Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  In September 1925, at the age of twenty-five, she had lost the second of her two parents. Her father, Richard, had been working in the Wabash rail yards when he was crushed between two train cars as they switched tracks. Marie’s father had mellowed in his last few years: his obituary noted that he had served as a steward of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and was a member of the Knights of Tabor, a black fraternity. But according to Pryor family legend, his devil-may-care side reasserted itself one last time after he was struck by the railcars. Rather than request medical attention after the collision, the old man staggered to a nearby speakeasy and ordered himself a drink. A few hours later, he was pronounced dead.

  Free of her former husband, deprived of her parents, and partnered up with a man with bootlegging experience, Marie turned entrepreneurial: she became a bootlegger herself. Decatur had been an on-again, off-again dry town in the first two decades after 1900, a swing city in the fight by temperance forces to abolish alcohol in Illinois. The passage of national Prohibition, in 1919, turned Decatur over to the “drys” and transformed thousands of saloon-going Decaturites into would-be criminals craving a banned substance. Many Decaturites started drinking “canned heat,” a legal cooking fuel made from denatured and jellied alcohol, even though it could cause them to go blind or die. The city’s police chief challenged anyone who doubted the extent of the problem to inspect the Sterno trash mounds distributed across the city, thousands of empty cans piling up as evidence of a collective desperation. Some bootlegging establishments in Decatur mixed their drinks with the stuff, straining the resulting liquid through a loaf of bread to reduce its traces of poison. Dangerously adulterated whiskey was, for many, better than no whiskey at all.

  It didn’t take much—a bottle, two chairs, and a dash of chutzpah—to open a speakeasy. Marie followed the standard practice, developed in black neighborhoods like Harlem, of converting her private apartment into a small-scale drinking establishment. Twelve-forty East Sangamon Street became what was known elsewhere as a “buffet flat.” Unfortunately, little is known about Marie’s Decatur speakeasy except that she was busted, once, in a raid on her home on a Sunday night in mid-October 1929. Marie was arrested for possession of intoxicating liquor, the charge affixed to a bootlegger when the police were not able to buy a bottle and leave the establishment. She pled guilty and, rather than face jail time, chose to pay a fine of $28.15.

  It was just a week after her bootlegging bust that Marie ran into more trouble with the law when, out of some mixture of maternal instinct and racial pride, she stormed into a neighborhood confectionary and exercised her wrath upon the woman behind its counter. When the shopkeeper, Helen Pappas, pressed assault charges, Marie did not back down: she pleaded not guilty and struck back with a countercharge a week later. The shopowners, Michael and Helen Pappas, she claimed, were the ones guilty of assault. It’s unclear what exactly Marie told the police to get the Pappas couple arrested: perhaps she was standing up for the boy who had been slapped, pressing charges on his behalf; or perhaps she was clearing the way for her own defense by asserting that she hadn’t been the one who started the fight; or perhaps she was fabricating an incident to rile the Pappas couple. In any case, Marie was not one to let her adversaries land the last blow; as with the police at the confectionary, she held her ground. “Tit for Tat,” read the headline in the Decatur Herald.

  Yet there were limits to how much a strong-minded black woman could bend the city of Decatur to her will; Marie eventually lost in court. After her opening plea of not guilty, she switched to one of guilty three weeks after her arrest and was fined fifty dollars, which she paid. All told, between the bootlegging fine and the assault fine, Marie lost the equivalent of around a thousand 2014 dollars. Michael and Helen Pappas entered a plea of not guilty to the assault charge Marie had filed, and seem to have escaped being fined a cent.

  At the same time that Marie’s assault charge was working its way through the Decatur courts, Wall Street was beginning to totter. On October 28, 1929, or “Black Monday,” the Dow lost 13 percent of its value. The next day, Black Tuesday, it lost another 12 percent. By July 8, 1930, stocks had declined 89 percent from their peak. It’s highly unlikely that Marie and her new husband, Thomas, belonged to the 16 percent of American households that invested in the stock market, but they would have noticed the shattering effect of the crash nonetheless. Decatur’s industrial base shriveled, with factory payrolls plunging 37 percent between the mid-1920s and 1932. Class war broke out in the streets: when around two hundred miners picketed the Macon County Coal Company in 1932, the police dispersed them with shotguns, tear gas, and axe handles. As was true across the country, Decatur’s black community was especially hard hit. The few blacks who held on to work were usually the hired help of affluent whites: domestics and chauffeurs.

