A Privileged Experience

A friend on Facebook shared a post asking for the most outrageous experience you had in which a black or brown person would've been in serious jeopardy.

Back when my Mom's store was moving down the block, and my brother and I were moving the contents of the basement into our minivan. When everything else was moved, we considered this hotel safe that had been left by another tenant in the building years before, and decided that we should take it with us because we'd always thought of trying to see if we could crack it, and it was my Mom's as much as it was anyone's.

As we're carrying it to the minivan in the alley, we ran into a police officer we recognized. I knew her because a telephone repairman had left a baggie of weed in our house after struggling to fix a phone line, and my Mom had been insisting that the phone company apologize for their contractor sending a stoned workman. They denied that he'd been stoned even after we found his pot. The phone company, by the way, tried to convince her it was ours, even though we'd been the one to find it and bring it to her.

My Mom called the police to pick up a bag of drugs, but then called me at school because it wasn't where she thought it was, because we had a hidden book in the bookcase for things like this, but I'd moved it to a stashbox in a different book when I'd been showing it to a friend the night before while telling the story. And now I couldn't tell her and the cop which book it was in without them finding my own stash.

Anyway, I headed home and managed to move the contents of the book around while it was out of the officer's line of sight, and that was the end of that. But that's how I knew this cop my brother and I ran into in the alley. I fondly greeted her and asked what sort of things brought her around the area and she said that she was investigating a silent alarm one of the shops had installed in the basement of the building my Mom's store was moving out of. We laughed, and explained to her that WE'D likely set it off while moving all the merchandise out of the adjacent basement, and also that this safe was definitely ours.

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