My father, Richard Pryor, was married six times to five different women. He had seven kids, and I was one of those kids, but for the first four years of my life I wasn’t even sure he existed. He existed, though. Big time. By the time I met my father, at the age of four, it seemed as if the whole world already knew and loved him.
Richard Pryor was a comedian, a famous comedian, with a personal story so unusual that it had already become part of the collective imagination. He was born in Peoria, Illinois, to a prostitute, and he was raised by his grandmother, Mamma, who owned a string of brothels, including the one where Richard’s mother worked—on her back, on her side, on her knees, or in any position she was paid to assume.
Richard grew up in those brothels, surrounded by whores, and he remained a big fan of whores and sex for the rest of his life—or for as long as he was able. On Sundays, though, Mamma dragged him to church, because she wanted him to know that there was more to life than fucking. Not much more, maybe. But more.
It was a world of contradiction, but young Richard didn’t seem to have a problem with it. During the day, he’d go off to school, like every other kid in the neighborhood, and when classes were over he’d race home and hang with the whores. They all loved little Richard, the madam’s grandson, and they showered him with so much affection that it probably ruined him for all the women to come.
Many years later, when I would press my father for details about his childhood, he always talked with great warmth about the whores of his youth. “There wasn’t a nicer bunch of women in the entire state,” he told me. “And they knew how to make men happy. Fucking is what makes a man happy. And a good meal from time to time. But everything else is bullshit.”
Young Richard had a favorite whore, of course, and that was his own mother. To hear him tell it, she was the prettiest one in the bunch. She wore the softest silk robes, the smoothest stockings, and the fanciest bustiers. Richard worshiped her, even though she was a temperamental drunk who would disappear for months at a time, but eventually shifted his attention to his grandmother, Marie Carter, the one everyone called Mamma. She was a big battleship of a woman, silent and stern, and she was fiercely proud of her whorehouses and her girls. Mamma became a madam back when it was almost impossible for a black woman to attain status of any kind, and her clients loved pussy, so they held her in high regard. These included politicians, lawyers, businessmen, police officers, and just about every man in town who knew a good thing when he saw it. “Most of them were white,” she told me years later. “Including the goddamn honky mayor. But they treated me right and I treated them right and the business kept the family fed—and then some. Hell, the Pryor men were useless! Your daddy, Richard—he’s the only one who ever amounted to anything. Only one who made something of himself!”
Richard was not a great student, to put it mildly, but Mamma was tough, and he did his best to please her. By the time he was in high school, one of his teachers, Juliette Whittaker, decided he had talent, and she pushed Richard to hone those gifts in a variety of plays and showcases. Richard loved acting, but he lost interest in school and dropped out. He did a short, unproductive stint with the U.S. Army, then returned home and reconnected with Whittaker, who helped him get gigs at a number of local comedy clubs.
In 1960, Richard married Patricia Price, and the following year they had a son, Richard Jr., but the marriage didn’t last. In 1963 he left Peoria and hit the Chitlin’ Circuit, a consortium of black-owned nightclubs in the Midwest and the South, run by blacks, for blacks.
It was a great training ground for my dad—a black version of the Borscht Belt—but he was itching to play to larger audiences. He wanted to entertain everyone, like one of his idols, Bill Cosby. Cosby had been raised in a middle-class family in Philadelphia, and his “safe” humor had made him a crossover hit with mainstream (white) audiences.
Finally, in 1963, ready to take on the world, my dad packed his bags and moved to Greenwich Village.
People liked him from the start. He was a cute, scrawny guy with a rubber face and a congenial attitude, and his shtick covered the usual, inoffensive comic ground: wife, kids, job, commuting, landlords, and so on. This was the early 1960s, and my dad wasn’t blind to what was going on—Vietnam, JFK’s assassination, the riots in Watts, the civil rights marches—but race and politics played no part in his routines. He was being cautious, he told me years later, “just trying to keep it light,” but he was also making an effort to learn from the more seasoned comics—men like Dick Gregory, Mort Sahl, and George Carlin. Another comic that made a big impression on him was Lenny Bruce, who died in 1966, before Dad ever got a chance to see him perform. “I saw him once on the street, in New York, outside one of the comedy clubs,” he told me years later. “Lenny was busy trying to take a picture of a horse’s penis. And don’t ask me what the hell that was about.”
