In 1951, Tommy Hamim Gassion, son of Ani, was 22 years old. Born in the Midwest, raised in the vicinity of Monterey California in the circles around John Steinbeck, Joseph Campbell, and Edward Ricketts, through his mother Ani and her lover Rihanna “Rina” Ni hUallachain he was introduced to Colonel Torres around the time of the “accidental” fire which destroyed Ricketts’s Pacific Biological laboratory on Cannery Row in 1936.
By 1950, after his mother and Rina had gone to Europe and he himself had completed an undergraduate degree in journalism at Ole Miss, he was living in Memphis and working as a stringer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, reporting on agriculture and public affairs in North Mississippi, southern Tennessee, and Northwest Alabama. A keen amateur musician, he was already aware of, writing about, and commenting on radio about the first post-War generation of blues and roots musicians, both in the Delta (Clarksdale, Indianola, and Greenwood) and in the vicinity of Florence and Muscle Shoals. He also took evocative photographs, which he occasionally sold for $3 an image to the Time-Picayune or to the wire services: for example, he took some of the earliest photographs of Riley “Blues Boy” King, before BB left Memphis. Tommy Gassion would subsequently become an important figure in documenting the rise of the post-War Civil Rights movement in the days before Brown v. Board of Education.1
However, through his mother and Rina, he was also part of international networks having to do with the affairs of Bassanda. Though the Rift scientist Ibrahim Hazzard-Igniti, another member of the international bohemian circle who gathered at Monterey and Pacific Grove in the 1930s, had by 1941 disappeared—most thought he had been kidnapped by the Soviets into the Gulag, in order that they could control his scientific knowledge of Bassandan electromagnetics—there were still lines of communication, mostly clandestine, between Soviet-occupied Ballyizget and the West. The capitol city had fallen to the Nazis in the late autumn of 1941, and though “liberated” by the Allies in 1945, had promptly been taken over and cordoned off by the Russians: though Bassanda had little in the way of those natural resources (especially minerals and petrochemicals) which had motivated German, Russian, Italian, and Japanese expansion during the War, and comparable imperial gestures by Britain, France, Belgium, and the USA prior to 1936, it was nevertheless a highway of conquest providing passage between Southeastern Europe and Central Asia. Anti-occupation activity by Bassandan partisans thus continued essentially uninterrupted from the Nazi occupation of 1939-45 into the Soviet occupation that promptly succeeded the Reich; a common catchphrase among the Bassandan partisans was “they’re all the same Cossacks.”
These activists, among whom Yezget-Bey and the BNRO were an important sub-rosa organizing network, both resisted the occupiers’ authoritarian excesses, expedited the escape of freedom fighters and the anti-Soviet activities of western secret services, and—most importantly but most secretly of all—sought to prevent the occupiers’ access to, or even knowledge of, the ancient electromagnetic Devices which had been developed by Iliot shamans and Bassandan alchemists, and had (temporarily) halted Tsarist conquest in 1906 (see THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA). Following the Great War, which was protracted in the eastern satellites and in Asian Russia considerably after 1918 (BASSANDA AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION), it remained a tenet of Bassandan resistance thinking that these Devices’ great aggressive potential must be kept out of the wrong hands. Some of the ancient documents went east and south, to Tibet and northwest India, some north into Scandinavia and the circumpolar peoples of the Arctic Circle, and some remained, hidden deeply away in Bassanda’s northern Alps.
Still others, however, were smuggled west after 1945, and their electromagnet supranormal capacities appeared in curious and incongruous contexts…
Tommy’s memoir begins:
I hadn’t met the General at that time, but my mother’s friend Colonel Torres had described him to me, and so, when he came through one of the brass double doors under the hanging chandeliers of the Peabody Hotel’s lobby in Memphis, I knew what I was looking for (http://users.soc.umn.edu/~samaha/cases/cohn_delta.html 1967).
He looked a little like a daguerreotype of one of those Confederate generals that the hotel still, in 1951, had hanging up in the dim dusty hallways like revered ancestors. I wasn’t from the South—my mama’s people came from around Chicago—so I didn’t feel much inclination to sanctify those rotten old slaveholders. But this man did give off some sense of old-fashioned physical energy: he was short and compact, with gray hair under the straw Panama he took off as he came into the lobby, and a spade-shaped short gray beard. He had a black gaucho shirt under a tan linen bomber jacket, and he took off his tortoiseshell-rimmed sunglasses in the dimness, maybe a little near-sighted.
He was alert, though—he looked left and right, sweeping his eyes left and right in a wide arc. Even as I shifted my legs to stand up out of the deep wicker chair, his gaze zeroed in, and he came across the lobby toward me, pigeon-toed, his booted heels thumping on the marble floor. His face was pretty much impassive, though there might have been some light in the hazel eyes in the weatherbeaten face. I put out my hand, but he ignored me and actually walked a few paces beyond me, and then turned on his heel, gazing around the lobby as if looking for someone he didn’t yet see. Then he sat in another of the lobby’s wicker chairs under a large fan of peacock feathers, and he was facing out into the room. He put his straw hat down carefully on the floor next to him. And then he spoke under his breath, without making eye contact, and his voice, though very quiet, nevertheless carried clearly.
“I recognize you, youngster; our mutual friend the Colonel described you. I’m come from Yezget-Bey, your mother’s friend…no DON’T look at me…and I have a package we want delivered to a musician here in the city. No, DON’T ask any questions. There’s a package under my hat; when I get up to leave, I’m going to leave it, on the floor next to this chair. DON’T follow me: wait ten minutes, and then sit down in this chair. And when you leave, take the package with you.”
He stood up again from the wicker chair, and put on his hat, before pulling a cigar from an insight pocket of his tan jacket. He bit off the end of the cigar, and dropped the butt into a nearby spittoon. He stuck it between his lips, and cracked a kitchen match into flame. Bending over to shield the match from the breeze of the big overhead fans, he said quietly, “Find Stokes. Sam will know.”
And, just for a moment, he looked at me sidelong from under the brim of the straw. Maybe there was a little hint of a smile.
He added, “And watch your back.”
Gassion provided initial leads in the investigation of Carolyn Bryant, whose lies had directly precipitated the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Speaking to the Eagles Heart Sisters Oral History Project in 1981, Gassion said, “I just want to outlive that murderous bitch, and make sure the story get told. I owed Emmett that.” He died in 2022, at the age of 93.