The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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hildhood in the

sant. Jimmy and Alice grew up in the

Tompkins Houses, too, and knew each

other as kids. Alice was from a family

of strict Jehovah’s Witnesses. After they

got together, Jimmy served multiple tours

in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, and

he returned hooked on heroin. Two years

later, Alice discovered her oldest son,

Jim, playing with a needle he’d found

on the floor, and asked Jimmy to leave.

He ended up moving to the Bronx.

“I Am the New Black” is raunchy

and funny, but it is also sometimes star-

tlingly dark; its overriding theme is

trauma, though Morgan never uses that

word. His brother Jim contracted spi-

nal meningitis as a toddler, and lost the

use of his legs. ( Jim’s childhood nick-

name was Reality.) When Morgan was

eight, he writes, a fourteen-year-old

babysitter, whom he doesn’t name, had

“real sex” with him and with Jim. “I don’t

think that girl molested us,” Morgan

says now. “She was just inquisitive. She

was a good person.” In the memoir, he

describes crying afterward, and explains

that the girl “gave me a stack of Oreo

cookies to keep me quiet. It wasn’t the

only time it happened either,” he writes.

“Damn. Memories.”

Morgan started having sex with some

frequency at the age of twelve, and says

that he has been obsessed with sex ever

since. (One of his favorite ways to warm

up a standup crowd is to shout—less

as braggadocio than as a matter of in-

evitable, shrugged-at fact—that he’s

“going to get somebody pregnant to-

night.” ) Alice had three more kids after

Jim and Tracy, and she struggled to raise

the five of them alone. At thirteen, Mor-

gan left home, determined to live with

his dad. For two nights, he says, he slept

in subway cars, riding between Brook-

lyn and the South Bronx, unsure how

his father would react if he appeared.

He showed up at his father’s doorstep

“smelling like ass,” he writes. “Just a

confused teenage son who’d left his

mother’s home two hours away in Coney

Island with no plan.” Morgan lived with

his father for the next two years. His

mother kept him in school in Brook-

lyn, so he spent hours commuting each

day. Eventually, there was a custody

hearing. Morgan describes the judge,

“this old white man,” inviting him and

two of his younger siblings, Paris and

Asia, into his chambers, and asking

them which parent they wanted to live

with. They said that they wanted to live

with their dad. When the judge in-

formed the parents of his verdict, Alice

“yelled that they were taking her babies

away, and she cried like I’d never seen

her do before or since,” Morgan writes.

Later, he and his mother stopped speak-

ing, and they went years without see-

ing each other. In the memoir, he writes,

“Everything I’ve done in my career is

because I wanted my mother’s love.”

Morgan reads the audio version of “I

Am the New Black,” and he ad-libs and

elaborates throughout, veering into ex-

temporaneous rumination on his expe-

riences. At one point, he says, almost ca-

sually, “Another devastating day in my

life was when I learned my father had

AIDS.” Jimmy died when Morgan was

nineteen years old. (His father’s broth-

er-in-law Alvin, who played football in

college and was Morgan’s childhood

sports idol, also died of AIDS.) By then,

many of Morgan’s friends had entered

the drug trade, and he decided to try

his hand at it, too. Among his haunts

was the old Yankee Stadium, where he

scalped tickets and sold cocaine and sou-

venirs. On a spring day in 1987, as the

Yankees played the Minnesota Twins,

Morgan saw “this bomb-ass chick on a

pay phone,” he writes. He tells a friend,

“I could pull her like a hamstring.” He

struck up a conversation with the woman,

whose name was Sabina, and they soon

“THATTHE EARTHISSUSPENDED... ”

As scilla prinks out, purple, from half-thawed clods

and the cardinal flings his ribbon of song

in two high arcs, then trails the vibrato among the boughs

May unclenches. But not enough.

Buds grip fetal leaves. Each night

scatters frost. On sidewalks we tread on broken sky.

You are sick, and far away. The world is in flux

said Anaximander: worlds are born, appear,

and disappear. We perish, even the gods

fade. Spare me the industrial daffodils

poking through scraps of snow. The season will have

its hard birth, and we will be dragged

into light. For how many years

has that ill corroded your gut? Whirlwinds, typhoons

break out of the cloud, the tearing makes thunder, the crack

against black makes the flash. So natural

philosophy began. You watched glaciers slide

and crash at the tip of the earth, you floated on a rope

into ice crevasses to catch the gleam

and the groan. Ice sculpted the planet,

and sculpts it still: you hammered aluminum

into that shape. The stars are a wheel of fire

broken off from earth fire, surrounded by air.

We came from the unlimited, to it we return. So taught

Anaximander of Miletus, who thought we would be destroyed.

—Rosanna Warren

Fact Cunningham Tracy Morgan 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508104.indd 35 5/3/19 5:35 PM