Best Of: Novelist Maggie O’Farrell / A personal history of the N-Word

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Follow its been a minute wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll break down the zeitgeist topics that are filling your feed. From WHYWI in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend, I'm Sam Brieger. Today, novelist Maggie O'Farell, she wrote the book HamNet and co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation.

She has a new book called Land, about a father and son, mapping 19th century Ireland after the devastation of the great famine. Also, we'll hear from historian Elizabeth Stordor prior. She's spent her career tracing the racial slur, the N word, through slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and hip hop.

But what she did in tell her students, even some of her colleagues, was that her father, was the comedian who put that word at the center of American comedy, Richard prior.

“I mean, I was a scholar of the N word, and so obviously is he.”

Her new book is something we said, Richard prior, a notorious word, and me. And book critic Moring Corrigan reviews the latest by classic scholar Mary Beard. What's coming up on fresher weekend? This week on the MPR Politics Podcast, catch up on the week's big primary election news, how things played out with newly drawn districts in California, and an increasingly competitive

Senate race in Iowa. Plus, we unpack the latest redistricting news that may benefit Republicans in the fall, listen every afternoon to the MPR Politics Podcast, find us on the MPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresher Weekend, I'm Sam Bricker.

My guest, author Maggie O'Farrell, is best known for her 2020 novel Hamlet. It was adapted into a movie last year, and Jesse Buckley's performance is Onus Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's wife, one buckly an Oscar. O'Farrell co-wrote the film screenplay with its director, Chloe Zhao. Hamlet is a fictionalized version of the story of William Shakespeare and his wife Onus Hathaway.

It's about how they meet and fall in love, Mary, and have children. Their young son Hamlet dies from the plague. The grief shakes the family and leads Shakespeare to write his play Hamlet. O'Farrell's novel Hamlet won Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction. Maggie O'Farrell has a new novel called Land.

It takes place in Ireland in the 1860s, beginning with Tomas and Liam, an Irish father and ten-year-old son, Hout in Falweather, mapping up peninsula as part of the British Ordnance Survey of Ireland. Tomas, somewhere between employed and indentured to British soldiers, is tasked with modernizing the maps of Ireland. Something magical happens on the peninsula, that forever changes the trajectory of their

family, and compels Tomas to move his family from the tight quarters of their city's one-room apartment to an abandoned cottage on the peninsula and begin an agrarian life. There are many abandoned cottages and houses and villages throughout Ireland, as the novel takes place only a decade or so after the country's great famine. The countryside has been emptied out with millions lost to the famine and to emigration.

Tomas is in part mapping the erasure of those lives from the land. O'Farrell has written eight other novels, children's books and a memoir called I Am, I Am, 17 brushes with death, about well, her brushes with death, nearly being murdered, nearly drowning, and her childhood and cephalitis, the left her with various balance and spatial recognition challenges.

Maggie O'Farrell, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me, it's lovely to be here.

“So can you tell us what the spark was for your new bookland?”

Well, I'd say it crept up on me very slowly. I've always really been interested in the life

of my great-great-grandfather on whom Tomas, the character, is based. He worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the mid-19th century just after the great famine had taken place and I thought about him for years and I thought about his son for years, his son was my great-grandfather and he took a very different path in life. Initially, from his father's, he became a Jesuit, which as anyone knows, anything that

Catholicism is not a job you just happened to fall into, it's something that you really, really commit yourself to and it takes years to train. He was a Jesuit for art and then he left, quite astonishingly, hence, I, my existence and existence of all my cousins and siblings, and he came full circle and became a mapper like his father. So the two of them was always really interested in me, but I could never really see a way forward

to making into a novel until I was on a train a few years ago on the way from Belfast to Dublin

and just suddenly, and I wish this happened more often, but the very first line of the book

extraordinary. I've never had this experience before, as soon as I had that first line, I could suddenly

see the path of the whole novel. I could see how I could do it. So, I mean, not to give too much away, but this book does really map the history of your family, there. Well, it's based on the lives of what I could find out of the lives of my great-great-grandfather, and my great-grandfather, which wasn't a huge amount to be honest, but I've woven a novel around the scant details that we have about them. Your father used to read to you Irish folk tales