Dad was also making time with the women, including white women, and during this period he fell for Maxine, a whip-smart Jewish gal with whom he had a daughter, Elizabeth, in April 1967. (I met her the day I met my father: she’s the one who pointed him out to me out by the pool of his Hollywood Hills home.)
When my father wasn’t onstage, or angling to get onstage, or hanging with Maxine, he spent a lot of time watching vintage movies. Back in those days, they still had repertory houses, and you could catch old films on the big screen seven nights a week. Dad worshiped Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, in that order, and he was especially intrigued by the way Chaplin moved. Years later, we used to watch old Chaplin movies together, and when I finally saw my father perform I was startled by some of the physical similarities. As Richard himself told me years later, “I can’t dance, but I can strut.”
In a matter of months, Dad was a fixture at various New York comedy clubs, where his clean-cut, inoffensive material kept getting him compared to Bill Cosby. It played well with integrated audiences, though, and it led to a number of appearances on variety shows—Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Mike Douglas—and to his first big break in television, on Rudy Vallee’s Broadway Showcase.
“I didn’t scare whitey,” he told me when I was in my teens. “So I became the Token Negro.”
Before long, Dad moved to the West Coast, without Maxine and Elizabeth, lured there by the promise of jobs in film and television. He had been told that black actors were scarce, and it turned out he’d been told right. Shortly after landing in Hollywood, he got a small, recurring role on The Wild, Wild West and decided to become an actor. He enjoyed getting up onstage and telling jokes, but it didn’t compare to the experience of really inhabiting a character. He was eager to create his own characters, too, but it was early yet, and he was still experimenting.
In 1967, he was cast in The Busybody, his first feature film, a wacky ensemble comedy that put him on the set with some of the great comedians of the day, including Sid Caesar, Bill Dana, Jan Murray, Dom DeLuise, and Ben Blue. The movie didn’t win any awards, but it led to a part in Wild in the Streets, a bizarre vision of a utopian America where citizens are forced to retire when they turn thirty. I guess the movie was trying to capture society’s fear of the counterculture movement, but it is ridiculous on just about every level. My dad, the Token Black, was supposed to symbolize the scary future—the day when NEGROES WOULD BE RUNNING WILD IN THE STREETS! (Hey, it was a paying job, people.)
When he wasn’t starring in films, or auditioning for roles, he worked at some of the comedy clubs in and around Hollywood, but found himself growing tired of the same, family-friendly routines. After yet another such appearance, Don Rickles met him backstage and evaluated his performance. “It’s amazing how you channel Cosby,” he said.
This was the mid-1960s. A lot was happening, culturally and politically, and Dad was still mired in the kind of palatable entertainment that played well on national television. He wanted more, though, and he had begun experimenting with darker comedy, developing anecdote-rich monologues about some of the crazy characters that peopled his unusual childhood in Peoria, Illinois. All of them were black characters—winos, drug addicts, homeless people—and they all spoke to the real Richard Pryor, the one who knew what was happening out there, in the larger world. Onstage, he was a black man, a funny black man, but deep down he was a Nigger with a capital N. An Angry Nigger. He could pass as the kind of nigger you could bring home to dinner, but deep inside he was a frustrated nigger with two failed relationships behind him, two kids who didn’t know he existed, and a stage life that had nothing to do with the real him. Still, what was he supposed to do about it? Mainstream America knew all about the Angry Niggers, and they certainly weren’t going to pay to see them onstage.
Daddy in Wild in the Streets
On the other hand, it was hard to ignore the politics of the day. In 1967, the Love Generation was taking a close look at the Establishment, and not seeing much to like. The answer, according to Harvard professor and LSD enthusiast Timothy Leary, was to turn on, tune in, and drop out.
It was also the year that three Apollo astronauts burned to death in their test capsule; the year Muhammad Ali was sentenced to five years in prison for draft evasion; the year Thurgood Marshall became the first black justice on the United States Supreme Court; the year forty thousand antiwar protestors marched on the United Nations; the year hundreds of gay men rioted in Greenwich Village to mourn the passing of Judy Garland; the year of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Star Trek and Hair and Laugh-In and In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
They called 1967 the Summer of Love, but there wasn’t much love among the rioters in Boston, Buffalo, Newark, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.
Black America was angry, and race was on everybody’s mind.
That same year, that wild, angry year, my daddy, Richard Pryor, was busy working on his first solo album, struggling to figure out just who he was and what he wanted to say. He was trying desperately to reinvent himself, and he was taking his first baby steps toward the cutting-edge humor that would eventually define his style—and his life.
