“We mourned through the doors, and we will continue all the way home… we have lost one of our own. But we can all walk taller into tomorrow, made bigger by the memory of Yusef’s goodness, and we will forever carry the notion that we must be good to our neighbors, and expect that goodness in return.” Jackson Smith
I did finally read the first issue of This and Other Things regarding the murder of Yusef Hassan. I was surprised to find that an old teacher of mine, Mr. Jackson Smith, was quoted in the issue. Apparently he’d taught Yusef and the infamous Ellison Colson. When I met him recently at a coffee shop in Ladoga, Mr. Smith looked exactly as I remembered him in my youth and I wasn’t surprised to learn that he was still teaching academically gifted students in all of the schools in the city. Twice a week when I was in elementary school, me and three other classmates would leave our class after lunch and go to a room next to the counselor’s office. Our counselor was a nice lady, I don’t remember her name, but she always offered us candy on the way to Mr. Smith’s class where I had the most fun I think someone can have in school excepting recess and sometimes gym class. Maybe it was fun for me because I enjoyed the things we did and any average student would have been just as bored there as they were in the regular classroom, but I definitely appreciated the experience. I credit Mr. Smith with unlocking my intellectual curiosity and my love of books and stories. He was my teacher through high school and by that time, he would assist with honors and advanced placement literature classes every couple of weeks. He was there to provide a more rigorous learning environment that would encourage students who excelled at their school work to maintain and improve their performance, while introducing them to higher level work that would prepare them for their next step, be it middle or high school and even college.
Mr. Smith was once a photographer and folklorist who found his way to Ladoga by chance, chasing strange and interesting stories he’d found in books while studying in college. He was obsessed with the south because the stories of the people seemed to layer themselves on top of old ones that had existed in the area’s past. He especially loved tales of the natives that had lived in the present-day southeast and the ways they mingled with white settlers and African slaves once they arrived in the area.
When I met Mr. Smith for coffee, he expressed his congratulations at my successes. Even though I told him that it was hard to feel comfortable accepting accolades for a life I sometimes longed to be completely different, he said that I should be extremely proud of myself. “Everyone suffers doubt,” he said. “It would be superhuman not to. But you wake up everyday and keep going, which is admirable. We all have times of doubt, we all want to just give up. But the best of us keep going. You can groan and gripe every day, but I bet you haven’t missed a day of work in so long you can’t remember the last time.” He was right. Mary and I usually only go on trips during holidays but since we’ve been talking about the home we want in the near future, we have been saving every penny. No amount of doubt would make me shirk responsibilities. It’s only certainty that will allow me to blow things off; like the certainty that I didn’t want to be an academic snob in college that allowed me to miss classes with no guilt. Certainty is a funny thing though, it’s as relative as time. I wouldn’t mind being a snobbish academic nowadays if for nothing else but the job security; there will always be students willing to pay for knowledge. The same can be said for the law, only, the papercuts on my fingers are getting to be extremely annoying and I feel constricted only circling the very rigid words of codes and regulations. Did I ever mention that I can complain about anything? Because if I haven’t said it already, I can.
Mr. Smith and I had a long conversation before we got to the point of the visit. When I asked him about the Hassan murder, he pursed his lips like a polite smile, no joy whatsoever.
“Sad day for everyone. One of the worst days in the town’s history. Throughout the history of mankind we have shown little patience for enlightenment, or enlightened individuals. There are too many examples of history’s greatest teachers and reformers who found themselves silenced to death out of fear that the ensuing change from their various messages would lead to catastrophe. Yusef wasn’t necessarily enlightened, he was just a kid when he died, but he died standing up to what he saw as the bad element, the thing that made his neighborhood a bad place. All Yusef wanted was to take pride in his community, and they killed him for it.”
The newsletter said that four people were arrested for Hassan’s murder, but Mr. Smith doesn’t believe there was any justice served. “They ran his family out of town for God’s sakes! I don’t know who I mean when I say they, the Bottoms I guess. There were enough people defending what had happened to Yusef to engender feelings of Islamophobia. Even in the black communities. I guess it’s naive to think that people will remember history, but black people? Someone vandalized the Hassan’s home every time they cleaned up evidence of the previous incident of vandalism; usually they spray painted terrorist on something. They killed Yusef, then ran his family out of town. Despicable. I know that it wasn’t every person who lived in the Bottoms, and it wasn’t just black people that gave the family problems. Actually, there was always a show of support from east siders for the Hassans, but it only takes one bad egg, right? One bad egg to spoil the whole bunch. It looked bad for the east side when the Hassans moved, even though they had every reason to move before the vandalism started. It was a real tragedy for many reasons, but the most ironic reason, the most head-hanging, shameful truth reason, is because people from the east side should have rallied behind that family and championed Yusef’s goal of ridding the community of drugs, but everyone was happy to just put it behind them. There can be no justice, Maxwell, if everyone is wearing blinders. They chose not to fight the actual fight. Yusef was killed by Ladoga’s drug culture, but that’s still alive and well in the city. It continued uninterrupted. I don’t know the answer to the drug problem, and it’s very likely that no one else does either, but Yusef death was evidence that the culture around that time was hyper violent. Even if you don’t think it’s possible to rid the community of drugs, you can still do something about the violence. “
Hassan was one of many whose death was somehow related to drugs in Ladoga. There is no easy solution to that problem, but it is sad to hear that someone died in defense of a community that didn’t seem to agree with him.
