Becoming Richard Pryor Read Online Free

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.
    O n 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.