Becoming Richard Pryor Read Online Free Page B

marriage to Roy had salted her with fire, giving her a sense of what she could abide and what she could not. She had absorbed some of the aggressive energy of her husband and the rest of her family: in 1919, she was arrested for fighting with another black woman on Main Street in Decatur. And for a while she stepped out of Roy’s shadow by managing a little down-home musical duo, the Jazz Bone Minstrel Company, in which one man made music with a comb while the other blew a jug—a sign that the abuse from her husband had hardly robbed her of her sense of fun.
    In September 1925, at the age of twenty-five, she had lost thesecond of her two parents. Her father, Richard, had been working in the Wabash rail yards when he was crushed between two train cars as they switched tracks. Marie’s father had mellowed in his last few years: his obituary noted that he had served as a steward of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and was a member of the Knights of Tabor, a black fraternity. But according to Pryor family legend, his devil-may-care side reasserted itself one last time after he was struck by the railcars. Rather than request medical attention after the collision, the old man staggered to a nearby speakeasy and ordered himself a drink. A few hours later, he was pronounced dead.
    Free of her former husband, deprived of her parents, and partnered up with a man with bootlegging experience, Marie turned entrepreneurial: she became a bootlegger herself. Decatur had been an on-again, off-again dry town in the first two decades after 1900, a swing city in the fight by temperance forces to abolish alcohol in Illinois. The passage of national Prohibition, in 1919, turned Decatur over to the “drys” and transformed thousands of saloon-going Decaturites into would-be criminals craving a banned substance. Many Decaturites started drinking “canned heat,” a legal cooking fuel made from denatured and jellied alcohol, even though it could cause them to go blind or die. The city’s police chief challenged anyone who doubted the extent of the problem to inspect the Sterno trash mounds distributed across the city, thousands of empty cans piling up as evidence of a collective desperation. Some bootlegging establishments in Decatur mixed their drinks with the stuff, straining the resulting liquid through a loaf of bread to reduce its traces of poison. Dangerously adulterated whiskey was, for many, better than no whiskey at all.
    It didn’t take much—a bottle, two chairs, and a dash of chutzpah—to open a speakeasy. Marie followed the standard practice, developed in black neighborhoods like Harlem, of converting her private apartment into a small-scale drinking establishment. Twelve-forty East Sangamon Street became what was known elsewhere as a “buffet flat.” Unfortunately, little is known about Marie’s Decatur speakeasy except that she was busted, once, in a raid on her home ona Sunday night in mid-October 1929. Marie was arrested for possession of intoxicating liquor, the charge affixed to a bootlegger when the police were not able to buy a bottle and leave the establishment. She pled guilty and, rather than face jail time, chose to pay a fine of $28.15.
    It was just a week after her bootlegging bust that Marie ran into more trouble with the law when, out of some mixture of maternal instinct and racial pride, she stormed into a neighborhood confectionary and exercised her wrath upon the woman behind its counter. When the shopkeeper, Helen Pappas, pressed assault charges, Marie did not back down: she pleaded not guilty and struck back with a countercharge a week later. The shopowners, Michael and Helen Pappas, she claimed, were the ones guilty of assault. It’s unclear what exactly Marie told the police to get the Pappas couple arrested: perhaps she was standing up for the boy who had been slapped, pressing charges on his behalf; or perhaps she was clearing the way for her own defense by asserting that she hadn’t been the