While he was working on his album, he got a call from somebody at the Aladdin Hotel, in Las Vegas. They were reaching out to that Nice Negro, Richard Pryor, and offering him a chance to perform on a very large stage indeed. How could he resist? That’s what every stand-up dreamed of: The Strip. The Bright Lights. The Big Time. Success. Respect. Your Name Here.
The Aladdin Hotel. Shit! The whole country knew about the Aladdin. Hell, the whole world knew about the Aladdin. Just two months earlier, Elvis Presley and Priscilla Beaulieu had made it official at the Aladdin. How could he not play the Aladdin?
Finally, the big day arrived. It was September 1967, and summer was still winding down. Daddy walked out onto the stage, a skinny guy in a skinny tie and a gray suit, and he looked out at the audience. Dean Martin was there, right near the front, smiling, expectant. Every seat in the place was taken, sold out, and every ass in every one of those seats was demanding to be shaken with laughter. Come on, funny black man. Make me laugh!
And Daddy, hell, he just froze.
“What the fuck am I doing here?” he said, right into the microphone, loud and clear, then turned and walked off the stage.
The crowd booed, but he wasn’t listening. As he made his way toward the dressing room, the stage manager went nuts. “You get back out there and do your goddamn job, Pryor! This is the Big Time, man. For Christ’s sake, this is Vegas!”
“Fuck Vegas,” Dad said. “Those honky motherfuckers don’t know shit about me. They don’t know who I am and they don’t get half my jokes. Don’t talk to me about no ‘goddamn job.’ This ain’t a job. This is my motherfucking life!”
Years later, in his autobiography, Pryor Convictions, Richard referred to that moment as his “epiphany.” He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do with his career, or with his life, but he knew what he didn’t want to do—and what he didn’t want to do was more white-bread comedy.
So he went back to Los Angeles, and he found himself sitting in a bar one night, alone, when in walked my mother, Shelley Bonis, in a miniskirt and tall, white-leather boots. “This guy comes up to me, and he’s got a huge, Mad Hatter–style watch hanging from his belt, and he asks me what time it is,” my mother told me years later. “His watch was the size of an alarm clock, and he was asking me for the time. Such chutzpah! I fell for him on the spot.”
Mom in her quintessentially ’70s glasses
Mom was no fool, though. She wasn’t going to let him know she was interested. So she wandered into the middle of the dance floor, alone, and started to dance. I can’t even imagine what my dad was looking at, because when I say dance, I mean dance.
Back in those days, my mother made a living as a dancer in movies and in television—she was under contract to Columbia Pictures—and she absolutely loved to dance. This was the sixties, remember? The era of the go-go girl. Of Hullabaloo and Shivaree and Shindig! Of Perry Como, Andy Williams, Dean Martin. And here was my mother, a woman who liked to dance so much that she even danced on her days off—even danced when she was finished dancing for the day—which was what she happened to be doing just then, in front of my daddy. So, yeah, I can’t imagine what Daddy was looking at, but I’m sure it was hot.
There was one other thing Shelley had going for her—aside from the blond hair, the blue eyes, and that fantastic dance-honed body—and it became apparent the moment she got off the dance floor. You see, she believed herself to be an African American princess. She wore Afro wigs, talked jive, liked all things black, and felt that God had mistakenly put the soul of a sistah into the body of a Jewish girl from Brooklyn.
Richard was staring at her. He went back for more. He was wearing bellbottoms with a wide belt and carrying a small notebook and a pen. The bellbottoms were de rigueur back then, but the pad and pen were unusual.
“I see you like to dance,” my father said.
“Yeah. You dance?”
“No, not really,” he said. “But I’ve got moves.”
She shook her head, gave his outfit the once-over, and asked, “Do you always look this silly?”
“Silly? Ain’t nothing silly about me, woman,” he said. “I’m a man. I ain’t got time to be silly.”
“So what’re you writing on that little notepad of yours? You’re not trying to steal my dance moves, are you?”
“Dance moves! I’m working on my act, girl.”
“What kind of act?”
“My comedy act. I’m a comedian.”
“Oh, I thought that might be you. You were on Ed Sullivan, right?”
“While back.”
“I read about you. You’re the guy who walked off the stage in Vegas. I dig that.”
“You ‘dig that’? Now where you comin’ from, girl, talkin’ the talk. You don’t look like no nigger I know. You’re not some kind of freaky bitch, are you?”