of the kid. Yeah. And only our spectacles. He would only ever write that to us. And I sort of see magical elements in your books. There's haigstones, these like special stones,

magical stones. There are these magic wells. You have people who are closely tied to nature

and tend to have sort of extra sensory perceptions. What did you take from those folk tales and writing your books? Well, my father would only ever read, as I said, only ever read Irish mythology to us. And at the time it used to annoy us a bit, because we used to beg him to try and read the moments of all people long-stocking to us, but he would only ever read Irish myth. But actually now, I see that it forms that that world and those people and the narrative rules

inside these myths form part of my storytelling DNA in a way. And it was really important to me to try and transpose as much of that atmosphere of those tales to this novel. So in Irish mythology, the land itself is, it's like a character. It has opinions. It can change the direction of its human compatriots. It can, trees can speak. It has opinions. It's actually a person interacts in a state. Or it's an entity that interacts with the plot. And I really wanted that to come across in the novel.

And there are certain elements of the novel that are that lean heavily on Irish myth. There's a fish in the novel, which is quite important. I did at one point come, I have a writing a studio at

“the bottom of the garden and I did come up and I said to my children, I think my novels can have a”

talking fish in it. But they were quite minute teenagers now. They were a little bit skeptical about that. But the fish are very important in Irish mythology. And there's a, there's a wolfhound in the novel called Bran. And he's called Afterth in the Cools Dog. You were born in Ireland, but I don't think you spend much time living there. Is that right? No. As you can probably tell by the worst speak. No, I left when I was really young. I was born in Derry. And then we moved to Wales

when I was still quite young and then Scotland. You said that you're wary of claiming Irish heritage. So where does the idea of Ireland fit into your identity? I wouldn't, I mean, wait, maybe I said wary, but I think, you know, I can't, I don't really, I can't listen to myself in my very British voice saying the sentence, I'm Irish. Just because it just sounds, it just sounds

“grating to my ear. I'm probably, I'm sure to other people's too. So I think it's a strange thing,”

you know, I think anyone who doesn't grow up in the country they were born in or has maybe an

accent with their names as I do. There's always a sense of a kind of ghost self that walks along

beside you and you always have this awareness, I think, of what could I be? Who would I have been if we had stayed? And I know that I would have sounded completely different and I might have been a different person, but I suppose I feel, I feel quite Irish and Britain and I feel, but I'm in Ireland, I feel quite British just for those of the way I talk, although my passport is Irish and it always has been and I'm very proud of that. Did you have any hesitancy about writing

this very Irish novel because of any of those feelings? I did, yes. I do, I suppose so, yeah, I don't know that I hope nobody feels like I'm trespassing on anyone else's beliefs or, but it just felt, it just, it was a story that just wouldn't go away and I don't know who else would have written about my great-great-great-great. But it's based in your family history. Yeah, I mean, yeah, when I was,

“I remember I was worried about it, I was talking to my husband and he said to be honest, he said,”

you've got more right to write this than you have about 16th century England or Renaissance Lawrence, so I thought, oh yeah, that's true. That's true, but that way. So, you know, America is often called a country of immigrants. It's, it's a lot more complicated than that, but I don't want to get into that, but I was wondering what you think it means for Ireland to have such a history of immigration of so many people leaving like, how do you think that plays out in Irish identity?

and I've sure that's true. I think it's some, yeah, I mean, it's inevitable, you know, and I always

“think immigration is not, is usually at the heart of it a sad story, isn't it? And when I think about”

those people who left their homelands and not just Irish people everywhere in the 19th century or whatever, it was such an extraordinary thing to do. And I know some of them, it wasn't by choice, sort of particularly in Ireland, but, you know, it's such an extraordinary thing to leave your homeland, knowing that the people you're saying goodbye to, you will, in all likelihood, never see them again. And in a lot of cases, you wouldn't be able to communicate with them again if, you know, if you

happen to be literate of your family happened to our friends and family will literally, you could

potentially write to them, but that wasn't always the case. So, yeah, just, it's, it's,

