“Richard, she can’t stop looking at you,” my mother said with a big silly smile.
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After only three months, my father came back into my life. And it was all because of the N-word.
“I can’t stop looking at her either,” he said.
My face became warm with happiness. I pressed my cool fingers to my hot cheeks.
Leaning against a red leather booth, he looked at ease in my favorite Boston restaurant. She opened the fortune cookie with one hand, her long fingers pulling it apart. I savored his scent, a mixture of sweet, sour cologne and a richness of tobacco smoke, and studied him as if he were one of the seven wonders of the world, especially the wrinkles under his eyes when he smiled.
There was a bustle in the restaurant, but I only saw her, a fairy-tale girl who was blinded by her knight.
My mother broke the spell.
“Tell your father what happened at school.”
Startled, I looked helplessly at my mother, her cigarette smoke stinging my eyes. Ignoring my discomfort, he demanded a full confession.
It all started on my seventh birthday when my mother asked me to hurry home after school to surprise her. Walking all the way, I tried to guess what kind of gift he had given me. I knew this was no ordinary treat – my Nana’s apple slices or Papa Gino’s pizza – because there was nothing that made my mother so bouncy. As I turned onto my block, the possibilities so occupied my mind that I almost missed the Cadillac limousine parked against the flow of traffic in front of our house. The long white car was a sharp contrast to the boxy, brown and blue Oldsmobiles and Chevrolet sedans lining Houston Avenue, a neat working-class street just south of Boston.
He held out in his hands a gift, an offering.
Before I could observe the car or its driver, my mother opened the storm door, waving her hands to usher me along. “Hurry up!” He said. “come on!”
As I stepped inside, I saw him, a round-faced man peering over my mother’s shoulder who looked a lot like my father, but I wasn’t entirely sure. His mustache was the same, but thicker. Dressed in a white, three-piece suit and with a brown silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, he looked very polished and very nice for our simple, shag-carpeted house. Since we first met, he had recorded his third comedy album and had a new swag.
“look who’s here!” My mother screamed. I was too shy to hug him, too embarrassed to have made a mistake in recognizing my father. Closing the distance between us, I walked towards her, on uncertain feet like a deer fawn. Something in her eyes reminded me of mine, but not until she leaned down and nipped my nose with her very wet lower lip was I convinced it was her.
“Boston Blackie,” he whispered, sounding exactly as shy as I was feeling.
He held out in his hands a gift, an offering. First, they gave me a big stuffed dog, then a real gumball machine filled with jelly beans that worked with nickels, and finally, my first doll with dark brown skin. I had never seen anything like this before.
Popping a jelly bean into my mouth, I saw how elaborately my mother and Nana had prepared for their trip. The house smelled good, filled with the scent of all my Nana’s specialties, what my mother called Jewish food – sweet and salty stuffed cabbage, raspberry jam and lemon zest from Nana’s famous jelly rolls, Mandel bread with red and green maraschino cherries, and the burnt smell of the nearly empty coffeepot still on the machine.
It didn’t take long after I opened the gift for my mom to make me look like a Miss America pageant contestant.
“Elizabeth, read something to your father.” “Elizabeth, do your Mae West impression.”
“Elizabeth, sing that Stevie Wonder song for him.” And I did. “Can you teach me the words?” he asked.
“In the hard times of Mississippi a boy is born,” I read all the lyrics as slowly as I could. He repeated them to me word for word.
“It’s a good song,” he said, and he meant it. They used it on their fourth album, 1975. . . Did I say that? Reading from what he called “the Book of Wonders”, he preached the songs as if they were holy gospel.
The next night we went for dinner at my favorite restaurant. My parents would chat awkwardly about the weather and the next stop on their tour, and laugh when they weren’t saying anything at all. Suddenly, my father became very interested in knowing what happened in the school. I tried all night to resist the strain on my thumb, but my resolve quickly evaporated. I pressed my thumb between my lips, placed my index finger on my nose, and held my remaining fingers tight over my mouth like a shield.
My dad bowed his head and looked at me for a minute. Then
Tucking her long, graceful fingers under my little ones, she moved my hand away from my face, patting the palm of my hand and moving my thumb away from my mouth.
“What happened?” he asked. I hoped to avoid the question, but I couldn’t resist him.
“Two boys at school called me a n***er.”
I was hanging upside down on the monkey bars when Lewis and Robert came up to me. Louis was black; Robert was white. He had teased me since first grade. As the slight chill of spring touched my face, I reminded myself that I hated Louis because he ate spaghetti with his mouth open, and I hated Robert because he was his follower. I felt dizzy as I shook my head back and forth, wishing the boys away. But they did not go away.
