Richard Pryor’s daughter takes on the n-word in her new memoir ‘Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me’

“Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me,” is more than Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor’s story of her relationship with her famous comedian and actor father. She writes that the book is “a hybrid memoir and historical exploration of the n-word.” Pryor’s writing creates an intimacy that invites readers to feel as she felt: vulnerable, smitten by her father’s courage and genius and inspired by the danger of his honesty as a writer, performer and actor.

Growing up Black and Jewish outside Boston, Pryor met her dad for the first time at age six, after her mother Maxine Silverman wrote him a letter “filled with anguish, (and) pleaded with him to do right by his daughter.”

After an arranged meeting with him while he was on tour in Newark, New Jersey, Elizabeth and her mother moved to Los Angeles to be closer to Pryor. She entered his orbit and we read about his classic concert movies, co-writing of “Blazing Saddles” and struggles with substance use.

In “Blazing Saddles,” director Mel Brooks wanted the n-word removed from the script. White folks used it in the movie to confront Cleavon Little, playing the role of their new Black sheriff, as he rode into town preceded by the Count Basie Orchestra playing “April in Paris.” Pryor insisted that the n-word stay in the picture, showing racism you never saw in classic Hollywood westerns. Woven into the American consciousness, the n-word was normalized. Pryor demonstrated the word’s abnormality.

Elizabeth Pryor is a professor at Smith College in Northampton, where her research focuses on 19th-century U.S. history and race. Her essay, “The Etymology of [the N-word]: Resistance, Language and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North,” won the Ralph D. Gray Prize for the best article of 2016 in the Journal of the Early Republic.

The Banner caught up with her last week.

Banner: Your book has an intimate tone and readers can feel as if you’re speaking to them. Given that the book is in measure about your experiences with “the n-word” it provokes readers to consider their experiences with that word. Can you comment?

Pryor: I wanted the book to be a jumping off point for a conversation that my students pushed me to have — it’s increasingly important as a society. I hope the book prompts conversation about race and context. The ways in which the racial history of the United States creates entanglements in our lives.

You write in the book of a white student in your classroom quoting a line from “Blazing Saddles” and saying the n-word itself. When did that happen?

February 2010 and it shook me. I was teaching a course in 19th-century history, the Civil War. I still teach the course only now I call it “Emancipation and the Afterlife.”

British author Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote a book called “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.” As a professor at Smith, you must feel differently.

I get it. One of my Black students gave me a T-shirt that reads, “Whiteness Is Exhausting.” There’s a way in which having to explain yourself that’s exhausting. How can you debate someone else’s experience when you don’t know what you’re talking about?

You’re at a unique juncture: as a historian and as the daughter of Richard Pryor your analysis of the n-word is informed by your father and your academic research. Was there divergence in these?

My father had a different experience growing up than I did facing different types of inequity and social injustice. What separates me and my father about the word has to do with coming at it from such different angles. In the late 1960s, my father was appearing regularly on latenight talk shows. Then he had an epiphany in 1967: He realized that his own grandmother would not be welcome in the audience; this was in Las Vegas. And although he was inspired by vaudeville, he felt it was important to tell his own truth. He took a risk with himself and decided to tell stories that were not respectable by American standards: about police brutality, racism, poverty, alcoholism, corruption and growing up in a brothel. He told these stories in an authentic Black voice.

Which was inspiring.

He won five Grammy awards for his comedy albums. Two of the albums had the n-word in the titles. Ice Cube and other rappers credit him with inspiring them to use the n-word in their music as a way to confront racism.

Then, after his trip to Africa he stopped using the n-word in his performances.

Right. In 1979, after reading Alex Haley’s book “Roots,” he and many others developed more interest in one’s own genealogy. He decided that in this new context that the n-word is an expression of the wretchedness of Black people in the United States. His decision to stop using the word was as cutting edge as his initial decision to use it.

Was there one most difficult challenge in writing the book? Or was it a series of challenges?

It was a series of challenges building on each other. One difficulty, especially as an academic, was writing about myself. The honest and most rewarding part was getting to grow up as a narrator. A lot of what happened to me was locked in time: I’m 11 at that moment, I’m 15 at that moment, I’m 7 at that moment. I had never brought my womanhood and scholarly self to that conversation. Writing the book was gaining control of the narrative. It allowed me to step into that love. I loved my dad. Writing the book was so healing.

For those of us who idolized your father, your descriptions of what he was like as a father and man, independent of family, are nuanced and very compassionate. His vulnerability, at least for me, was at the heart of his work.

His vulnerability was what made him able to deal with heavy stuff from choke holds to women getting raped. Audiences went there with him. His vulnerability makes that possible.

His humility. Vulnerability to me is the chief characteristic of my father. It’s what I aspire to, to be that real.

ON THE WEB

Learn more at simonandschuster.com/books/Something-We-Said