it begs belief that you would say goodbye to your friends and family, and that was that, you wouldn't see them again. My guest is Maggie O'Ferrell. Her new novel is called Land. Her 2020 book Hamlet was recently made into a film of the same name. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This week on Consider This, the drama at CBS News, some of the most respected journalists in America say their corporate ownership is bowing to political

pressure. It's intimidation. They've created a climate of fear to make the news organization unwilling to tackle the problem and report to news. A lot of times 60 minutes correspond at Steve Croft this week on Consider This. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast. So, Maggie, your book Hamlet tells the story of Anus and William Shakespeare, the family they create, the death of their son Hamlet at the age of 11, we think, and the grief

that they suffer and the play that Shakespeare, Hamlet, that comes out of that grief. As a young person, you were obsessed with the play, is that right? Yes, I studied at school when I was 16 for my Scottish tyres, and I absolutely loved it. I felt right in a big way and it really got under my skin. I particularly loved the character of Hamlet who felt like sort of a brother to me in a sense.

“I think he appeals to a certain type of teenager. What's kind of emo, isn't it? The play?”

Yeah, just the continues to wear a lot of eye makeup. Hang a bang, graveyard, and that was definitely me at the time. How did your understanding of the play change? And Shakespeare changed when you learned that he had a son named Hamlet, that was a name at the time that was interchangeable with Hamlet, and that he wrote the play after the death of his son. I was very lucky in many ways that I had a particularly brilliant English literature teacher called Mr Henderson. And he told us as we were studying

for the play when we were 16 that Shakespeare had a son who had been called Hamlet, and that he died age 11, and that Shakespeare had gone on four years or so later to write the play Hamlet. And I was even though it was a really long way off from being a writer and a parent. This really struck me, and I remember putting my finger over the L of in Hamlet on my school copy and taking it off again, thinking that's strange because it's the same name. And I knew that it was, I knew that it was hugely

significant that nobody would casually give a play and a prince and a ghost, the name of his dead son. I have to admit that I found the book very hard to read because I knew going in that Hamlet was going to die, and it gave me this feeling of foreboding that I have often felt as a parent this sort of constant vigilance that something is going to go wrong that I need to be watching

out for it. And even like now in my kids are in their teens and twenties, that feeling never really

“goes away. And I was just wondering, were you trying to create that feeling in the reader?”

I think the engine behind me writing Hamlet was a dissatisfaction with the way Hamlet himself had been treated by scholars and biographers of Shakespeare. You read these incredible works of scholarship, these huge biographies about Shakespeare and Hamlet is lucky if he gets maybe one or two mentions. And his, the city was born and then they say that he died and his death is all too often for me anyway, wrapped up in statistics about Elizabeth and child mortality. Right, which seems to

try to soften the grief that people would feel. Yes, the implication is that because it was you know death that you were lucky in I think it was one and you had a one and five chance of reaching your fifth birthday in the 16th century in England. There was no shortage of things that could fill you, unfortunately. But the implication is that somehow it was less upsetting because you just had to get used to it. And I, I just never, I never believed that. And there was one

grieved when Hamlet died. And I was so furious about that, I threw it across the room, because I just, I just, I don't believe that anywhere in time, anywhere in the world is anything less than catastrophic to lose a child. I just don't believe it. Well, I mean, which is hard to imagine considering, like who wrote better about grief than Shakespeare? Well, yes, you just want to direct them say,

“have you read any of the things that you have to listen to, you know, constants in King John,”

talk about her, her son and him dying. You know, I mean, obviously, we, I think we all know that nonsense. You don't have to be a parent to know that nonsense. So I think I just wanted to,

and I always felt that Hamlet the boy had been relegated to a footnote in his very famous

father's story, and I wanted to bring him out of the shadows and say to the people, to read his, you know, this child was important, he was loved, he was grieved, and with that home, we would not have Hamlet, and we probably wouldn't have 12 night. You say that Hamlet is relegated to a footnote, Shakespeare's wife, Anne, or Anne, yes, I guess, the names were interchangeable, as well. Maybe had a slightly longer footnote, but not any better, correct? No, her footnotes were

quite unkind, I think. Yeah, again, scholars tended, have always tended to only tell us one story about