The N-word felt like it could last a lifetime.
“You’re a s***er,” Lewis said. Just like that.
From the first day of kindergarten, Lewis wanted to be my friend. He seemed to understand that we had something in common. Maybe they saw how I struggled with the kids in our predominantly white school. They said that I was adopted, that it was impossible for my white mother to be my real mother. I cried and told them it wasn’t true. I was afraid that if I became friends with Louis, I wouldn’t be able to ignore the nagging feeling that my light-brown skin meant I was different from my mother, the rest of my family, and most of the other kids at school.
“Did you hear me?” Lewis said. “You’re a s***er.”
She told me that no matter what my mother looked like, she and I were alike.
Tears started falling before I remembered to stop them. How could this word be so magical when my dad used it on stage, and how could it be so hurtful when Louis said it at school?
The boys laughed as I tried to hide my tears and confusion.
I went to my teachers and told them what happened. Two young white women with long, straight hair hugged and caressed me and wiped my eyes. I waited for him to say something consoling as he always did when kids teased me – “You’re not a child,” “You’re not stupid,” “You’re not ugly,” – but the reassurance, “You’re not a s***er” never came.
Later, when I told my mother what happened, she didn’t even tell me that I wasn’t in that word. She was confident about all sorts of topics – cross-stitch, taxi-licensing, chic dresses, Hollywood gossip, and who in the family makes the best chopped liver. But as he held me in his lap and struggled for words, it became clear that the situation was too complicated even for him. Before that day, kids called me a baby because I was a thumb sucker and cried a lot. I hated it, but I figured it would stop when I grew up.
The N-word felt like it could last a lifetime.
When I finished telling my story, I had a hard time looking at my father, convinced that he would no longer look at me that way. Slowly, I raised my head and couldn’t believe that he was looking at me with as much love and affection as he had the entire night.
“Don’t let anyone call you that,” he said. His voice was calm, like a mystery.
My dad said that black people are resilient and strong.
Ever since it first happened, I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me that what Lewis said wasn’t okay. My heart remained wide open. With one sentence my father earned all the trust in the world that he had to give me.
He held my hand and said something else to me. “You are black.”
I am black. I am black. I am black.
The meaning of his words was absolutely incomprehensible, like when I had a mole removed and the doctor used ether to put me to sleep and for days after that my thoughts were like fireflies that I could not catch or catch. My father was telling me something important, I knew, if only I could hide the essence of it.
My mother sat in the back, smoking a cigarette, and looking at us as if we were acting out a scene from an entertainment TV show.
Did she know I was black?
I thought I was just a Jewish girl, like my mom and my maternal grandparents and my cousins, who loved lighting candles for Hanukkah and eating brisket at the Passover Seder. As soon as I got the news that I was black, my mind was blown. That said, my father and I were both black, a fact that connected us to each other and also to other black people. I remembered the day, not long ago, when I was accosted by a group of brown-skinned teenagers as I walked to school. “Hey, little brother!” When they were passing by in the car, they started shouting at me thinking I was a boy, but they did not misunderstand my blackness.
Gently, my father continued talking to me without repeating what the boys had said. “That word,” he said. “It’s a fighting word. Whenever someone says it, you better knock them out immediately.”
The hot emotions of just a moment ago came rushing out and left me cold as ice.
The irony was that when my father was telling me that I should not let anyone call me that, he was also making that same word his creative calling card. Just before he met me in Boston, he recorded his 1974 album he is crazy crazyAn unprecedented celebration of the specific black experience he knew from his childhood. It would become the highest-grossing comedy album of the year and would forever cement their cultural influence.
His characters go through all kinds of oppression – slavery, lynching, poverty, police violence, drug addiction – but come out on the other side of the trauma wiser and stronger. My dad said that black people are resilient and strong.
N***as never burn in buildings. They know how to get out of this dangerous situation.
At the restaurant, my father looked at me with the passionate confidence of a man who was confident in his blackness and wanted nothing more than to pursue it. Turns out, my mom wanted the same thing.
When the boys at school would abuse me, she knew she was out of her league and she also knew that my father was coming to Boston for a promotion. He is crazy crazy. So she moved on, convinced that only a black father could help a little Jewish girl from Boston understand words. Gently, he told me I was black, but not the N-word. He also said that no one should ever call me like that. I didn’t know how to stop this from happening, but I was willing to try because more than anything, I wanted him to be proud that I was his daughter.
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derive from Something We Said: Richard Pryor, an Infamous Word, and Me. Copyright © 2026 by Elizabeth Stordur Pryor. Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