  Meanwhile, eighty miles away in Peoria, a river city with a vice district that bustled even in hard times, a business opportunity was opening up for Marie. In the small hours of September 29, 1930, a man named Joe Markley kicked in the door of a well-appointed brothel operated by “Diamond Lil,” a stout black madam known for the twelve stones, each at least a carat, embedded in the top row of her teeth. Markley demanded to see Lil. Rebuffed, he rushed to the stairs that led to her bedroom. Before he could get there, Lil herself appeared at the top of the stairs pointing a six-shooter down at him, the gun belt and holster wrapped around her nightgown. Markley moved for Lil’s gun; in the ensuing scuffle, he got shot twice in the chest. Lil was convicted of murder and given a fourteen-year sentence in the state penitentiary in Joliet. Her club the Oasis, a brothel known as the “largest and liveliest black and tan resort” in Central Illinois, closed soon afterward.

  Lil’s Oasis was located at 200 Eaton Street, in the heart of Peoria’s main red-light district. Marie moved to 130 Eaton Street, just a few doors down from where Lil’s establishment had been, and set up her own brothel there. Her recent trouble with the law in Decatur probably motivated her decision to relocate and her choice of destination. The Christian Century called Peoria “the sinkhole of midwestern vice, the place to which prostitutes can flee when driven out anywhere else.” This “sinkhole” was Marie’s safe haven, a hospitable base of operations. She could take refuge in a town where gambling was big business, black madams commanded a public stage, and the longtime mayor and his cronies ran city politics out of an old houseboat dubbed the Bumboat.

  She brought her whole family—her new husband, Thomas, and her four teenage children—to Peoria with her. Soon her son Buck and a young woman fresh from Springfield would make her a grandmother for the first time. Her grandson would be given the name of her father: Richard.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  The Backside of Life

  Peoria, 1932–1946

  There’s something about the sound of “Peoria” that makes people think that they know the city when they simply know the cadence of its name. “Sweet as far-off bugle note / Fall the syllables and float— / Peoria!” gushed a New Hampshire poet in 1890. On the vaudeville circuit in the early twentieth century, “Peoria” became the setup to a joke about a heartland city that was the most boring place on the planet. “Do you know Peoria?” “Oh, yes—I spent four years there one night.” Or: “Why did you two get married?” “We were in Peoria and it rained all week.”

  By the 1930s, when Richard Pryor’s grandmother arrived in Peoria, the jokes about the land of “the rube and the boob” bore only the thinnest relationship to the actual city. Far from a blandly typical midwestern town, Peoria was perhaps America’s most unchecked sin city, a bold experiment in squeezing maximum profit from the pleasures of the flesh. Peorians were different, looser: they “talk[ed] about corruption the way people elsewhere talk about baseball,” one reporter noted, and divorced at a rate double that of Illinois and the rest of America.

  A hundred seventy miles southwest of Chicago, Peoria rose up from the western bank of the Illinois River, which connected
it to the Mississippi and points beyond. In the early nineteenth century, it was settled by homesteaders from Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland; in the 1840s, a wave of German immigrants brought with them their native fondness for beer and their recipes for how to brew it. Beer and whiskey became the economic cornerstones of this “city of good spirits.” Though only a midsize city, Peoria began boasting of its unmatched achievements. Starting in the 1880s, it hosted the largest distillery in the world; its breweries and distilleries required so much corn from the nearby Corn Belt that Peoria became the largest corn-consuming market in the world. In the era before the federal income tax, Peoria, through the whiskey tax, was responsible for fully half the federal government’s internal revenue, by one estimate. (Chicago was second in whiskey tax revenue, Cincinnati third.) Later, the arrival of Caterpillar’s headquarters and the LeTourneau factory made the city the earth-moving capital of the world, too.

