My father-in-law left Guinea Grass when he was a teenager, and he asked to be buried there. His wish was fulfilled a few years ago, but in between the time he left Guinea Grass – in the 1930s/1940s, and the time we took him there to be buried, he almost never visited the village. He must have loved Belize City. He did not take his children to Guinea Grass to know their roots, and he did not teach them Spanish or any of the two Mayan dialects he spoke. My father-in-law?s story is interesting in its own right.

Today, however, I?m talking about Smokey Joe, and the thing is that Belize is so small, he and my father-in-law were friends on a boat during World War II before I was even born. Also on that boat was another friend of Smokey Joe?s, another B.H. teenager by the name of Lindy Rogers, who became the Deputy Premier of Belize a quarter century later. So again, you see how small Belize is, and the late Lindy Rogers? story may be the most incredible one of all.

Smokey Joe moved north from Florida, Georgia and Alabama and joined the United States Army in time to serve in Germany before the end of the war in 1945.

Returning to New York City he discovered that he had a gift for dealing with dead bodies, and he became a mortician and hospital pathologist in Harlem. So he was a successful man, raised a family, travelled all over the United States and the Caribbean, and now and then he made visits to Belize. Smokey Joe has a lot of relatives in Belize, and in the United States.

I don?t remember how or where I met Smokey Joe. Maybe it was at Mike?s Club around the time we put KREM Radio on the air in 1989. Smokey has written that it was my dad and my younger brother who encouraged him to write, and I was his editor from then.

After a few years, Smokey went back to the States, and I thought I would never see him again. But lo and behold, and praise the Lord, he returned to Belize a couple years ago and began writing again.

He has been under attack in the streets because of the soft profanity in his columns, so perhaps the time has come for me, as his editor, to take out that stuff, because his message is more important than the little profanity.

Again, Smokey has seen something that Adele Ramos has begun to see ? that African people here are being destroyed and destroying themselves. I can see that this is frustrating to Smokey, because he was here when black people were building this country. So he is angry at the superiority complex of our Creole mulattos, and he resents the Latin immigrants he believes are pushing out our black youth.

His detractors say that Smokey is a black racist, but I just see it as his calling the shots the way he sees them. He sees the future of the black race in Belize being attacked and destroyed. The mulatto people in Belize, the people from which I came, do not see the situation in the stark way Smokey Joe does. Most mulatto people in British Honduras/Belize got a jump start ahead of their black brethren and sistren, because there were very few white women in Belize, so many slavemasters here created opportunities for the children they had with black women. In this way, mulattos got a jump start in British Honduras, and some of them think this makes them superior by nature. Some mulattos have no sympathy for the travails black youth are experiencing.

Some mulattos have no love for their African mothers. I am a mulatto who does have this love for my African roots, so I have love for my black youth. This does not mean that they have love for me. I?m just explaining that in 1969, while Smokey Joe was in his prime in the Big Apple, I started a journey which caused me a lot of pain and suffering. This was just a road I had to tread. So, let it be.

The paths of Smokey Joe and myself have intersected, and, while speaking different languages, we understand each other perfectly. Smokey doesn?t have to be doing what he?s doing. He could be comfortable in America living off his military veteran, Social Security and other benefits. He?s found a cause which is driving him each day – the cause of black youth in Belize. He sees the genocide being perpetrated with the acquiescence of a lot of uppity ?Creoles.? Out of Smokey Joe?s pain, comes his strength. If you can?t understand this because of your party politics, all I can say to you is, there is none so blind as he who will not see.