Free Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul Page B

in circulation, the minstrelsy behind popular radio programs like Amos ’n’ Andy . (In fact, the white actor playing Andy had been born and raised in Peoria, and discovered blackface comedy in the city’s theaters in the 1910s.) Richard felt his way through school by turning his own sense of himself as a misfit into the stuff of comedy. If his white classmates expected an act from the skinny, excitable black kid, he would give it to them—and then some.
    Richard did not begin as a class clown, though. He started simplyas a boy out of sorts, having trouble adapting to the strictures of school. At the end of first grade—by which point he had witnessed his parents’ divorce and been sexually abused—his teacher made a special note in his record: “Apparently unstable emotionally.” He received an F in “conduct” and similarly low grades in every subject except English, where he earned a C. Irving decided to hold him back a year.
    During the middle of his second try at first grade, for reasons that remain unclear, Richard left Peoria and lived for half the school year with his mother and her family on the outskirts of Springfield. “The farm,” he recalled in his memoir, “was paradise, a playground where my imagination could go wild. At night, I listened to crickets instead of creaking beds and moans, and in the morning, I woke to the sound of roosters crowing and the smell of hot biscuits and fresh-brewed coffee.” The setting, in a neighborhood on the eastern edge of town, might have appeared to others as a rural slum, with its shotgun houses and unimproved land. But to Richard, it was a slice of heaven. Even the garbage dump next to the farm, where his grandfather hauled the trash he picked up during the day, enchanted Richard. He would wander down to the dump and pretend he was a cowboy or soldier, firing rounds from a .22-caliber gun at any rats that made the mistake of crossing his path. “Yes, sir, I fucked up some rats,” he said. He called this interlude the happiest time of his life.
    And then it ended: by September 1948, he was back in Peoria schools, now promoted to second grade. By third grade, in 1949, Richard suffered constant bullying from boys who hailed from the valley’s white Protestant blue-collar families. They ganged up on him in the vacant lot across from the school, sometimes giving him flimsy grounds for their attack, often not. Slight in stature, Richard fought back most impressively with his mouth. Bottled up tight at home, elsewhere he was loose, and mimicking the kind of salty talk he heard at Marie’s brothel and the Famous Door. And he had the good fortune to befriend two other kids who were similarly outsiders and similarly targeted: the pint-sized Michael Grussemeyer, whose family was middle class (not blue collar), and the wavy-haired Roxy Eagle, whosefamily was Italian American and Catholic (not Protestant). Roxy also happened to be the son of Joe Eagle, who ran the sole brothel with white prostitutes on Richard’s block of North Washington Street.
    Repeatedly the three fended off the bullies in the vacant lot and developed a strong sense of togetherness, so much so that Richard started calling Michael and Roxy “nigger” as a term of endearment. Richard seemed to recognize, early on, that there were some white people who could be smuggled into the circle of black identity—the exact white people who could be called nigger and hear it as a compliment. They were “three oddball brothers,” in the words of Michael Grussemeyer, and proud of it.
    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