“No. Just a horse of a different color. Hip to change is all. I call it like I see it, and what I’m saying is, The Man ain’t The Man no more—dig?”
“Don’t get all political on me, bitch. I know who the fuck I am. I’m a nigger. And I know who the fuck you’re not: a nigger.”
“You don’t know a thing about me, funny man. Not a thing.”
Within days she had moved into his house on Laurel Canyon, not far from the heart of Hollywood, and they poured out their respective stories. His, you already know. Hers, well let’s just say that Richard Pryor had never met a woman like Shelley Bonis.
Her parents, Herb and Bunny, were a fairly sophisticated showbiz couple. Herb managed the careers of many entertainers, including comedian Danny Kaye, and Bunny was a Brooklyn housewife who managed her nice figure, her makeup, and her perfectly coiffed hair. When Mr. Kaye moved west, Herb and Bunny followed, and they settled into their new life as a pair of liberal, entertainment industry Jews.
Though maybe not so liberal.…When my mother informed them that she had fallen in love with a black man, they freaked out. “People are going to talk,” Bunny said. “The world is not ready for this interracial business. You have no idea what you’re up against.”
“Wait till you meet him, Mom,” Shelley replied. “He’s absolutely magical.”
“Magical schmagical,” Bunny said with her Jewish lilt. “I know his kind.”
Shelley was furious. His kind! To hear this from the mouth of her own liberal mother was more than she could bear. “I never knew I’d been raised by racists,” she screamed, and she stormed out of the house.
Later, when Shelley calmed down, they spoke on the phone, and her father tried to explain what he had meant: Richard was an entertainer. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man. He was unreliable. “And what was that business in Las Vegas—what kind of man walks off the stage like that?” And, finally, yes—the man was black. “Do you have any idea what you’re up against?” he asked.
“I don’t care,” Shelley replied. “I love him.”
A few weeks later, she brought Richard by the house. It was civil, sort of, but it was a far cry from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Herb and Bunny both had serious doubts about the chances that these two could make a life together, and they said so, but Richard remained undeterred. “I love your daughter,” he said. “I love that she’s smart, and I love that she believes in me, and I love that she makes me want to reach for the moon.”
After that speech, what could they say? Herb gave his blessing, albeit reluctantly, and Bunny sat next to her husband, saying nothing, not trusting herself to say anything.
“I love my daughter with all my heart,” Herb said finally. “Please don’t hurt her.”
“You have nothing to worry about, Mr. Bonis. I love her with all my heart, too.”
So off they went to Vegas, to tie the knot in a tacky chapel, and shortly after they got home Herb and Bunny sent out a wedding announcement, with a picture of the happy couple. It must have killed them: Our lovely daughter, with that crazy comedian—right there in black and white, for all the world to see.
“We had no problem with your mother marrying a black man,” Bunny explained years later, looking a little ver klempt. “But did the neighbors have to know?”
For a few weeks, to hear Mom tell it, she and her African prince were in heaven. They made love all day, every day, and when they weren’t making love they collected pet rocks and gave them cute names and engaged them in conversation.
“How you doing this morning, Rocky?”
“Okay, Pebbles. Wanna fuck?”
Mom was so happy she kept pinching herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. My mother, you see, was an incorrigible romantic, and in those heady early days she was convinced that she had found her soul mate—her magical, missing half.
Dad, on the other hand, was less romantic, and in no time he was using the marriage as fodder for his comedy routine. “She got me to marry her while we was balling,” he told his audiences. “Just as I was about to come, she asked me, ‘Richard, will you marry me?’ and a moment later I’m crying, ‘Yeah, baby! Yeah! Oh yeah!’”
Like they say, there’s a lot of truth in jokes, and there was plenty of truth in this one. Dad was many things, but he was first and foremost a sexual animal—not surprising for a guy who’d been raised in a whorehouse—so when he started looking around at other women, well, Mom knew the end was near.
The thing is, sex, for my Dad, was pretty much recreational. It was fun, it was a tension reducer, and, no—it didn’t have anything to do with love.
In his teens, his very early teens, when he got his first taste, the whole world suddenly made perfect sense. My father finally understood why men were willing to pay for it. Hell, he understood why they were willing to die for it.
Sex was something of an obsession for him. Pussy, pussy, pussy! My father talked about pussy all the time. But when he used the word, and he used it constantly, it never sounded dirty: “Gotta get me some pussy.” “Can’t stop thinking about that pussy.” “A man can never get enough pussy—and you can quote me on that.”