“her one narrative, which is that she was an older, peasant woman who was, who lured this boy”

genius into marriage, and they've, people have written things like that, he hated her, and he ran away to London to get away from her, he regretted their marriage, I mean, none of which there's any evidence for whatsoever. I couldn't really understand where all this hostility towards her came from, and why people are so determined in a way to give him a retrospective divorce, and actually I found a lot of evidence that they did not reach other, instead, so I wanted to

again, to write, to ask, invite readers to forget everything they think they know about Anne Hathaway,

which is always called, they don't know what, even though her name was Shakespeare for most of

her life, and just to say, actually, maybe they did love each other, maybe there's was a partnership. So, as I said, it was very hard for me to read Ham that sort of thinking about myself as a parent, did you have similar feelings writing it as a parent yourself? I did find writing the scenes of Ham's death and his, the subsequent scene, his laying out for burial, very hard to write, it's true I did, and I didn't write them in the house where my children live. I actually wrote them

in a really old shed in the garden, which is since blown down in the gale, and I had to do it instead of 10 or 15 minutes intervals, so I would write it, and then I would have a walk around the

garden to kind of decompress, and then I would go in again, and the two scenes probably took me

about a fortnight to write, and they were really hard, but I wanted them to be hard actually, partly because I felt his death had been so downplayed and overlooked and wrapped in statistics. I wanted it to give it the dignity I thought it deserved. May you are on the show in 2017, talking about your memoir, but I just had a couple chapters I wanted to talk to you about, if that's okay, one in which you talk about your childhood and

suffolitis that almost killed you, and left you with lifelong spatial challenges. One of the challenges that you dealt with was you were left with a stammer. You went to speech therapist in your 30s,

“I think, that seems to have helped a lot, and what did you learn from the therapy?”

So I started stammering as quite a young child, and when I was little, it manifested as the kind of plastic repeated syllable. And for a while, I think as a child, I remember thinking maybe no one else can hear this, because my family didn't react, but then it wasn't long until someone at school made fun of me, and I thought, "Oh, okay, no, they can't hear it." And by the time I was a teenager, somehow I did kind of morphed into this complete blockage. So if someone asked me a question,

I would almost, I think I was so, I didn't want that repeated syllable to happen, so I just kind of locked my throat. And so I did just, I would go completely silent and not be able to speak at all. And I think all stammerers have a collection of sounds that are problematic for them and them alone. The trigger of this stammer? Yeah, there's usually a kind of problem letter or a pronunciation or a diphthong or a collection of letters that's problematic. One of mine was M,

which is very tricky with two things. So actually what you learn to do at a very young age is you learn about the flexibility of language. So if somebody around that time asked me, "What's

sound, and I would just try to rush into it. So I would say, "You can call me Maggie," and hope that I was able just to vault over the problematic. You know, I don't think I would be

“right or unless I was also a stammerer. It gives you a huge sensitivity to language, and I think”

anyone, any child who does stammer or stutter, is able to come up generally with maybe seven

or eight synlims for a word in almost instantaneously. Because you're always looking for the

line of least verbal resistance. And in a conversation, even now, I still am thinking several interlocutions ahead, and I think, okay, well, if I want to avoid that sound or that word, which is really hard, even now I practice and practice and practice and practice any kind of public reading I have to do, and I have a special reading copy of my book, which I cross out words that are problematic, and I put notes to myself, or I remind myself when I need to breathe.

So you don't try to avoid those words when you're writing? No, that's one of the absolute joys of writing, honestly. So being a writer is, yeah, obviously being a stammerer and a writer helps you because you are, you can perform these, you've been performing grammatical and semantic gymnastics into a tiny, but also just I cannot express them the joy of typing and watching all those words, just coming at with nothing to stop them. It's even now, it gives me such a thrill.

