Author: Morris J. Peavey Jr
Title: MAH & FAMILY VALUES
Born: July 21, 1945
Bio: Morris J. Peavey, Jr.
MAH & FAMILY VALUES are
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES from the mind of
Morris J. Peavey, Jr.

Born the third of four children in a time when the world was at war and men were creating atomic bombs and kamikaze was more than just a word.  His mother Leona was a very intelligent daughter of a rail splitter turned farmer.  His grandfather Robert Bland ford was the first man he remembers and a strong black man he was.  Morris J. Peavey, Jr. was sent to Blanton Florida with his aunts and uncles to live on his grandfather’s farm because his mother Leona was institutionalized when his younger brother was just one month old.
	He recalled his mother’s beautiful face from old pictures which his aunts had displayed.  There were always pictures of the aunts with long page boy do ez and bangs with the white gardenia.  The picture setting which intrigued him most was the picture of Leona posing and looking off into the void with a gleeful look of knowing on her face.  Since she was taken from the family when Morris J. was one year eight months old some would say he was orphaned at that age. Leona’s leaving was something strange to him and his missing her was enchanted by the images burned into his mind by the picture.  He did not see his mother of father until he was about 13 years old.
	His father was a strong man who had taken his family to Newark, NJ in the early 40’s just before WWII.  He had worked as a janitor in Miami and went north to find a better job.  Morris Peavey had come from a family of business owners.  His sister Ocelia was a hair dresser; his oldest brother, Horace, was a general contractor who built houses; brother Walter was a bartender at the Red Rooster on South Orange Ave in Newark and the youngest brother, Earl was a member of  New York finest. His father became a road construction worker and helped build the Holland Tunnel. But something went wrong in Newark between the time Morris J and his youngest brother Eric’s was born.
	Since he was raised by his mother’s family one would not call him an outright orphan but he grew up with a strange feeling of belonging somewhere else.  Morris J or as his friends called him Peavey was just what he was in a word.  In a world of intolerance he was sure to be tolerated.  But when he went to Newark and saw his mother at Greystone Hospital in her drab grey dress with large bulky pig tails on her head he began to see the world in even a more distance view.  Her pain was still and dark and deep.  It was all about eyes and when he met her to know his mother he understood why.
	Leona Peavey was released from the mental facility after 40 years but never quiet come to the sense of accepting the game.  Her state was catatonic and when she wanted to be heard it turned to what is termed manic.  From this intense door way which had allowed his human being, he comes to see a world of magic.  The clear understanding about the possibilities of success and failure and the human dynamics which controlled the journey was his greatest fascinations’.  MAH and FAMILY VALUES was written soon after his mother had wandered off from a nursing home in Stone Mountain Georgia and froze to death in the snow.  He had long before understood the idea of a seed, the sprout and the full grown tree.  His mother’s struggle to be seen, and heard had failed and the seed of her being had become catatonic from the beginning.  Where she had been was the place where she lay in the end.
	When his sister come to ask him for a word he Spoke for Leona as she existed within him!

His words became MAH & Family VAlues