Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is a professor of history at Smith College. She is also the biracial daughter of the late comedian and actor, Richard Pryor, whose raw, acerbic observations of life for Black Americans were enormously popular some fifty years ago. Her new book Something We Said is a memoir of life with her father as well as an account of her own often unsettling coming-of-age experiences. It had me reflecting on the everyday difficulties of being a biracial American, even when you have an internationally famous father.
In on-stage comedy performances and on Grammy award winning record albums, Richard Pryor's unfiltered use of what later came to be referred to as "the n-word" was a jarring thing in the 1970s and 80s. It set the word loose in the culture, in a way for which there had been no precedent. The ubiquitous use of the n-word in RAP and hip hop music would likely not have occurred had not Richard Pryor thrown it down to white America in a way no other Black American had ever done.
Elizabeth, though, could not embrace the word in the casual-seeming way her father had. Hearing it in any context made her flinch. The comedian's trademark use of the word became an uncomfortable legacy for his daughter. How did she deal with it, then? She made it her business to grapple with the word's implications, exploring them in a scholarly methodical way, writing about them for publication, reflecting on her own experience, presenting the topic in a TED talk, and bringing the word up for discussion in her history courses at Smith. That latter activity didn't usually go well, and often left the professor feeling shaken and newly vulnerable.
In all her explorations and in examining her father's notebooks after his death - the notebooks in which he developed comedy ideas - she finds that his use of the n-word was not as casual for Pryor as he made it seem.
Richard Pryor suffered enormously during the first and last decades of his life. He grew up in an environment no child should experience, witnessing things no child should see. By his mid-40s he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. In between those decades his star rose quickly before he became very debilitated by illness. He died in 2005 at age 65. Something We Said left me with a deeper appreciation of who he was: his complexity, personal conflicts, raw honesty and courage, his tenderness and vulnerabilities, his generosity to everyone around him, and above all his originality.
Pryor was a much more serious man than his public image suggested. He had learned as a child that a way to cut through family tension was to make people laugh. As an adult he used this awareness to cut through the nation's racial tensions.
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor and her father each made it their life's work to unearth the hostile legacy of the n-word, taking a microscope to the word's past and current implications. I think her dad would be proud that she carried on his work in her own, inquisitive way. Something We Said is historically informative while the intimate details of this father's and daughter's lives make compelling reading.
-Marianne W.
