Morris

Who Is Morris?

Morris takes a journey through several generations of a remarkable and resilient family, following them over more than 60 years, chronicling how they dealt with growing up in the face of loss, adversity, and tragedy, as well as with triumph. The result of editing together numerous personal journals, Morris documents their individual experiences of life, love, and relationships as they struggled to gain acceptance, fight discrimination, and overcome the attitudes and prejudices of their times with regard to race, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, and politics.

Beginning in the summer of 1965, this starts as a school assignment made to a then-teenaged Jessie Peterson as he made a point of constantly complaining to everyone about how boring and backward life is in his sleepy small town on the Florida Panhandle. Jessie dreams of when he would be able to get away and see the world, but circumstance and the reality of his family's needs conspire against those dreams and set up obstacles, as he endures to build his own life and tries to find happiness. He then encourages his daughter as the next generation to begin chronicling her own life and the issues that she faces, which she then passes on to her children as they come of age to do the same, even as we continue to follow Jessie, his siblings, their families, and their extended families from their teens to adulthood, to being parents, and eventually as grandparents.

When at one point an adult Jessie is asked whom he has been writing his journal to, he replies, "If not to myself, I would be writing to Morris." Hence the title. A nonspeaking character, Morris is part of everyone's lives and stories, contributing to the overall context and continuity without writing or uttering a single word. But he is as much a member of this family as anyone else. He's always there silently, as part of the thread that helps weave the fabric of all their lives and adventures together.

But just who is Morris?