So I decided, and actually I was 40 when I thought I really need to go and get some speech therapy, and what happened was that I was on a program of live radio in Britain, and someone asked me on air to read something in one of my books, and I was so terrible, because I was unexpected, I wasn't prepared, and there was a moment of absolute dead air where I couldn't get the words out, and the presenter was looking at me, and the producer was looking at me, and honestly, even now,

it's such a terrible, it's making me so terrible. Yes, exactly. It was horrible, and I came out that interview, and actually I remember thinking, I don't have to say name, I can just say she,

and then I did it, and it was okay, I got through it, but honestly, I've never quite recovered from that,

and so I'm sorry to bring her reading up on me. No, it's fine, because I've got it all I've got it all marked up, and I thought, okay, I really have to do something about it. So I did go to speech therapist, and she said to me, you know, what's the worst thing, and I said, well,

“it's the worst thing is if I stammer, and she said, but why? If you stammer, why's that so bad?”

Why is it so terrible that somebody knows? And she asked me to keep a stammering diary, and one of the weeks I went, I'd gone into a chemist to pick up a prescription, and they asked me my name, and I couldn't get it out, and they were in behind the count of laughter, and said, oh, if you've forgotten your own name, and I came out feeling, oh, so humiliated, and I told the speech therapist about this, and I said, this was a moment, which I stammered really badly, and she said, you need to

look that woman in the eye, and you say, I have a stammer, and she said, I want you to practice it now, say it to me, and so I said, I'm sorry, I have a stammer, and she said, no, no, don't apologize, just put it out there, and she said if the woman in the chemist can't cope with it, that's her problem, but you tell her, be upfront about it, and it was a good start, I mean, it's such a simple piece of advice, but I think, you know, as a child and as a teenager, you become so used to hiding

it, and so used to thinking, I need to conceal this from people, because people might find out, I have a stammer, and you know, it took me into the eye, it was 41, for someone to say, it's okay, just tell people, what does it mean though for you to have spent so much time

“like hiding this part of yourself, only to reveal it to thousands of people in a member?”

Well, I never really talked about it before, written about, I mean, I'd written about it

in fiction, I wrote about the illness, I gave it to someone else, I gave it to a character and someone else in one of my books called The Distance Between Us, which I suppose was I kind of start into thinking about it or analyzing it, but I think I realized that it isn't something, you know, as you get older, I think you realize that it, you can't really leave these cells behind, that they all travel along inside you, like there's metrochicodols, I suppose, but yeah,

I think you're attitude to these things changes all the time, doesn't it? The way wherever you are on the continuum of your life, you look at things differently. Well, Maggie Ofero, thank you so much for coming on today. That's my pleasure, thank you so much for having me again. Maggie Ofero's new book is called Land, she also wrote the novel Hamlet, which was made

into a film of the same name. Mary Beard taught classics for most of her life at Cambridge, but her career is also included popular television shows and books, the reach-a-wide audience. Our book critic Moring Corrigan says Beard's latest book, Talking Classics illuminates a lot about the ancient world and our own. Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye. That's a line from a Yates poem,

classic scholar Mary Beard. In her new book, called Talking Classics, Beard, who grew up middle class

“in an English village, recalls being taken as a child by her mother for her first visit to”

London in 1960. They wandered through the British Museum and stopped to see the mummies. Beard, however, became curious about a display case featuring every day objects, including a 4,000-year-old piece of bread. Beard's mother tried to lift her up for a closer look, but his beard confesses in the drool way that has endeared her to millions of readers and television

audiences. The attempt failed because I was a heavy and wiggly child. A long came a kindly curator

who drew keys out of his pocket unlock the case and held the ancient piece of bread in front of

“little Mary Beard's eyes. As Beard says, that experience was what the ancient Greeks would have”

called a moment of thama, meaning wonder or wonderment. I don't think it's fanciful to say that Mary Beard has spent her life unlocking the deep past and encouraging thama in the rest of us. Most of Talking Classics is drawn from four lectures Beard gave at the University of Chicago in 2023. If the word lectures makes you want to head for an exit door, you don't know Mary Beard's style. This is a public intellectual who uses terms like slimebag to describe Medias husband and to

advise as everyone to dial down the highest reverence when considering the ancient world. Beard also

“has little love for the exclusionary side of studying the classics or for those conservative”

traditionalists, she dubs the column crowd who want to erect classical architecture and contemporary cities because of the authority it appears to exude. One of the many hard questions Beard considers in this book is whether classical architecture and statutory are irredeemably tainted by the uses to which they've been put by say Mussolini or today's far-right racist groups. Beard reminds us that there's also radical disruptive power in the classics.