Mom the romantic, on the other hand, thought that sex was an expression of their deep, abiding love, and for a while I guess he let her believe this. He didn’t tell her he loved her very often, and he didn’t bring her any flowers, but he was great in the sack, and he could be very sweet when he was stoned—which was pretty often. So it worked. For a while.
Mom was also a romantic about politics, and she believed that she and her black prince could literally change the world.
Oddly enough, in some ways, she knew more about black America than he did, and they often got into long discussions about the future of the country. My mother was familiar with the writings of Malcolm X, with Angela Davis, with the Black Panthers, and these conversations went a long way toward politicizing my father. He was still pretty lost at this point—so lost he had walked off the stage at the Aladdin—and he was looking for his next act.
And Mom honestly believed in him. She believed that Dad had the talent and the power to change the world, and that with her help he’d have the political foundation to do it. Those days were probably the best times they ever had, because they were full of promise, but unfortunately they didn’t last. Richard was volatile, unpredictable, antiromantic, and downright mean. There was only so much Mom could take, and she was this close to her breaking point. Alas, that’s when she discovered she was pregnant.
Okay, so maybe the marriage isn’t falling part. Maybe this is a sign. The marriage is worth fighting for.
She went home to break the happy news to her parents.
“Don’t say anything until there is life!” Grandma Bunny snapped.
This was not exactly the response Mom had been hoping for, and she was outraged. She accused her mother of being a racist and raced off in a huff, swearing that she would never again talk to her fucked-up parents.
She never gave Bunny a chance to explain herself. “I was just being superstitious,” she told me years later. “In the Jewish tradition, you’re not supposed to mention a birth until after the first trimester. It had nothing to do with race.”
My mother went home to Richard, and the marriage continued to unravel. Still, she believed they would get through it. She had been looking forward to motherhood for many years, and she had waited for the right man to come along, and for a while Richard had been the right man. In her heart, she thought he could become the right man again, so she hung in.
When I think back to what it must have been like for her, I can’t even begin to imagine it. There she was, pregnant and miserable, hoping for a happy outcome, and every day was another fight.
“Fuck you!”
“Shut up, you fucking bitch!”
“Eat shit and die, motherfucker!”
“Drop dead!”
Nowadays, parents put a lot of time and energy into having healthy babies, and they often go to ridiculous extremes. They’ll coo at them through stethoscopes, crank up the soothing tunes, even read to them—loudly—while they’re still in the womb. But that was not the case in my family. I knew the word motherfucker before I was born.
When my mother was about six months pregnant, my father returned from a road trip in a red silk shirt, gold chains, high-heeled boots, a brand-new mustache, and an unfamiliar glazed look in his eyes. Now she knew—the truth was staring her in the face. Richard was already deeply involved with another woman, and—whoever she was—she had introduced him to some fine new drugs.
He would disappear into the bathroom two or three times a day and emerge minutes later, roaring like a lion. “I am Super Nigger! I am the coolest, funniest nigger the world has ever seen. Nobody can touch this nigger!”
“Wipe your nose, Super Nigger,” Mom said. (Now that’s funny.)
She eventually found Super Nigger’s stash, and she tossed it, and of course all hell broke loose.
“Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” she said.
“My powder, baby. What the fuck d’you do with it?”
“Oh, the powder, baby. I threw the powder out.”
“You what?”
“I flushed it down the toilet.”
Dad had been violent before, but never as violent as he was on that day. He was throwing punches like a boxer—to her head, to her pregnant stomach—and Mom went down hard. “I should have left him there and then, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it,” she told me. “I loved the bastard. And you were on your way. And I didn’t think I could face my parents.”
We told you so! Didn’t we tell you not to marry that crazy nutcase? Didn’t we? You should have listened! But did you listen? No, you didn’t listen!
So she stayed. And she believed. And she kept telling herself that things could get better, that once the baby came he would change and they would raise their little family and be happy. But she needed something to make him believe, and one day it came to her.
“Richard, honey—you know that wedding present we got from my parents?”
“What present? They gave us cash.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. The thirty thousand dollars.”
“What about it?”
“Well, you know that movie script you’ve been working on—that crazy fantasy?”
“It’s not a fantasy. It’s a simple story about a white man who rapes a black woman and is judged by an all-black jury.”
“I thought it was called Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales.”
