Looking for Mudbone

The following article contains anti-Black racial slurs.

I’d never been to Peoria, Illinois, so I was really excited. This is where Richard Pryor comes from! I wanted to see the place just outside of the Caterpillar Plant where Pryor described old Mudbone's tractor running out of gas after he'd made that wrong tum on the way from Tupelo, Mississippi to Chicago.

I was in Peoria to tell stories at the big University in town. They put me up in this big fancy old German Castle near the school. I won't lie to you, the building is impressive. It's made just like the real castles they got in Germany. When I drove up to the place it was wide-open daylight, but the minute I stepped inside it was so dark that it might as well have been midnight outside.

As I walked to my room I got to thinking about the way the Neo-Nazi skin- heads are running wild in Germany, Europe, and lots of places in this country. I'd just seen a story on the news about how some German skinheads had chased a black athlete and gave a good whupping to one of his white teammates for walking into the wrong place.

Now, me I am not exactly the scary type, but I will confess that before I unpacked, I checked the room for one-way mirrors, hidden panels, and secret switches that opened doors to dungeons. Like I said I'm not scary but if I had seen a bunch of goose-stepping SS troops marching down the halls looking for every threat to the purity of the Aryan race in the place, it wouldn't have surprised me!

It struck me that I'd been on the road too long. This was a classic case of the homesick blues. I had to get to where I could smell the hamhocks simmering in the greens or I was going to be a menace to society. I didn't even brush my teeth before I set out on my search for Mudbone.

Two things struck me as strange about Peoria: the small number of black people on the streets, and the large number of police. The small number of black people surprised me because I figured that Richard Pryor could not have become the storyteller he is without being in a place that helped him learn his stories and how to tell them. The large number of cops surprised me because I don't usually see that many cops unless there's a bunch of black folks for them to worry about.

Then I spotted this brother sitting in a Mister Donut shop, so I decided to stop. I figured he might be able to help me get my bearings.

The guy looked just like this lawyer I used to know in Jackson, Mississippi named Jess Brown. If he’d stood up straight Jess might have been five-foot-eight, but he always hunched over so much that he never came to more than five-foot-five. He had light brown café ole skin, a nose like an eagle’s beak and—when you could see them—piercing brown eyes.

I sat down beside the guy and said “You ever been to Jackson, Mississippi?”

He said, “Naw. Why?”

“You could be Jess Brown’s twin brother except for the fact that Jess was older than you are now when he died 20 years ago.”

Well that got a conversation going. He told me his name was Weasel.

I mentioned that I was surprised to see so few black people and so many cops in Richard Pryor’s hometown. Weasel slurped his coffee and looked out over the edge of his cup. “Hell, Richard ain’t been home for years. I think he’d been a lot better off if he had come home every now and then. But as for the cops, it’s always been rough here.

“I remember one time I was sitting in this very donut shop matter of fact I was sitting in this very same seat slurping coffee and dunking doughnuts—when this white guy who looked like he might have been a bank clerk in a cowboy movie walked in. I paid little or no attention to him because I’d just been laid off at Caterpillar and had plenty of problems of my own.

“Then the waiter dropped this load of dirty dishes on the floor. I heard him say, ‘Oh my God!’ The noise made me and the other four people in the place look up.

“The little mousy white guy had pulled this big gun and was telling the donut shop clerk behind the counter to empty the cash register. ‘Keep your hands down. Just give me the money, and no one will be hurt.’ The clerk had his hands up over his head and looked like his legs belonged to someone else’s body.

“The guy waved his gun at the rest of us. ‘Everyone just sit still and no one will be hurt.’ The donut shop man with very shaky hands emptied the cash register. “This ain’t but $47!” the robber said.

"'I just came on. That's all I've got! You can look for yourself.'

"The robber thought about it for a while and said, 'Okay, then we'll just wait for more money to come in. The rest of you just sit here looking normal. The coffee's on me.'

"I couldn't believe what was happening. He sat down there at the other end of the counter, put his gun down in just such a way that it aimed dead at my heart, and we sat here all night acting 'normal.' Other people came and went with no idea that the store was being robbed and that the rest of us were being held hostage by this mousy little guy at the end of the counter with a big German Luger under his newspaper.

"About 12:30 these two cops came in to take their break. They sat there writing reports and talking for about 30 minutes and nothing happened. When they left everyone started breathing again."

Weasel stirred his fresh cup of coffee as he turned his head to look at me out the top of his eyes. "You may not believe this but after a while it began to feel 'normal.' You'd be surprised how people can adjust to crazy situations."

So what happened?" I asked. "How' d you get out of it?" "The situation didn't change until about 3:30 a.m," Weasel said. "This black guy named Paul Blocker, he was the star running back in high school we all called 'P-cock,' came in the store. He was a plain clothes cop at the time. He picked up on the bad vibe in the place right away. He sat right there where you're sitting now.

"While P-cock talked about his gridiron heroics, I used a toothpick and coffee to write the word 'robber' on a napkin and drew an arrow pointing to the mousy guy at the other end of the counter. Finally P-cock got the point. He paid his bill and went out to his car and called for backup. He came back into the donut shop a few minutes later claiming that he'd been cheated out of his change. He managed to get close enough to the robber to knock his gun away, toss the guy over the counter, and cuff him.

"P-cock was standing behind the counter at the cash register with the German Luger in his hand when the two cars of white, uniformed officers came screeching up to the donut shop with their lights flashing. The first two in the door with their guns drawn were the same two guys who'd been here drinking coffee around midnight.

"'POLICE! DROP THE GUN!'

"'I'm an officer too. Here's my badge. I've got a perpetrator here. I can't drop the gun.'

"'Drop the gun nigger!'

"'Don't you call me-'

"The youngest of the two white officers fired one shot that hit P-cock in the neck.

"It was awful."

 

Was he hurt bad?" I asked.

"I tried to help him but he bled to death on the floor right there beside the cash register. I still come here every month as my own kind of private memorial."

"That's what you call a double dose of bad luck," I sort of mumbled to myself.

"Yeah," Weasel murmured. "The worst thing about it was that the little mousy guy that was trying to rob the place was tried for armed robbery and murder, and the cop who did the shooting got off scot free."

Weasel and I sat there without talking for a long time. I thanked him for the story and went back to the hotel thinking that maybe I had found Mudbone after all.