Among the revolutionary she names with more than a foothold in classics are Carl Marks Nelson Mandela

Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale. The overarching question about the ancient world that structures Beard's slim little book and her life's work is one that she says was very nearly drummed out of me when I was a student. What on earth was it like to be there? I'd say it's also the question that powers the geyser of contemporary reimaginings of the ancient world. Among them novels like the song of Achilles and Searsy, both by Madeleine Miller, as well as the forthcoming Christopher

Nolan film The Odyssey. As much as she treasures connection with the deep past, Beard cautions us that the classical world is also unthinkingly alien, sometimes almost incomprehensible. It goes right down to everyday ideas about the body, the self, and to such basic questions as who am I? Don't forget Beard says that most people in antiquity would have no clue what they look like except from their wavering reflection in a pool of water or from a dull outline on a piece

of polished bronze or silver. No wonder so many ancient jokes hinged on issues of mistaken identity. The payoff to put it bluntly of studying classics and more broadly of a humanity's education is, according to Beard, best encapsulated in a phrase she gleaned from a colleague who said, classics teaches you to read difficult things. Beard goes on to elaborate that in a global environment of fact dodging, misreporting conspiracy theories, fake news, and outright lies,

skills in reading difficult things are those that the world most needs.

offers readers plenty to chew on. More in Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed talking classics by Beard. Coming up we hear from Elizabeth Storedoor prior, a history professor at Smith College and the daughter of legendary comedian Richard prior. This is Fresh Air Weekend. This week on NPR's NewsMakers, former First Lady Jill Biden. She reveals Joe Biden's 2024 debate performance was so alarming. Doctors checked him after he got

“off the stage. I was terrified I thought oh my god what's happening. Is this a stroke? What is this?”

Inside the dramatic month that followed leading to one of the biggest decisions of Biden's presidency to walk away. This week on NewsMakers you can listen to watch wherever you get your podcasts. Our co-host Tony Mosley has the next interview. Here she is. About a decade ago, my guest, Elizabeth Storedoor prior, was on the road as one of the country's leading scholars of the most charge, racial slur in American English, the inward.

A history professor at Smith College, prior was giving lectures on the inward and the use of it during slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and the hip hop generation. But every night, after the lectures ended, she'd have this weird reoccurring dream about her father, saying something

“to her that she couldn't quite understand. Her father is the late Richard prior, the legendary”

comedian who in the 70s took this divisive word and made it the engine of his standup. Here he is in 1968 and his first comedy album with a bit about a black superhero.

And I always thought when he never had a hero, black hero, and I always wanted to go to movies

and see him black hero. I figured out maybe someday I'm television now have it, man. I could see I'm television now come out. It's a mess. No, it's super f*cking hell. And yet for all of Richard prior's influence on American comedy and music and culture, his daughter Elizabeth never told a single audience in her academic circles that prior was her father.

Her new book, something we said, Richard prior, a notorious word in me,

is part memoir, part history of a word that her father laid in his career swore he'd never say again,

and that his daughter has been trying to understand ever since. Elizabeth, welcome to fresh air. Hi, thank you so much for having me. You're leading scholar. In the in-word, your father is probably one of the most famous people ever to use the word in his stand-up and here you are living this life not telling anyone that he was

your father. I actually want you to read excerpt from the book. The first time you told folks,

“it was at a Smith Talk and it was 2016 so not that long ago. Can I have you read that passage?”

Sure. I started with a joke. Out of nowhere, an eager student in my class asked, have you seen blazing saddles, then I leaned forward with a pst, which was funny because my father, who happens to be Richard prior, co-wrote the movie, the audience roared. It was the first time I'd ever said publicly that I was

Richard prior's daughter. I wasn't just revealing a family connection. My father was an essential

part of the work I was doing. He used his platform to influence public discourse about American racism and to use the inward to do it. Thank you for reading that. Why did it take you so long Elizabeth to tell folks your dad's Richard prior? I mean that's a great question. I think I was the last person to know that this connection mattered. I kept you know feeling that feeling of coincidence. And the end of his life had been really hard and painful. I kind of wanted to keep it to myself.