“It is,” he said. “But that doesn’t make it any less real. Fairy tales are real, too. I have to get back to work on that script. It’s very fucking good.”
“Well, baby—that’s what I was thinking. I was thinking we’d take my parents’ wedding money and make ourselves a movie—our very own movie.”
Mom wasn’t just blowing smoke, either. She loved the idea of the movie. It focused on a Big Theme, racism, and it explored the strained race relations in this great but confused country of ours. The movie had Something to Say. It was an Important Movie.
Dad was Super Nigger, and the more he thought about the movie, the more he felt this was the way to go. Super Nigger was going to change the world, and this was a good place to start. Plus the movie belonged to him. It was his all the way. He was in Complete Control. He was an Artist.
So one fine day he put on his long leather coat and his wide-brimmed pimp hat and drove over to the UCLA campus, in the heart of Westwood. He approached the first two students he saw and asked them to point him in the direction of the film department. The students, who happened to be fledgling filmmakers themselves, recognized Richard and immediately volunteered their services.
Everything fell into place in no time at all. Dad rented a posh house in Beverly Hills, hired an all-student crew, and got to work. For Dad, this meant snorting coke and sipping Courvoisier from dawn to dusk, and taking breaks now and then to tell everyone that the film sucked. Only one person on the crew could handle his shit, and that was Penelope Spheeris, who went on to direct Wayne’s World and The Beverly Hillbillies, among many other films. I only mention this because there’s a lesson here somewhere, and it has something to do with putting up with a lot of shit on the road to success (or something like that, anyway).
In any event, the work continued, on and off, till July 16, 1969, when work stopped for the day so that Mom and Dad could tend to other business. That other business was me. I arrived at 11:30 that morning, at the old Cedars Sinai Hospital, in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, not far from the current site of the Church of Scientology. I am a true Cancer, or Moon-child, not only because I was born in July, but because I exited my mom’s womb right as Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were blasting toward the moon.
While Armstrong was taking a small step for man, and a giant step for mankind, Grandma Bunny did him one better by making her way to the hospital to take a look at her newborn granddaughter. She actually knew an obstetrician at Cedars—what can I say? She’s Jewish—and she had asked him to call her the moment I was born. When the phone rang, she was sitting in front of the TV, watching continuing coverage of Apollo 11.
Grandma Bunny holding me. At first Mom’s side of the family suggested giving me up for adoption, but with my punim (pretty face), how could you?
Herb drove her to the hospital, and they made their way to the maternity ward side by side. It was the first time they had seen my mother since the fight, and they didn’t want to say anything about the fight, so they focused on little me. “My, she’s black as a berry, isn’t she?” Bunny said. “Black as a berry, black as a berry.”
Mom was deeply insulted. She immediately assumed that Bunny had hoped for a “more Caucasian” granddaughter, and she said so.
“That’s not what I meant,” Bunny replied, defending herself. “I was simply making an observation.”
The two women quickly made peace—my mom was too exhausted to argue—and the sins of the past were quickly forgotten. After all, this was a healthy child—a blessing! A gift from God!
The truth is, my grandparents were not racists, but they were acutely aware of the problems facing a biracial child in a world that wasn’t ready for biracial children. Like good grandparents, they worried. And worrying was in their blood.
My mother, on the other hand, saw my birth as a harbinger of good. As a biracial child, I represented America’s bright future. When she looked at me, she envisioned an America where race was a thing of the past. We are all brothers under the skin. I know, I know—it sounds a little precious, but this was 1969, the year of Woodstock—the so-called Summer of Love.
Remember the Youngbloods:
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now
And Dad tried. Sort of. When I was born, he arrived at the hospital with flowers, grinning ear-to-ear, and he showered Mom with kisses. He took a lot of interest in me, too. When he saw the nurses changing my diapers, for example, he noticed a bluish bruise near my lower spine and asked about it. He was told it was called a “Mongolian spot,” and that it was a melanin deposit—something fairly common among biracial children. He was over the moon about it. Suddenly he was in full agreement with my mother about the meaning of my birth: Little Rain was Something Special. Little Rain was gonna change the motherfuckin’ world!
Special? I was black and blue from the start. Maybe God was trying to tell me something.
Five days later, when it was time to take me home, Dad didn’t show up. Mom waited and waited, then finally asked one of the nurses to call her a cab. When she got home, she found Dad in bed with the housekeeper.
Mom locked herself in the bathroom and wept.
And I’m sure I wept with her.