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Richard in St. Joseph’s Catholic School . It didn’t take long before the nuns got wind of how the Pryor family came by their livelihood, and a confused young Richard found himself unceremoniously expelled. “Some people just don’t know right from wrong,” Marie explained, “even though they think they wrote the book.”
    Despite his expulsion from St. Joseph’s , Marie insisted he continue going to weekend catechism where, one Saturday, according to Richard, a priest snuck up and gave him “some smooches on the lips.” Richard ran bawling and heaving all the way home. Once his father and uncle Dickie got over their anger at Richard’s story, they saw the financial possibilities and hatched a blackmail scheme. “We’ll collar him,” his father said. The men listened in on an extension while Richard flirted with the priest on the phone—that is, until his grandmother happened to overhear and put a stop to it.
    “Richard,” she told him, “you’ve got to understand that everybody’s human. Don’t ever forget it. No matter what they are. Everybody’s human.”
    Richard, for his part, remembered this as a bonding experience with his father and found it exciting being the center of attention.
    After St. Joseph’s, Richard enrolled in the overwhelmingly white Blaine-Sumner Elementary School. A chronically truant student, Richard was listless and withdrawn in the classroom on the days he did show up. Yet his sixth-grade teacher, Miss Marguerite Yingst, noticed that he enjoyed making other kids laugh on the playground. So she offered him a deal: if he came to school on time every day, he could have ten minutes to perform in front of the class on Friday afternoons. It worked. His classmates loved him, and having a regular time slot challenged him to come up with new material each week. His family had just bought their first television set, so he mimicked the antics of comics like Red Skelton and Jerry Lewis, freely lifting their jokes until other kids in his class got TVs, too. Richard never forgot the Monday morning he arrived at school to find his classmates all abuzz over Sammy Davis Jr.’s performance on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town the night before.
    “I was jealous,” he said. “It was like I’d been home sick one Friday and some other cat had come in and done my act. Now I knew I was going to have to be even better.”
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    Richard was expelled from Woodruff High after he threw a punch at a teacher (and missed). He next attended Peoria Central but dropped out after just one semester. If he wasn’t going to school, his father told him, he had to start pulling his own weight. “If you don’t put nothing in the pot, you don’t get nothing out.”
    He got his first job mopping floors in a North Washington Street strip club, but did such a poor job the dancers got filthy from writhing on the stage.
    Next he tried his hand at robbing stores, but he bungled his first and only attempt when the coins spilled from the register and went rolling all over the floor. Instead of calling the police, the owner kicked him out and threatened to tell his father if he ever came back.
    Despite Grandma Marie’s faith in Catholic schooling, she had become a devout Baptist and frequently attended revival meetings in hopes of being cured of her arthritis. She took young Richard with her, believing the preacher could “pray the devil out of him.”
    “It was kind of embarrassing in front of all those people,” Richard recalled. “He prayed over me and says for that devil to come out! . . . I didn’t feel anything. I couldn’t see it. Maybe . . . it’s still in there.”
    * A second wave migration from New Orleans in 1917 proved beneficial in paving the way for Marie Carter’s future occupation. Prostitution had been legal in New Orleans’ Storyville district until 1917 when the U.S. secretary of war requested that the law be amended to safeguard the health of the multitudes of seamen who came