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God.
    Further documented facts of LeRoy Pryor’s life include his birth on March 21, 1889, in Mexico, Missouri; his plea of guilty to a charge of grand larceny in Macon County, Illinois, in 1928; an arrest for disorderly conduct in Decatur in 1931; his registration for military service in 1942 at the age of fifty-three; and his death on January 15, 1946, in Decatur, Illinois.
    One final documented event in LeRoy’s life occurred a little more than a year after he and Marie were married, as shown by an item that appeared in the Decatur Review of December 6, 1915:
    CLAIMED WIFE ATTENDED BALL
    Roy Pryor, Colored, Fined for an Assault on Spouse
    Roy Pryor, colored, 362 East Main Street, pleaded guilty before Justice J. Edward Saxton Monday morning to the charge of assaulting his wife and threatening to kill her. He was fined $5.30. Pryor’s assault was provoked, it is alleged, by Mrs. Pryor attending a grand ball some place when Pryor wasn’t along.
    Marie’s next public notice appeared in the Decatur Herald of October 14, 1929, under the headline “Three Are Arrested in Raid Sunday Night,” wherein it was reported that Marie Carter had pleaded guilty to possession of intoxicating liquor, was fined $28.15 by Justice J. G. Allen, and released.
    After divorcing from Le Roy in 1929, Marie moved with her four children to Peoria where she soon married Thomas “Pop” Bryant and went into business operating a brothel and doing some bootlegging on the side. Pop ran a gambling operation, a candy store, and later, a saloon and pool hall.
    Marie’s eldest son, LeRoy “Buck Carter” Pryor Jr. was a Golden Gloves boxing champion in his teens, spent some time traveling between Chicago and East St. Louis, working odd jobs—including a bit of vaudeville singing—then came back to Peoria to take up the family business. He fell in love with Gertrude Thomas, a part-time bookkeeper who also turned tricks in Marie’s brothel, and on December 1, 1940, she gave birth to Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III. He was called Frankin for the uncle who had prophesied his birth. Thomas, of course, was his mother’s maiden name. And Lennox, he would later learn, had been one of his aunt Mexcine’s boyfriends.
    Richard professed not to know where his mother came up with the name Richard. An odd claim since his father’s younger brother and his great-grandfather on his grandma Marie’s side were both called Richard. Odder still considering that biographies, reference works, even his own press materials, often identify him as Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III, although, to reckon him as the third in a line of Richards requires making a few zigzags in his family tree and a slight exception to the rules. No matter. That piling on of names was heavy enough without a Roman numeral at the end.
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    With full acknowledgment of how telling were the circumstances, a grown-up Richard Pryor recalled how he had come to recognize the draw and power of physical comedy very early on, when, running across the yard in his new cowboy suit, he slipped in dog shit and set everybody on the front porch howling with laughter. Realizing he was onto something, he got up and did it again. “And,” he would say, “I’ve been slippin’ in shit ever since.”
    Richard found he could use his fledgling comic abilities to ingratiate himself with older, tougher kids in the neighborhood or to worm his way out of scrapes with bullies. But not always. At the age of five, while playing alone in an alley behind his house, Richard found himself cornered and sexually molested by a fourteen-year-old bully known as Hoss. Despite his efforts to avoid further encounters with Hoss, the assaults continued. “I felt violated, humiliated, dirty, fearful, and, most of all, ashamed.” The humiliation got even worse when an older kid in the neighborhood pulled him aside and told him he shouldn’t be sucking dick. Who else knew?
    At the dinner table a few nights