The Morris
Chronicle is completed after
nearly four years in the
making!
"In
pursuit of documenting the old fashioned way of slow-cooking a Hog
in a pit dug in the sand in Barnwell County as my ancestors once
did, I ran across a gentleman named Morris Peeples. And is the case
so often in my folklife documentaries, this film became more than a
film about a South Carolina folk heritage foodway and traditional
cooking by a folk foodways artisan. I have often found
that when I enter into the folk culture by way of
documenting food traditions I find myself immersed in that
culture and it's relationships in ways that tell a much larger story
- but in ways that tell that story from the inside out. This is
an intimate kind of filmmaking. It requires much trust between me as
chronicler and my subject as storyteller. And as food is connected
intimately to life, we end up being intimately connected
to aspects of life within the folk culture that we didn't go
looking
for."
- Stan Woodward,
Producer/Director
Morris
Peeples is a film that sets out to document a 93
year-old barbecue master as he cooks a hog in the old
fashioned way - the way that farmers in the Springfield community in
South Carolina have cooked in this Edisto River region in
Barnwell County. This film starts out to be about Morris
setting aside a hog for a BBQ requested by an attorney in
Barnwell - his attorney. As we move linearly through the cooking of
the barbecue, we learn that Morris is supervisor and honorary member
of a hunt club that in what Morris calls "the Big House" about 300
yards from his sharecropper house, where he and his 52 year old
wife, Faye, live. When Morris takes us to the "Big House", we
become connected to a story of the relationship between the
landowner who began the hunt club, Morris Peeples, and the men
who are members of the hunt club who spend weekend outings at
the "Big House" The Hatiola Hunt in which Morris is an honorary
member brings Morris together with men whose Southern roots are
entertwined with Morris's.
Morris lived
the life of a sharecropper. He is a man who inherited
almost supernatural strength - on the inside and the outside - from
his father, as well as a knowledge of the soil and how to get
the most out of it that earned him the reputation of being
able to get more quality product out of an acre of land than anyone
else in the county. He is a sage - a man whom his brothers and
their sons in The Hatiola Hunt club seek out for wisdom ,as well as
a zest for living. As we come into Morris's life we find a
person with the love for people that is so infectuous that it
draws the young and the old
to him.
This documentary was made
possible by a grant from the SC Arts Commission Folklife and
Traditional Arts program awarded to community sponsor, The
Lexington County Histaorical Society and Museum, Lexington,
SC
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