“Does what happen with Colston have anything to do with Yusef’s murder?” I asked Mr. Smith.
“I imagine that he would say it had everything to do with it. And that old tree. The Chief’s tree. I don’t tell that story to my students anymore. “
“Because of Colston?”
“And because it’s probably not even true. Unless someone has it dated and confirms that it’s at least 400 years old. I think it’s a story someone made up to empower the powerless, you know? To demonstrate that the Catawbas and the Waxhaws didn’t go away quietly. But we forget, Maxwell, the white man is a masterful colonizer, plenty capable of using the one to eliminate the other, then reducing the one to nothing, to silence. Sure there was resistance, but it was met with defeat, and the righteous anger of the spirits, of the witches, has yet to be wrought. Colston thought that he could invoke those spirits to get revenge for Yusef.”
“How do you know that?” I asked him.
“The phases of his plan, they had details on the news after he did what he did. He called step one The Song. He charmed everyone and made them all love and adore him. Step two was The Sacrifice. Everyone’s still a little sketchy on exactly what his step two was because there wasn’t much found that detailed the two months leading up to the explosion in town hall, but I think that he had an accomplice, someone who was working with him to put all the pieces in place so that he could keep others from ever getting wind of his plan. I think it was another person because he was everywhere in those two months, all over Ladoga, being the mayor that we all thought he would be. And all that time, someone else was making those bombs. There was an FBI agent in town for a while after the explosion investigating and when he questioned me he said that he had reason to believe that Ellison didn’t work alone, even though the Ladoga police had decided on the contrary. He said that some of the written plans found in the office in downtown were in someone else’s handwriting. I can’t imagine who it could have been though, but it could have been anyone considering how charismatic Ellison Colston was at that time. I think step two was his realization that he couldn’t do it it alone and he knew that he had to talk someone into helping him out if he wanted to get it done. And that sacrifice led to step three, The Rise, the devastation wrought by the three witches. No one understood why he chose those names, no one saw it.” Mr. Smith was sad, I could tell by the look on his face. He hardly blinked and he talked like he was lost in a flashback. “It’s from the story. The Chief’s story.”
According to local legend, the indian chief was over seven feet tall and ruled a tribe of Catawbas who had lived in what is now known as Ladoga. The Chief commanded respect, even from settlers who mostly avoided his people whom the settlers feared as murderous giants. They proved to be a very necessary ally to settlers during a particularly harsh winter that decimated a local township. The chief and his people offered food to the beleaguered survivors who had not adequately planned for the season and the Catawbas, against the reservations of some, were saviors to the white settlers. The settlers were happy with their new found alliance with the intimidating tribe and there was relative peace for a time. But peace does not last forever, and the story goes that eventually the settlers tried to occupy the lands of the Chief’s tribe, which led to all out war. Many of the Chief’s people died in the struggle over land, some managed to escape with their lives. But not the Chief, who refused to cede his home to the so-called friends who had disrespected their unity. The settlers bound the Chief to the big pine tree, while they burned everything that had belonged to the Chief’s people. He was forced to watch the destruction of his home and then left to die, chained to the pine. They say that every day when it rose, the Chief fixed his eyes on the sun and chanted the song to the three witches, who would only rise if offered a gift, and when summoned would wreak havoc at the whim of the man who had given the gift. After about a week tied to the tree, the settlers decided to kill the Chief. As the sun rose on what was to be his last day, the chief chanted the song to the witches and their spirits rose before him, accepting the gift of his eye sight. Soon the settlers were besieged by the horrors of the three witches: the red eagle made a feast of the settlers’ children, the white rabbit laid waste to all of the settlers’ crops, and the white Buffalo gored and trampled any settler who tried to fight back. They say the Chief smiled with his eyes wide open and unseeing until the screams of the settlers died away, and then he died.
“I don’t tell it anymore because it reminds me of Colston and the fool thing he did, not because I’m afraid other people will hear it and get fool ideas. It might not be true either, but that’s not really a good reason, is it?” Mr. Smith asked, smiling. “We’d have to throw out our history books if it is.”
“Did he think he was doing a good thing?” I asked.
“I know he thought he was as righteous as the story. Yusef was his best friend and Colston thought everyone should pay for it. He didn’t want anyone to forget. Before he ran for mayor, we were talking and he brought up Yusef. He asked me if I thought people even remembered that Yusef had existed, and I told him the truth. Everybody had forgotten by that point. The Hassans were long gone and I don’t think there’s any other Muslims in the area. I should have lied to him, you know? I should have recognized in that moment that he needed to be lied to. But I assumed that he was a better man than he was.”
We left the coffee shop more somber than when we arrived, but I was happy to have seen Mr. Smith after so many years. We made plans to talk again soon and I left him with the link to This and Other Things. He was surprised to have been quoted, but said that he had spoken at the high school’s memorial service after Yusef’s death and the magazine had quoted his speech.
‘It was right after the funeral. I remember struggling to write my words for that day. What do you say in response to senseless violence? Words that have already been said so many times that it would seem that they have lost their meaning? I just talked about how great a kid Yusef was.”
I couldn’t help but visit the big pine tree after I left Mr. Smith and before I headed home. I stood underneath it, staring up at its height that was a marker of all the time and change it had witnessed. I didn’t stay for long, though. The Chief’s tree is haunting for more reasons to me now.
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