An interesting read from a man who told his mama anytime somebody says “nigger” they’re promoting his book.
It’s February….Black History Month in America, a.k.a. the shortest month in the year that Black folks are supposed to cram a couple hundred years of conflicted but celebratory history into. So instead of kicking it off with a four part dissection of all of Alex Haley’s plagiarized classics, why not give a spotlight on Substack’s favorite word featuring Dick Gregory, Nigger.
For those not hip to Dick Gregory, he was a athlete turned comic turned activist turned health nut turned pseudo revolutionist. And hell yeah, in that order. During the peak of his comedy career when he was tired of, by his account, step and fetching for white folks, he wrote this pocket paperback autobiography in 1963 called Nigger. When I first read this it had to have been in the seventh grade. And I read it for this joke right here that is featured on the back cover:
“Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant. This white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said, ‘That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’ About that time, these three cousins came in. You know the ones I mean, Ku, Klux and Klan. They said, ‘Boy, we’re givin’ you fair warnin. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re gonna do to you.’ So I put down my knife and fork, picked up that chicken, and kissed it.”
That, definitively, is some St. Louis Nigger shit right there.
This book is a love it or hate it. There’s no middle ground. Dick Gregory is angry as fuck about being born black, poor, and living in poverty with “so many roaches they were part of his family” throughout his childhood, so much so that half the book is dedicated to it and his seething condemnation of his parents, America, and every Black person that goes along with the status quo. He rambles incoherently about points, goes in and out of talking to his mother Lucille, and slips in some bitterness to make his teeth white. Above all, he ain’t trying to be funny. Jokes don’t land but his disdain and blame towards White America comes shining through like Kodak to the point its irritating overkill and makes no fucking sense.
That’s the type of Nigger you working with.
Dick Gregory starts his story as a boy looking forward to Christmas, no more than ten. He ain’t typical. He lives in a cold water flat with no water, heat, or food except major holidays. His mother Lucille is a maid that cleans behind white folks but doesn’t clean her own, that can’t afford clothes or shoes for her kids and gets no help from Big Pres, Gregory’s do drop in father. What we learn is that his life is in chambles. No one will help his family. He and his siblings are dirty, don’t bathe, have no soap, and live in filth they can’t afford since they’re evicted often. What he has is from pity, charity, or stealing. Big Pres works as a train cook so he comes through once a year, plays nice for two days, and then stomps the piss out of Lucille and the kids. Lucille sits up all night long waiting on him to come to her, though she knows he’s the community dick with broads and babies all over, who beats essentially every woman he with. Between talking to God and realizing he ain’t a delivery service, ducking from social workers and constantly moving because of evictions, Gregory’s entire ass is chapped until he becomes a teenager.
Second half of the story is Gregory’s rise as an athlete in high school, a.k.a. The Running Nigger, which puts him on a path out of poverty despite his penchant for not attending because of the segregation and racial disdain his teachers have for him and his circumstances. He’s a medal winner on his way to a career, gets a scholarship to Southern Illinois and does well there, but the Army drafts him his sophomore year and defers college for him. The Army ain’t all bad as he starts noticing his penchant for comedy, so when he gets out he gives St. Louis the finger and moves to Chicago to fake his way to the top bullshitting white folks into believing he’s funny as he tongue in cheek talks about their ass while playing a good house Nigger.
During a gig at the Esquire Club he meets a shy lady named Lillian, who later becomes his girlfriend and subsequent wife (and is the same Lillian he spent years dogging out verbally in public, especially when he was an activist and she was home having miscarriages). Once he turns Chicago inside out and gets the attention of people like Hugh Hefner, he starts getting notoriety and then the white fame Gods shined down upon his portly Black brow, which didn’t make him happy either.
His pisstivity for white folks’ fame leads him to join the Civil Rights Movement, both out of vanity and bitterness, treating it like it’s no big deal that he’s in the mix with people like Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as earning a lump and bump from the good old boys in the south trying to help people exercise their voting rights. He seems obsessed about the movement and constantly trying to show his ass more and more to be that Nigger out there, guilt tripping white folks, making them feel guilty about the mistreatment of the Nigger all while making a name and a path for himself.
And that’s the book up until he’s 32 years old, so you could imagine what a fucking sequel would be after his Bohemian Diet shit.
Dick Gregory’s a head case, and it really starts with this book. If you only read it once in your life, that’s cool, because for all it’s get the hell off my lawn type rantings, it’s a piece of American history that shows how the policies of systemic classism made a Nigger like him.
