Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul

test, he scored a 100—perfectly average. Conventional testing could little recognize unconventional talent.
    Richard’s poor grades in “conduct” were tied to his increasing propensity for mischief. Often he was simply disruptive, a prankster on the loose. He threw spitballs and went through a Tarzan phase where, from out of nowhere, he would erupt into his imitation of Johnny Weissmuller doing his yodeling call or would gibber like the chimpanzee Cheeta. But he also fell into a reverberating discovery: that he could use his failures to transfix his audience. When he was caught without his homework or when he lost his books, Richard would not make a quick, shamefaced confession and be done with it. Instead, he seized the opportunity for a disquisition about how, exactly, he’d arrived at this sorry outcome. The teacher might not like ceding control of her classroom, but the other kids delighted in Richard’s freewheeling spiels—even the ones who, outside class, attacked him on the vacant lot.
    Richard started testing boundaries, treating rules as playthings,monkeying with expectations. He tried out for, and made it onto, Irving School’s basketball team. His inspiration? The Harlem Globetrotters, who visited Peoria every year to play an exhibition game at a local high school and who, despite their name, actually hailed from Chicago. The Globetrotters were the toast of the black community at the time. They had just defeated the Minneapolis Lakers, the dominant team in the all-white world of pro basketball leagues, in two exhibition matches—victories that were as sweet as black heavyweight Joe Louis’s knockout of Max Schmeling a decade before. In his mind, Richard was channeling the spirit of Goose Tatum, “Clown Prince” of the Globetrotters and ball handler extraordinaire. At practice, he tried to dazzle and entertain his teammates rather than demonstrate basic skills. The reaction was swift. The coach felt he’d lost control of his team and would have none of it; style was not at a premium in his version of the game. Within a week, Richard was kicked off the team.
    In fourth grade, Richard found trouble in a whole new way, though this time he had no idea he was crossing a line—he didn’t even know there was a line. He had noticed that, while the white boys in class kept their distance, the white girls were more welcoming; they seemed to enjoy seeing him whip out his drawing pads and sketch his cartoon characters. He fell for one girl in particular and gave her a scratch board—the kind covered with a plastic sheet that, once lifted, would erase the drawing—as a token of affection. She was thrilled. It was, she swore, her new favorite toy.
    The next day, her father appeared in their classroom, scowling as he held the scratch board and demanding to know which “little nigger” had given it to his daughter. The teacher fingered Richard.
    “Nigger,” the girl’s father shouted, “don’t you ever give my daughter anything.” Richard recoiled in shock. “Why was he calling me a nigger? Why did he hate me?” he wondered to himself. In his memoir he wrote, “If I was four and a half feet tall then, the girl’s daddy cut six inches off. Zap. Six inches of self-esteem gone. That was my indoctrination to the black experience in America.” The meaning of Richard’s blackness was coalescing: being a “nigger” meant keepinghis affections to himself when they involved a white girl or else face certain humiliation. The liaisons he’d observed around North Washington Street were taboo elsewhere; what happened at the Famous Door stayed at the Famous Door.
    There was, however, an unexpected upside to the whole thing. For once Richard saw his father unleash his anger in his defense rather than against him. Buck came to his son’s classroom the very next day and confronted the teacher.
    “How could you do that?” he asked her. “How could you not say anything to that man?”
    The teacher looked down