Morris Parks

SANDMAN taisher based out of Detroit, Michigan. URIEL first encountered him Operation ALLOCHTHON, when he was assigned to work with Marshall and Archie at the subduction zone outside Columbus, Ohio. Survived a critical gunshot wound from a kulullû-puppeted Joe Robertson while in Pascagoula, Mississippi, with Roger and Charley.

Morris's powers of perception were first discovered in Korea in '52. Morris got Section 8'd after a particularly heavy bombardment of Chinese artillery at Heartbreak Ridge, a month-long battle where thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Communists were killed. Apparently Morris, a young infantryman, was arrested for shaking his superior officer telling him to aim fire at "the giant vultures hovering over the battlefield." A debrief by the very young Project SANDMAN confirmed that Private Parks had personally witnessed multiple šedu being retrocreated due to the mass death event of the battle. Morris was taken back to the States to recuperate mentally and to be trained by SANDMAN. The Project did not clear his dishonorable discharge from the Army, in the hopes of keeping him desperate enough to remain on with the Project as one of its small stable of postwar taishers; a Black veteran in 1953 without military benefits would be easily suborned, they figured. But instead he just went back to the streets of his hometown of Detroit, and lived on the streets a stewbum and a junkie for a few years, until he wandered desperate into Mosque No. 1 of a rising religious Black nationalist movement called the Nation of Islam. SANDMAN made stronger efforts to bring Morris back under Project control, this time as an infiltration agent into the NOI movement to confirm whether their esoteric philosophy was connected to the Kings.

It was a delicate dance throughout much of '57, with the few Black Sandmen available to use as handlers trying to get Morris to return to SANDMAN by betraying the movement that had gotten him to clean up his act and gave him a ontological, spiritual, and political framework for what he'd seen in Korea. But Morris himself saw the corruption at the center of the movement in the behavior of the Honorable Elijah Mohammed. The movement wasn't infected by History B, but it was a cult of personality overlaid on a political vehicle for Black nationalism and liberation. Morris eventually landed on the side of the "angels" — SANDMAN and the FBI — and much of the intelligence he brought back from inside the NOI ended up informing the public television documentary series The Hate That Hate Produced in 1959, one of the first times white America had heard about the Nation and a major propaganda/memetic operation to forestall the broad civic unrest that could come from an ascendant Black nationalist movement.

Morris spent the Kennedy years as a full member of SANDMAN domestic ops. He was still considered somewhat politically and spiritually "compromised" but his skills as a taisher were indisputable. He'd not only be able to give information on the nature of subduction zones, but had an uncanny ability to sniff out the retrocreation of Irruptors. The cults SANDMAN was dealing with in the early 1960s in America were often part of the various movements for Black liberation. Morris's work was essential in helping astrologer, UFO contactee, occult bookstore owner, and History B-influenced cult leader, Fred Ahmed Evans, self-destruct in Cleveland in 1968. While city-wide deadly riots followed (riots where Morris was out in the streets looks for Irruptors), the op was considered a huge success by the Project. Similarities between Evans's and Morris's life paths and the directions each took them are left as an exercise for the reader.

In 1964, Morris participated (as a citizen, not a government infiltrator) in the Freedom Summer movement, doing street networking and clerical volunteer help to get Detroit-based activists get transportation down South. It was around this time that he first encountered the Louhelen Baháʼí School in Davison, Michigan. A few Baháʼí were part of Freedom Summer in Detroit and Morris had finally found a home for his spiritual and political inner turmoil after having betrayed/become disillusioned with the Nation of Islam. Conveniently, SANDMAN had long been interested in how the syncretic, synthetic theology of Baháʼí could be used as a weapon against the Kings (as a post-Ontoclysm faith). Morris's powers grew by leaps and bounds after his brain neurolinguistically installed the Baháʼí "programming"; Morris is thus just not merely an active taisher, he's a test subject, encouraged to bring Baháʼí thought and philosophy to the fight against the Kings.