I Called Him Morgan
Thursday, Feb. 6, 7 p.m., free
Provident1898, Durham
Jazz griot, writer, radio announcer, lecturer, and activist Larry Reni Thomas is a gadfly who has no problem telling naysayers and haters alike to kiss his ass.
Thomas, a native of Wilmington, created the blog Carolina Jazz Connection, which spotlights more than 75 jazz musicians with ties to this state.
“Tell ‘em I gave at the office,” Thomas quips when asked what he is willing to do for the cause of freedom nowadays. Still, the tall, conscious soldier continues giving to the cause, by any means necessary.
Thomas’s book The True Story Behind The Wilmington Ten figures prominently in Wilmington on Fire, a documentary that screened in the coworking space Provident1898’s monthly Wonderland Film Series in November. Director Chris Everett’s documentary explores the racial massacre that engulfed the coastal city in 1898, when armed white supremacists with the Democratic Party targeted African Americans with violence that conservative estimates say left at least 60 dead and hundreds more injured. Thousands of African Americans fled the city and never returned. It was the overthrow of a legally elected biracial government.
Now, for the second time in recent months, Thomas’s work is on screen in Durham. “The Woman Who Shot Lee Morgan,” his 2007 news story that later became a book, informs the 2016 Netflix film I Called Him Morgan, which traces the life of the fiery-hot young trumpeter through the memories of his common-law wife, Helen Morgan, who killed him. The film will be shown on Thursday, Feb. 6 at Provident1898.
Morgan was only 33 in February 1972, when his wife shot him in the chest at Slug’s, a jazz nightclub in Manhattan.
Born in 1926 in Brunswick County, Helen Morgan was an attractive, bronze-skinned talker who gave birth to her first child at 13 and her second at 14. She left the children with her grandparents and moved to Wilmington to be near her mother. When she was 17, she married a bootlegger who was thrice her age.
In the Netflix film, Helen claimed her first husband’s drowning was behind her move to New York, but Thomas says he spoke with her oldest son, Harrison Morgan, who said family lore held that Helen killed her first husband, too.
In 1945, the 19-year-old widow moved to New York, where her late husband’s family lived. She met Lee Morgan, her future common-law husband, in the late 1960s, when he had gone from being a 16-year-old prodigy trading solos with Dizzy Gillespie, and working with John Coltrane and Art Blakey, to an addict strung out on heroin. It was Blakey who reportedly introduced Morgan to heroin.
One day, Benny Green, the trombone player, brought Lee by Helen’s house, “and for some kind of reason my heart just went out to him,” she told Thomas. The struggling horn player was the same age as her oldest son. “I asked him, why didn’t he have a coat?” Morgan added. “And he told me he didn’t have a coat ‘cause it was in the pawn shop. He had pawned his coat for some drugs. I told him, ‘Well come on, I am going to get your coat!’”
Helen got his coat out of the pawn shop, and later picked up his horn, too. Before fatally shooting Lee, she had been credited with rejuvenating his career, doing everything from ironing his shirts to handling his bookings and travel arrangements—and, for the most part, helping him to stay clean.
Lee Morgan had started spending time with another woman, Judith Johnson. In the early morning hours of February 19, 1972, between sets at Slug’s, Lee argued with his wife about Johnson, who was also at the jazz club that night. Lee threw Helen out; she came back in and shot him. She told Thomas that she then panicked and threw the gun on the counter. Pure pandemonium broke out, and the bar’s occupants fled. The police arrived as Helen sat there in a daze. A blizzard had hit the city, and it was an hour before an ambulance arrived. Lee Morgan bled to death. His wife was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and given a brief prison sentence.
In 1978, after she was released from prison, Helen Morgan moved back to Wilmington. She met Thomas around 1988, while sitting in the front row of a class about world civilization that he was teaching at the old Williston High School.
“She wasn’t academically smart, but she was streetwise,” Thomas says in the film.
Thomas says that during the first class he gave all of his students his bio and encouraged them to write their own. When Morgan saw her teacher’s background in jazz, she exclaimed to him, “Oh, I love jazz. By the way, my husband was a jazz musician.”
Thomas said he knew that her last name was Morgan, but he was hesitant to make the connection. Still, he asked Helen Morgan her husband’s name and she told him.
“And we looked at each other and she knew that I knew. I told her, ‘I’d like to interview you one day.’”
She agreed, but the interview did not happen until eight years later, when she called.
Thomas meant to do at least one more interview with Helen Morgan. But she died the next month, of heart failure.
Contact staff writer Thomasi McDonald at tmcdonald@indyweek.com.
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