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gan what he thought of the incident.
“What did I think about it?” he said.
“I went through it!”
In 2011, Morgan was onstage in Nash-
ville, Tennessee, and talked about how
he would react if his son told him that
he was gay. That might be O.K., Mor-
gan reportedly said, but his son better
tell him “like a man and not in a gay
voice, or I’ll pull out a knife and stab
that little nigga to death.” Discomfort
with homosexuality has popped up in
Morgan’s act from the beginning, but
the violence of the comment was un-
usual for him, and disturbing. He ended
up going back to Nashville to visit with
gay youth and to give a tearful, apolo-
getic press conference.
What were his feelings about this ex-
perience now, years later?
“Just jokes,” he said. “I talk about
everybody!”
Earlier, he’d told me a story about one
of his first standup gigs, in a community
center on Webster Avenue, in the Bronx.
Back then, he said, he didn’t have any
jokes; he’d just get onstage and poke fun
at members of the audience. One night,
he called out “this Puerto Rican girl” at
random, made fun of her, and moved on,
thinking little of it. “All I knew how to
do was attack,” he said. After the show,
he saw her crying in the parking lot. He
resolved never to use his comedy as “a
bully pulpit,” he said—only to help, to
edify. “I said I’d never use the microphone
to hurt anybody.” Comedy was supposed
to be a tonic.
Now, though, he was indulging anger
at the cultural moment. “P.C. taught us
how to lie,” he said. “Instead of telling a
motherfucker his breath stink, you wanna
offer him some gum. You’re around him
every day. You gotta deal with this shit—
you love him!—but his breath smell like
shit. His breath smell like eight cans of
orca shit. Sixteen cases of camel shit!”
He’d worked himself into a state of
agitation. His assistant, Lucas, appeared,
and, as he stepped into the room, may
have closed the door a little loudly.
“Don’t slam my door!” Morgan said.
“You’ll scare my sharks.” Lucas looked
confused but unlikely to protest. “Please,”
Morgan went on. “I don’t need them
running into nothing. Don’t do that.
Ease the door closed like this”—he
opened and shut it with incredible del-
icacy—“because otherwise you scaremy sharks, and they hit the sides, then
they die. Don’t ever do that again, Luke.”
He turned back to me. “Politics ain’t
nothing but poli-tricks,” he said. “I don’t
give a fuck—I ain’t never voted in my
life! I don’t give a fuck about Presidents
and all that other shit. You know why?
I’m down with the fucking King. I don’t
give a fuck who you voted for. When
your room’s ready, your
room is ready. When He’s
ready to meet you, He’s
gonna meet you. You ain’t
gotta get hit by no truck.
You ain’t gotta get shot. You
ain’t gotta get stabbed. Just
simply lay down in your bed
and not wake up! It hap-
pens every day!
“So your best bet is to run
your fucking race. White,
black, male, female, straight, gay—I love
you, motherfucker, and ain’t shit you can
do about it. Only thing you can do about
it is love me back.”S
ince the crash and the coma, Mor-
gan has been going to therapy. “You
take a bump on the head like that, you
gotta go talk to somebody,” he said. We’d
finished in the pool house and gone back
to the office. It has taken work for Mor-
gan to forgive the driver of the Walmart
truck, and to grieve for his friend. It’s
taken work, too, to forgive himself. Under
other circumstances, his wife and young
daughter might have been in the car with
him. Maven was only ten months old at
the time of the accident; Megan had kept
her home because she was teething.
“My doctor tries to tell me not to beat
up on myself, but, if you must beat your-
self up, don’t use a bat—use a feather,”
he said.
It was reported while Morgan was in
a coma that his mother, having learned
about the crash from TV news, had come
to see him in the hospital and had been
told to leave. Morgan said that she was
turned away only because no visitors were
being allowed at that time. She came
back the next day, and was able to spend
a few minutes at his bedside, but he was
not yet conscious. When he woke up,
their estrangement continued.
Recently, though, his mother fell sick,
and his brother called to tell him. He
sat with the knowledge for a while, then
headed into Manhattan for a sessionwith his therapist, a black man named
Henry McCurtis. “We’re very close,”
Morgan said, of McCurtis. “We had a
session, and I told him what was going
on with my mom. At first, he didn’t say
anything—just looked at me. He lis-
tened, just like you. Piercing eyes.” They
left the topic and discussed other things.
But then, toward the end of the ses-
sion, McCurtis leaned in, a
bit closer to Morgan’s face.
Morgan recalled him say-
ing, “Yo, what kind of son
would you be if you let your
mom go out like that?”
“From his office, on Cen-
tral Park West, all the way
until I got on the bridge, I
was crying, crying, crying,
crying,” Morgan went on.
“My brother gave me my
mother’s number; I called her. She said,
‘Hello.’ I said, ‘Hey, Ma.’ She said, ‘Who’s
this?’ I said, ‘Your son Tracy.’ She dropped
the phone and started screaming. I
couldn’t take that, so I hung up. I called
her back a half hour later and we started
talking. I told her, ‘Thank you, Mommy.’
‘For what?’ ‘For having me.’”
Before I arrived at his house, Mor-
gan had queued up a scene for me to
watch from the movie “First Sunday,” a
2008 comedy that was directed by the
black playwright and filmmaker David E.
Talbert and mostly starred black actors.
Morgan had a leading role, opposite the
rapper and actor Ice Cube. He pressed
Play, and we saw LeeJohn, Morgan’s
character, talking to a kindly church lady
named Sister Doris, a sort of mother
figure, played by Loretta Devine. They
shared a meal, and LeeJohn told Sister
Doris how sad he’d been as a kid never
to have had a birthday party. He’d been
a foster child. “This is one of my favor-
ite scenes from my career,” Morgan told
me. “This right here is when I knew I
could act—knew I had chops.”
Onscreen, LeeJohn began to cry. “Most
actors can’t eat and cry at the same time,”
Morgan said. Sister Doris started to sing
to LeeJohn. “Look at me!” Morgan said.
“I’m already in a dark place. I’m already
in pieces. Thinking! In a dark place in
my life.” LeeJohn kept crying, and, watch-
ing himself, Morgan started to cry, too.
“This movie was so fucking under-
rated,” he said, just before he turned
it off. Fact Cunningham Tracy Morgan 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508104.indd 43 5/3/19 5:35 PM