mustache, and a soft, sometimes inscrutable expression on his face. Six years older than Marie, he was, like her, a veteran of a collapsed marriage. He had married his first wife, Blanche, in 1920, when he was twenty-seven and she was fourteen; they divorced seven years later, and he lost custody of his two children after being accused of drunkenness in the proceedings. The charge may have been a screen for another set of difficulties. Just before the divorce filing, Thomas Bryant was convicted of selling liquor and spent three months on the Vandalia prison farm in Southern Illinois, where he milked cows and grew corn with his fellow inmates.

  The newly single Bryant would have met a considerably different woman from the teenager whom Roy Pryor married. Somewhere between her wedding and her divorce, Marie Carter had become a redoubtable woman: bigger, tougher, and more independent-minded. Her marriage to Roy had salted her with fire, giving her a sense of what she could abide and what she could not. She had absorbed some of the aggressive energy of her husband and the rest of her family: in 1919, she was arrested for fighting with another black woman on Main Street in Decatur. And for a while she stepped out of Roy’s shadow by managing a little down-home musical duo, the Jazz Bone Minstrel Company, in which one man made music with a comb while the other blew a jug—a sign that the abuse from her husband had hardly robbed her of her sense of fun.