I didn't want to hear those recurring overtures that people made. They became overly intimate and asking me about the relationship that was fraught and complicated so I kept it close to the chest. I was also wondering to be a child of a famous person and someone as famous as Richard prior. There has to also be an identity issue too, right? You're your own person in academia and

I felt like if I was going to own my father, it had to be organic and real. Like I didn't feel comfortable just bragging about it, even though I should have. I mean, there's a lot to brag about there but it just wasn't my nature. I wanted it to make sense if I was talking about him and this is what this journey was all about it and it made sense. I mean I was a

“scholar of the N word and so obviously is he? What had been your relationship with the N word?”

Had you ever used it? Had you heard it in your life? What was your relationship to it? I mean I had the super complicated relationship to it. My mother was white. My father was obviously

black and Richard prior. He used it on stage. One of the first meaningful conversations I ever

had with him as a little girl. He told me don't let nobody ever call you that and then he used it and then his friends used it and I was trying to figure that out. So and then I would hear different reactions of people in my life using it like for example, like kids on the school yard. But the teachers didn't tell them to, you know, they didn't get in trouble the way they did with other swear words and yet to me this was the worst swear word because my father said don't

let anybody ever call you that. This is something you better knock somebody out if they use with you and you've got to not only protect yourself but other black people too. He's telling you don't let anybody ever call you that and yet there is the some might say the hypocrisy or the contradiction

“that then he uses the word in a subversive way. I mean I think it's really important to emphasize”

that when I'm saying that he used the word that it was in the subversive way. That it was the language of protest and that he was building on a black tradition of protest that black people had used this word kind of as a you know a slap in the face to white racism. You know we know how to take our punches and our knocks and and we're not afraid of this thing that you're trying to demean us as and so bringing that use the way that black people perceived of the and we're

onto stage was really powerful in the 1970s. People weren't really doing that but always as a

form of resistance and protest not in the way that you know white racist had traditionally used the word. I should also say for the audience we're saying the inward but that was not a phrase that

“was even used back then you know we're doing that because we can't say the word on air and we you”

know we don't generally say the word but it's really interesting how how that phrase the inward has become the way that we we can describe it which is fairly new right. I mean yeah I had a really funny conversation with my daughter who was born in 1998 and when she was in college she went to a college about a half an hour from the college where I teach Smith College and she would come over and we'd do homework together. So I had a bunch of things pinned on the wall for this research

and one of them was when did people first started saying the phrase the inward and she said to me mom what do you mean when did people first start using the phrase the inward and I was like what

do you mean when did people start because and I asked my students to and they never dawned on them

that this wasn't something I didn't grow up with that it's that people either said the end word or they didn't but they didn't say the phrase the inward right but my children grew up in an era where there's a surrogate phrase to replace it and that that puts you in different relationship with with that word and the meaning of that word. So it was really interesting and I discovered that you know the big turning point was the OJ Simpson trial really. I mean black

black activists had been using the phrase the inward and the late 80s and early 90s but the OJ Simpson trial and some pretrial motions is what put that phrase on the map. Yeah it became then part of the lexicon to use that phrase and so when I watched the news clippings from them there are newscasters white newscasters on the news just saying the end word the actual word before that ABC news you know just saying it your father he was born in

peoria he was raised in a brothel his mother worked in the brothel he washed his father beat his mother he was abused his mother left when he was 10 and he he put that all together in a way that like no one had ever seen before where we were laughing almost to keep from crying. When did you first come to see or understand that your father had these broken parts of him? Honestly I think it was

me you know your father was raised in a brothel. I don't remember him ever saying that to me. I mean

I certainly wasn't introduced to my great grandmother you know this is this is mama she's a madam she runs a brothel right this is my great grandmother you know she you know cooked great food

