by Scott Saul
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 Hollywood 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.”
As 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.
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.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
Glow, Glow Worm, Glow
Peoria, 1952–1956
Mrs. 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 Ps. “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.
“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 counterfeitin
g 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.