About the Film
The Morris Chronicle started out as a film to document a 93-year-old barbecue master--Morris Peeples--as he cooks a hog in the old fashioned way, the way that farmers in the Springfield community in South Carolina have long cooked in this Edisto River region in Barnwell County. This film opens with 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 lives with his 52 year old wife, Faye. 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 men who are members of the hunt club and 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 his.
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 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 a love for people so infectious that it draws the young and the old to him.
