Told in Fight On, My Soul
A Virginia man’s fight against poverty, disease, and discrimination forms the background of Fight On, My Soul, a new biography released this month by The Write Place.
Set largely in rural Lancaster County, Virginia, Fight On, My Soul tells the story of Morgan E. Norris, one of Virginia’s first black physicians, who believed in himself enough to overcome the daily struggles of his life and his time. Told by his son, this meticulously researched biography is a moving story that captures Norris’s struggle to provide better conditions for his family and beloved patients. The author adeptly details Norris’s life as he shifts between defiance and diplomacy to obtain his goals.
“Initially, my intention was simply to gather some information about my father to share with my family,” said author James E. C. Norris. “But after nearly a decade of research, I started crafting this biography of my father for a larger audience. He was classed as a mulatto when he was born in 1883, a colored laborer at age 17, and a Negro doctor in 1917. He lived most of his life during the Jim Crow era, a systematic suppression of blacks by whites that could not be complete without those labels.”
From early on, Morgan E. Norris saw and experienced suffering. He lost his mother to tuberculosis when he was just a toddler. After his father died of cancer and his stepmother couldn’t take him in, Norris was left on his own when he was 17 years old.
Norris could have chosen to go with the flow, to move north to less conflicted environs, or even pass for white. But for Norris, none of these choices fit. He chose first to become educated and then to return to boyhood home in remote Virginia. In doing so, he fulfilled a pledge he had made to his dying father: to become a doctor and make sure no one in his little insular community would suffer as his father had.
In telling his father’s narrative, James Norris illuminates the delicate balance between defiance of systemic racial practices and working within a system that stubbornly resisted change.
As James Norris says of his father, “When barriers were raised and obstacles thrown, his modus operandi would be first to try to wend his way around them, and failing that, to blast them down!”
Norris’s life spanned the contentious period from post-Reconstruction to the relentless erosion of civil liberties for blacks, the encoding of segregation into law, and finally the collapse of Jim Crow. Norris died in 1966, about the same time as Jim Crow.
Although race defined many of Norris’s daily encounters, this story is less about race and more about the man. And during his nearly decade of work on the biography, James Norris learned much more about his father than he expected.
“It seems preposterous that I could grow up under the same roof and have contact with my father for thirty-four years and yet know so little about him,” said James Norris. To discover more about him, the author spent countless hours combing through his father’s correspondence, through university archives, and talking with family and neighbors who knew him.
Following in his father’s chosen field, the author practiced medicine briefly with his father in 1958 and 1959, and then became a general surgeon for many years. A board-certified plastic surgeon since 1975, he has lived in Manhattan for the past thirty-four years. He is married to Motoko Endo of Tokyo. They have one son, Takashi, who lives in Tokyo with his family. This biography is the author’s first book.
Published by The Write Place, Fight On, My Soul, is available for purchase at bookstores, online, or from the publisher by calling 641-628-8398. Suggested retail price is $14.95.