Becoming Richard Pryor Read Online Free Page A

Perhaps it was one thing to be abused, and quite another to have your husband making a criminal fool of himself in pursuit of a younger woman.
    Marie looked around at the women she knew, then, and saw thebattle before her with her husband Roy: how to hold on to her life and her children in the presence of a man who could explode at any time? Yet she managed the impressive feat of outmaneuvering her formidable husband on at least one significant occasion. It was November 18, 1916—half a year after her sister-in-law stabbed her brother Jim in a fight. Her own husband was no longer living with her, having moved out shortly after she gave birth to Bucky, Richard Pryor’s father. On a Saturday night, she took their year-old baby to a “gathering of the colored brethren” at a local meeting hall, and her husband showed up. Roy played with the baby and then (his crucial mistake) started to carry Bucky home with him. Not so fast: Marie brought the law into the picture. She pressed assault charges against her husband, which meant that he would be put in jail and the baby released back to the guardian who was not incarcerated—in this case, his mother, Marie.
    It’s a curious thing to consider: Marie was willing to use the police against her husband, repeatedly, but not willing to divorce him just yet. Marie and Roy had three more children together—Maxine in 1918, Richard (or Dickie) in 1920, and William in 1921. Here she was following the lead of her mother, Julia, who stuck out her marriage to Marie’s father well past his abandonment of the family, his liaisons with other women, his return to the family, and his continued abuse. But then Julia died, on May 4, 1921; she’d been married for thirty-three years, since the age of nineteen. Perhaps the death of Marie’s mother triggered some second thoughts about what it meant to remain with a dangerous man for one’s whole adult life. Roy had continued to get in hot water with the law—he’d been arrested in a sting on their home for running a gaming house there—and there was realistically no end to the struggle.
    In April 1922, Marie filed for divorce from Roy, charging him with cruelty and asking for full custody of their four children. The children ended up with Marie. A few years later, while working as a cook at a restaurant, Roy got into an argument with his boss and assaulted him with a heavy cooking utensil; the restaurant owner responded with a fusillade of knives, forks, and plates, and when theydidn’t connect, he threatened Roy’s life with a gun while Roy hid behind the stove. (An inquiry by the state’s attorney determined that Roy was at fault.) In 1928, in another matter, Roy pled guilty to grand larceny and was given probation. By that point, the vicissitudes of his life may have been of little interest to Marie. She had a new man and a family to protect. Her children kept Roy’s last name, but she went back to her maiden name of Carter. She was done.
    T he new man was Thomas Bryant, a light-skinned black man who wore wire-rimmed spectacles, a pencil-thin mustache, and a soft, sometimes inscrutable expression on his face. Six years older than Marie, he was, like her, a veteran of a collapsed marriage. He had married his first wife, Blanche, in 1920, when he was twenty-seven and she was fourteen; they divorced seven years later, and he lost custody of his two children after being accused of drunkenness in the proceedings. The charge may have been a screen for another set of difficulties. Just before the divorce filing, Thomas Bryant was convicted of selling liquor and spent three months on the Vandalia prison farm in Southern Illinois, where he milked cows and grew corn with his fellow inmates.
    The newly single Bryant would have met a considerably different woman from the teenager whom Roy Pryor married. Somewhere between her wedding and her divorce, Marie Carter had become a redoubtable woman: bigger, tougher, and more independent-minded. Her