  Yet Peoria was a city of violent contrasts, disparities so extreme that they begged to become grist for satire. The city was divided geographically and culturally between its industrial valley, which skirted the river, and the bluffs that looked down from a height of three hundred feet on the valley below. On the bluffs at night, a pair of lovers might bask in silvery moonlight; below, their valley equivalents might inhale a yellow fog that carried distillery fumes and the aroma of hog intestines. Above: magnificent estates inhabited by the city’s managerial class. (Theodore Roosevelt was so moved by the area’s palatial homes, gentle curves, and expansive vistas that he called its main street “the world’s most beautiful drive.”) Below: streets thick with the modest homes and outhouses of machinists, carpenters, salesmen, and waitresses.

  The politics of the bluffs were the politics of “reform”: its inhabitants hoped to scrub city politics clean as a whistle. One of its noted residents, the industrialist Robert LeTourneau, took as his slogan “God Runs My Business.” The politics of the working-class valley were “liberal,” which in the parlance of the day meant open gambling, open drinking, and open prostitution, all held together by a network of underworld businessmen who followed a principle of mutual self-interest. In Peoria, “live and let live” meant, according to the local paper, “Don’t bother my racket and I won’t bother yours.”

  The bluffs controlled the manufacturing economy of Peoria, but for the first half of the twentieth century the valley controlled its politics, and for a simple reason: it had the votes. From 1902 until 1945, the face of “Roarin’ Peoria” was the thin, flushed, cigar-chomping mug of Ed Woodruff, who served as the city’s mayor, off and on, for twenty-four years. Woodruff operated an ice company and lived in an unfashionable part of town. His philosophy, which he made into his city’s, was “Peoria likes to live and doesn’t want to be told what to do and what not to do all the time.” A self-fashioned man of the people, he held court on the steps of city hall, which, under his tenure, became a place avoided by the decent folk of the bluffs. Feminist pioneer Betty Friedan, a native Peorian and self-styled decent person, recalled with disdain that “bums cluttered its steps and threw their empty bottles into the courthouse yard.”

  Peoria of the 1930s was “wide open as the gateway to hell,” wrote the Peoria Journal twenty years later—“a city where every sordid passion had its willing handmaidens.” This was not just vivid hyperbole. The sex trade was a mainstream affair. Hustling women cruised the downtown bars, offering patrons a quick visit to a hotel room or the backseat of a parked car. One downtown restaurant even supplied, for its customers, a group of vacant parked cars in a lot in the back; once bidden, a young woman could enter a car and earn half a dollar for her services. A professional criminal familiar with the Capone organization landed in Peoria and was shocked. “When I had left Chicago,” he said, “well, things had been pretty wide open, but they weren’t as wide open as they were in Peoria. Which was something for me to look at—wide-open gambling, wide-open prostitution, everything running wide open. With no interference from the law.”

  In fact, the city worked out a set of formal protocols with its underground entrepreneurs. Madams like Diamond Lil were required to register their girls with the city and get them regularly checked by a doctor for venereal disease. Slot machine operators paid city hall a rate of twenty dollars a month per machine and were free to place the machines in newsstands and neighborhood drugstores, even near local schools (the latter being penny machines—in Peoria, it was never too early to learn how to gamble). Walk across the street from the police department and you’d be in the city’s most elaborate casino. Walk across the street from city hall and you’d be in a high-stakes, protected dice game. Every Monday, a messenger from local operators carried to city hall a sealed envelope stuffed with cash, which was recorded in the municipal budget under the title “Special Miscellaneous: Madison Novelty Co.” “Madison” referred to the street where city hall was located; “novelty” seemed to wink at the peculiarity of Peoria’s arrangements.

