Free Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him by Joe Henry, David Henry

during Paar’s tenure (1957–62). Paar invited her to sit on the couch after the Jewish American satirist and publisher of the Charlotte Israelite Harry Golden had been on the show outlining his “Vertical Integration Plan,” by which integration could be achieved simply by removing the chairs from any segregated facility. As Golden explained it, southern whites had no objection to standing and talking with black people but would never sit with them. “I suddenly realized,” Paar wrote, “that in our year or more on The Tonight Show, while there were black performers on, I had not actually sat down with one and talked. This may seem a strange thing to say now, but I do it only in the historical context. It just had not been done on any program or panel show that I knew of.”
    **   The fire-dancing Page later became a popular stand-up comic in her own right. Billed simply as LaWanda, she was known for her signature line “ I’m gonna tell it to ya like it tea-eye-IS, honey” and her raunchy, uncut humor .
    LaWanda had little interest in crossing over. Like Rudy Ray Moore, Skillet & Leroy, Wildman Steve, and Tina Dixon, she’d found her niche; she never tried to clean up or water down her act for the sake of reaching a wider audience, and she likely would have continued performing X-rated material for predominantly black audiences and recording risque “party” records for the rest of her career had it not been for the intervention of Redd Foxx, her friend since childhood, who saw to it that she got the role of the Bible-thumping Aunt Esther on Sanford and Son.

PART TWO

“GIVE ME SOME MILK OR ELSE GO HOME”

    Down along Manhattan’s MacDougal Street, Richard may have felt like a rube with his Jackie Wilson pompadour and shiny, narrow-cut suit that was perhaps a full size too small, but it took more than that to stand out in Greenwich Village in 1963. You could be anything there, and as such, everyone was unfurling a flag in hopes of staking a claim upon outrage and attention. It didn’t matter your discipline: it was all theater, and the tiny coffee shops were packed with performers—comedians, musicians, monologists, poets—all eager to survey the competition and glean some deft bits of stage business.
    Beat poets, visual artists, and jazz musicians had, since the mid-1950s, become such a potent and magnetic presence in the neighborhood that they’d seemingly reset the clocks, filling the dark cafes and narrow ethnic restaurants with dense smoke at odd hours, spilling with their work from dim rooming houses and co-opted storefronts and animating the street corners of early morning hours, blurring the lines between friendly congregation and performance. Over egg rolls and scorched coffee, writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and filmmaker Robert Frank hashed out an informal manifesto, whereby the most gritty and unabashedly personal of experiences would be thinly veiled in their work, if at all. And just north, Zoot Sims, Mose Allison, and Al Cohn wandered in and out of the frame of the ever-open-and-revolving door of photographer W. Eugene Smith’s buzzing loft, nodding their heads through sprawling rehearsals of Thelonious Monk’s big band. Smith snapped pictures throughout and kept a reel-to-reel tape recorder endlessly turning, documenting thousands of hours of jam sessions and casual conversation, street noise, radio speeches and staticky baseball games— all with seemingly no thought to judging what of it might be relevant for posterity. At this juncture—where a random satellite photograph revealed Soviet missiles in Cuba, and a crowd member’s silent Super 8 footage served as the only recorded witness to an era-defining assassination—there was almost no such thing as irrelevance: something was happening here, even if you didn’t know what it was.
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    The last years of the 1950s had left a flooded gully in its wake, like a psychic borderline snaking through an