“and was mean like that's that's what I knew about her um but I do think in part it was the process”

of writing this book like there was something about my memories that had been locked in childhood I don't know if this makes sense to people but I had only ever coming contact with them as like the 11 year old and it was as a woman as a professor as a mother myself that I came to this to understand like holy moly like it's not the sex work because like I think there are a lot of people who are raised around sex work and you know have their stories to tell as children but it was

the vulnerability of that for him that he didn't know how to navigate it and the brilliance of being able to tell those stories to people and make them funny and not just funny like laughing me but also universal like people could relate like oh about parenting like he described his father as an 11 o'clock inward because he had to be home by 11 o'clock even though the party didn't start till 11 thirty you know like you know everybody could relate to that but he was describing

a very harsh and scary man when he did there's this tender moment where you were 11 years old and there's this palm that you written for his thirty eighth birthday he asked you to read it to the family can I have you read it now sure my daddy is the famous Richard prior

yes how famous how famous of course I love him and I'll always be proud but I really get sick of

“all the crowds I think he spends all his day long trying to help someone who started out wrong”

he never seems happy though always so sad now they remember him that he's cool and he's bad he's got the money to do what he wants some people want the money to do what they want they heard him they slap him inside out but that doesn't matter because he's Richard prior no doubt it doesn't matter it's the money that counts this is a story so sad and so true he has trouble picking his friends and that makes him blue my daddy oh that's my guest Elizabeth prior reading

a palm she wrote for her dad Richard prior when she was 11 years old he was so moved by it he carried it in his pocket for weeks you now is a woman reading this and knowing the totality of who he was now through this new lens why do you think he was so moved from it aside from the fact that you are his daughter I don't know I'm thinking that I haven't really thought about this before but I feel like my father had a superpower of really being able to see people really being able

to see them and understand them you know and I feel like maybe he felt seen too and that was

“important to him as a person who could see there's a pivotal moment in your father's career”

where he he visits Africa the continent he goes to several places Kenya and Nairobi and this is 1982 that he comes back and he decides to get on stage and talk about this experience and told the world what he decided regarding the use of the inward let's listen and I was sitting in the hotel and a voice that to me said look around what do you see and I said I see all colors of people doing everything you know and the voice that do you see any I said no I said you know why I

cost that or any and it hit me like a shot no sitting I said yeah I've been in three weeks I haven't even said it I haven't even thought it and it made me say oh my god I've been wrong I've been wrong

I got to regroup I mean I said I ain't gonna never call another black man you know because we never

was no that's the word that's used to describe our own wretchedness and we perpetuated now because that was Richard prior in 1982 and oh gosh Elizabeth he built his career on that word and

moment mean for you oh I remember being so proud of it I felt like I felt like we were finally

like online in this particular way because for me as a biracial person the end word I always knew

it wasn't my word certainly the way black people used it with each other and I longed for that not that the word is so great but there's something happening when black people are using it together that is great did you ever try I did I did with my black friends and they were like do

“not do that anymore you do not have the flow you must stop but I felt yeah I was proud of it”

I felt proud of it did you guys ever talk about it we didn't talk about my feelings about it but my father did tell me right he made a point of telling me so in that way I think it was important for him but not necessarily about what it meant when he was on stage doing it because that felt like it was for all black people to me you know um he started to get sick around the time that hip hop really was making it's ascension but you know it was being used the word was

becoming part of the vernacular what do you think he would think about the next generation in the way that it was used I mean because he also didn't get a chance to see say someone like Kendrick Lamar win a Pulitzer Prize which is a whole another level of acknowledgement to the purpose of the use of the word beyond it just being a filler word you know right I mean I'm not gonna pretend to know what my father would think but I will say that one of the things I admire about that moment

when he disavows the word is he said this is for me I'm not telling you what to do you know

“this is for me and I think there is a piece where he understood that the word had a function in black”

culture he does talk about though as an artist like losing control of what the word was doing like he was trying to do something good by doing that and then it did take on a life of its own how has teaching this word changed for you now that you've gone through this this process

teaching the word is still incredibly difficult I have to say the conversations are always hard

but I feel like it's important because my students walk away knowing that this is not a conversation like I said about free speech it's really about how how we interact how we want to bring is

“many people as we can to the table and if we do that that means that we're going to be thinking”

about who we're sitting at the table with and how things will impact them a little bit the storter prior thank you so much for this conversation and thank you for this book thank you so much it was a pleasure Elizabeth storter prior's new book is something we said Richard prior a notorious word and me she spoke with Tanya Mosley fresh air weekend is produced by Theresa Madden our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham

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