  Unfortunately, the “liberal” ethos of Peoria did not extend to the realm of civil rights for its black residents, who were 3 percent of the city’s population in 1940, the year of Richard Pryor’s birth. Like many northern cities before World War II, Peoria was legally integrated but, on a practical level, segregated from top to bottom. In housing, black Peorians were concentrated in districts known before 1900 as “Watermelon Wards.” Soup Alley, Tin Can Alley, Pig Ear Alley—these were the nicknames attached to the black parts of town, and the preponderance of “alleys” was no coincidence, since black Peorians were made to live in narrow straits. None of Peoria’s hotels admitted blacks; many of its laundries would not take clothes worn by blacks; only two restaurants downtown served blacks; and most movie theaters seated blacks only in the mezzanines, while two movie theaters banned them entirely.

  For blacks, liberal Peoria was a city of grudging compromises. There might be black policemen, but they did not patrol white areas and could not arrest white people. There might be blacks admitted into the city-run swimming pools, but only one day a week. Blacks might be able to attend integrated schools, but no matter how well educated, they were pushed into menial jobs or shut out of the workforce entirely. In 1940, 40 percent of black Peorians were out of work—a sobering statistic made comprehensible by the number of employers who essentially refused to hire blacks. Caterpillar Tractor, the largest employer in Central Illinois, had no blacks on its payroll before World War II; the local power utility had one. And while policemen may have looked the other way at organized crime in Peoria, they were ever vigilant at the first sign of “trouble” from blacks in town. A full two-thirds of black Peorians reported, in 1940, the persistence of police brutality.

  Yet while there may have been many better places in America to be black, arguably there was no better place to be a black madam. The same white men who refused to hire blacks in their businesses were happy to gamble away their money or hire a prostitute in a black madam’s brothel. Since the 1870s, there had been a line of black madams who swaggered and threw their weight around town: Adaline Cole, the “queen of Peoria’s half world” in the decades before the rise of Diamond Lil, cut quite the figure riding with her girls through the streets of Peoria, her elegant black carriage pulled by a team of sleek black horses. An enterprising, poorly educated black woman in Peoria could look at her main options, prostitution or domestic service, and reasonably conclude that prostitution offered a more likely path to a higher station in the world.

  When the Pryor clan first arrived in Peoria, the rest of Marie’s family found jobs outside the world of brothels. Marie’s husband, Thomas, worked as a butcher; Buck, Richard’s father, as a chauffeur; his aunt Maxine, as an entertainer; his uncle Dickie, as an elevator operator. But by the early 1940s, when Marie opened a second brothel on North Washington Street, the red-light district’s main thoroughfare, everyone appears to have been integrated into the “family business” and fallen into their respective roles. They lived and worked in what Richard Pryor later cal
led “the backside of life.”

  Settling into a role that fit her well, Marie was the family’s madam in chief. She was a boulder of a woman—six feet tall, over two hundred pounds of immovable flesh—and she was in charge of establishing the law of the house. Thomas, or “Pops,” tended to work on the sidelines: when the Pryors had a legitimate business on the side, like a tavern or a pool hall, Pops would be found there. Buck was the muscle of the operation, having won a Golden Gloves boxing tournament in Chicago when he was eighteen. Dickie and Maxine were more sociable types and could be counted on to do the work of recruiting the girls and the johns. All Marie’s children were large people—Maxine was close to six feet tall; Buck, six foot two; Dickie, six foot four—and cumulatively, they had the sort of heft that could make any trouble go away.

  As a madam, Marie had a motto, “Don’t mess with my money,” by which she meant that you shouldn’t mess with the money in her hand, the prostitutes whose bodies she owned, and the johns whose cash she was seeking. The color of money was more important than black or white: while black customers predominated on Marie’s block of North Washington, whites were not to be harassed. To enforce the law of the house, Marie had her straight razor. Prostitutes would meet the razor if they tried to cheat her of her customary 50 percent share of the take; johns would be sliced on the face if they tried to leave without paying. (One childhood friend of Richard Pryor’s recalled “a lot of men” walking around Peoria “with nasty scars around their face.”) In later years, Marie upgraded to a pistol, which she carried strapped to her leg. Most of the time, she didn’t need to draw her weapon or even use her fists. She simply said, referring to her size-twelve shoes, “I’ll put my twelves up in your ass,” and the trouble went away.