My Fighting FamilyMy Fighting Family

The debut memoir from award-winning journalist Morgan Campbell: an incredible history of a family across generations, a hilarious and emotional coming-of-age story, and a powerful reckoning with what it means to be Black in Canada--particularly with strong American roots. Morgan Campbell comes from "a fighting family," a connection and clash that reaches back to the south side of Chicago in the 1930s. His father and mother's families were both part of the Great Migration from the U.S. rural south to the industrial north, but a history of perceived slights and social-class differences solidified a great feud that only intensified over the course of the century after the families came together in marriage and split up across the border. Morgan's maternal grandfather, Claude Jones--a legendary grudge-holder, as well as an accomplished musician, peer of Oscar Peterson, and fixture of the Chicago jazz scene--was recruited to play some shows in Toronto, fell in love with the city, and eventually settled in Canada in the mid-1960s, paving the way for Morgan's parents to join him amid the tumult of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. Morgan's paternal grandmother, Granny Mary, however, remained stateside, a distance her schemes and resentments would only grow to fill. In Canada, the Campbells create a new life and start a family of their own, but the tensions between the in-laws never cease, reaching an ugly culmination when Morgan's father dies of cancer. From that point on, 17-year-old Morgan, an aspiring writer, budding star athlete, and slow-jam scholar, looks to the future while reckoning with the past, exploring the bonds between imperfect parents and their children, the difficult but necessary process of loving relatives that you don't particularly like, and the profound gap between Canada's utopian reputation when it comes to racism and the very different reality. Having grown up bouncing between these disparate identities and nationalities, real or imagined--Black and Canadian, Canadian and American, Campbell and Jones--Full Citizenship is a witty, wise, rich, and soulful illumination of the journey to find clarity in all that conflict.