Writing a book about the deeply painful and complex history of the n-word is a significant undertaking, as is writing a memoir about a complicated relationship with one’s father. For Smith College professor Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor — daughter of comedian Richard Pryor, who famously used the word in his material often — the two have an inextricable and powerful overlap.
Pryor’s newly debuted book, “Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me,” was published by Simon & Schuster/37Ink. To celebrate the release, Pryor will join Jennifer DeClue, associate professor in The Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College, for a discussion at Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley on Wednesday, June 10 at 7 p.m.
“I feel like I was, in some ways, the last one to know that it mattered that Richard Pryor was my father,” Pryor said. “I did not realize until I started getting more deep into my research that there was absolutely no way to talk about the modern use of the n-word without talking about Richard Pryor. I didn’t fully grasp the scope of his significance in reclaiming that word for Black people and forcing Americans to reckon with their racism.”
The book weaves together anecdotes from her life as a biracial Jewish girl raised in white neighborhoods, and as the daughter of a famous comedian who loved her deeply but struggled to be present. She recounts the many ways the word has surfaced throughout her life — not just in her father’s stand-up routines, but directed at her or weaponized in her presence. In one especially painful instance, the person who hurled the slur at a 12-year-old Pryor was her own mother.
In 2010, less than a year into Pryor’s tenure teaching history at Smith, a white student used the word in her classroom, quoting a line from the 1974 satirical Western comedy film “Blazing Saddles.” Stunned, Pryor was unable to address it in the moment, but the incident left an indelible impression — even 10 years later, when she started writing her book.
“I came to understand that this was not just a reaction to the history of the word, but a personal reaction,” she said. “And so, it felt like both of those went together in a way that I hadn’t yet sorted out, but that I felt like I was going to. Not to mention the fact that the line that the student quoted in my class was actually one that my father had written.”
Pryor made the deliberate decision not to print the word itself in full, choosing instead to refer to it as “the n-word” or use three asterisks. It was a shift from her past work; when she wrote a 2016 article on the word’s etymology, spelling it out uncensored felt “like I was reckoning with something by doing that, that I was confronting my own demons.”
“Typing those letters wasn’t just an act of defiance — it was a way of using language to claim my Pryorness. My father had flung the word at American audiences like a grenade to expose its hypocrisy. I was placing it on the page as evidence, asking my readers to see it, study it, and reckon with it,” she wrote in the book.
However, when Pryor shared the article with a Black history scholar, he didn’t write the word out in his reply.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so out of touch,’” she said. “And it was like a permission to not write the word. And I think there’s something about the n-word, by not writing it, by saying the phrase ‘the n-word,’ that allows us to contemplate, ‘Why is this word cordoned off? Why are we going to these machinations for this particular word?’”
Pryor applied this same philosophy to one of her recent classes, “Richard Pryor’s America,” enforcing a strict rule that no one — including herself — could utter the word, even though it regularly surfaced in her father’s material.
“The word does cause the harm, and I want to be able to have the deeper conversation about what’s happening—‘Why is he using it in this way? What does it mean here?’—and not have the conversation about who can say it and who can’t,” she said.
Richard Pryor stopped using the n-word in 1982, largely because a trip to Kenya led him to rethink his use of it. Decades later, his daughter’s research not only deepened her understanding of the word, but it also forged a closer connection to her father, who passed away in 2005 from complications of multiple sclerosis.
Through her work, Pryor concluded that it was really two separate words. While the version used by white people is “a singular, vile, one-track, disgusting slur,” she realized her father’s deployment of it was entirely unique: “It was a universe.”
She wrote that her father used the word interchangeably to refer to Black men in a wide variety of contexts. In his hands, it could mean a revolutionary, a fighter, a person, a guy, a slave, a rule breaker, a fine fellow or a friend — and, in the context of a specific 1975 album, a Vietnamese person.
Near the end of the book, Pryor recalls opening a briefcase that had belonged to her father. Inside, she discovered a collection of notebooks filled with early sketch ideas and personal reflections on his life.
In a draft of his memoir, Pryor found that her father had written about a conversation he’d had at the age of 6, when his father Buck introduced him to the n-word. She and her father had had something in common, she then realized: “a fraught conversation with a complicated parent, rife with lessons about being a Black child in a hostile world, and a slur.”
“The way he said it. The way Buck said it. The way I struggled my whole life to make sense of it. Because the boy on the playground, because my mother at the kite festival, because Mama and Uncle Dickie and the Reverend David Banks. Then my mother spat it out, then I spat it out, then the white guys spat it out, then my Black friends spat it out, and then the white student in my class spat it out exactly the way my father, in ‘Blazing Saddles,’ meant for folks to spit it out, and I became unhinged. And then obsessed. And then a scholar of the word,” she wrote.
“Just like he was.”
Admission to the event at Odyssey Bookshop is free, but registration is required at eventbrite.com/e/elizabeth-stordeur-pryor-in-person-tickets-1984142304043.
