Richard Pryor, Black and Blue

by Jeff Rovin

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553238094
• ISBN13: 9780553238099
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Suicide by Life and a Slow Death: An American Story

Picture this: A barely clothed Black man, running out of the gate of his multi-million dollar Spanish styled home, pass his convertible Rolls Royce into the tree-lined streets well above North Hollywood, Ca., "on fire," fully ablaze, with a phalanx of police, firemen and an ambulance chasing him in order to get him to the hospital. Once you have this picture firmly in mind, you now have a metaphor for Richard Pryor's life: I call it "life by suicide," and this book by Jeff Rovin tells why he had no other route. Pryor was born in 1940 in a brothel that his grandmother ran, and in which her daughter, Richard's mother, was a whore. His father, of course was her pimp and all of their clients were respectable white men from across the tracks in Peoria, Ill. No one thought this social tableau of life in the American heartland in anyway out of the ordinary. This life, "below the dignity line," which is still a fixture for most blacks in America, set the parameters and became an existential straightjacket for Richard Pryor's life. Except for how he was to navigate these treacherous social waters, everything else in his life was but inessential details. Most blacks that live "below the dignity line" have the luxury of a life of lying to themselves about their reality; they instinctively "pretty it up," "pretend it is otherwise." They "front each other off," as we say, and otherwise remain in denial throughout their lives. It is a survival strategy, often the only coping mechanism to retain a life with some semblance of equanimity. Richard's grandmother, the Madam, for instance was as big a churchgoer as Peoria had, and she already had her tickets punched enroute to heaven. But Richard was a precocious child, who learned to trust his instincts and what he saw before he ever learned to "disbelieve his lying eyes." His eyes became his windows for making sense of the world. Later, once he fully understood the truth of his social situation, he had nowhere to turn. He was locked in to a situation entirely not of his making. As he tells in one of his jokes when his mother says to him: You see what having you has done to me?" He says, "Okay, I'll go back." Growing up in a black community with a mother a whore and a father as her pimp, and the grandmother the madam, did not leave Richard much room for existential maneuvering, no angles left to play, not many options for psychic escape. Everyday his eyes taught him the brutal bitter truth of his existence. As bitter as it was, the truth was all he had. Everyone in Peoria knew his biography before he was born and even before he understood its full meaning. He literally and figuratively had nowhere to hide. He was naked from birth and throughout his life. The truth, through comedy was the only existential escape or companion there was for him. The utter terror and pain of his very existence could hardly be confronted. But Pryor was no liar he confronted his truth anyway, and it was destined to gain him success