This conch shell was a gift from my friend Lewis. Our lives, which arose from wildly different circumstances, briefly intersected during several months when we worked together on a survey crew many years ago. I will always be grateful for that friendship, which gave me insight into a world very different from my own and reinforced my appreciation of our common humanity.

I have been obsessed with watching the events of Ferguson unfold – the all too familiar story of another young black man gunned down in the streets, the frightening images of police trampling on citizens’ and journalists’ rights and bodies with military force, the outing of the racial inequities in our culture that so many white people, myself included, seem not to know how to acknowledge or discuss. I’ve also been following the Ice Bucket Challenge phenomenon that has been unfolding side by side with Ferguson – people taking up a challenge to do something moderately uncomfortable as a means of shining a light on and raising money for a difficult human reality.

So I want to take on the challenge, offered by Sharon Browning in her blog post Listening to Our Ghosts: Pilfering with Privilege, of outing the ghosts of my youth, to disclose a time when I got away with actions that – had my skin been black and my biological gender male – might have easily gotten me put in prison, or killed.

Unlike Michael Brown, I was not a teenager, and my transgressions exceeded pilfering. I was about twenty-two or three, still in the adolescent risk-taking phase but old enough to know and act better. Only I didn’t. At the time, I was working on a NOAA survey crew as a rodman, one of a very few women working on a national crew charged with measuring the change in elevation of our country’s land. When my girlfriend M. and I joined the survey crew, our mostly white crew-mates were sure we were lesbians. But that is a story for another day.

When we signed on to the survey in Houston, there were two black guys on the crew  – Mike and Lewis. Mike was a recent college graduate who came from a middle class family in the Washington D.C. area, and like me and M., was working on the survey as an adventure while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. Lewis came from the streets of Houston, and had been signed on to the crew in lieu of going to prison. I believe he’d been arrested on drug charges, maybe petty larceny, but never learned the details, though we heard rumors about a sawed-off shotgun. We were working with a criminal.

My earliest memory of Lewis is this: On my first day of work I was standing by the side of a busy highway struggling to figure out how to handle the 8-foot survey rod, when he suddenly lurched at me and began vigorously brushing down my ankles with his gloved hands. Being new to Texas, I’d inadvertently stepped into a fire-ant mound: he saved me from being severely stung.

Our white male co-workers, who thought they were cool because they had long hair and smoked pot, spent a lot of time making racist jokes when with M. and me, while maligning women when with Lewis and Mike. Occupying the lowest rungs of the crew’s privilege ladder, the two white girls and the two black guys quickly became allies, then friends. We had many wonderful evenings over dinners cooked in our motel efficiencies as we moved around coastal Texas and then Florida. Our friendship completely baffled our co-workers.

This was the late seventies. Drugs were everywhere in Miami. While we were stationed in Florida, measuring the the elevation between Miami Beach and Key Largo, M. and I became romantically involved with two upright, industrious roommates who worked as firemen during the week, moonlit as carpenters on weekends, and dealt drugs in whatever spare time was left over.

And so we dabbled in pot, and coke, and very good wine during our Florida sojourn. It was while we were stationed in Florida and hanging out with the fireman drug dealers that I learned how to smoke cocaine with Lewis, who continued to use drugs when the opportunity arose even though getting caught would mean a prison term. M. and I were making good money for the time: the survey crew paid $8 an hour plus $35 a day per diem. We knew how to save. And we knew how to behave, how to be “good girls,” how to show up for work at six in the morning even if we’d been up most of the night before. No one ever suspected our off-duty activities, which involved the purchase, use, and occasional sale of some very good “product.” In fact, we were considered the most trustworthy, responsible members of our crew.

When M. and I see each other now, nearly forty years later, we sometimes talk about how lucky we are to be alive, to have not gotten caught during this brief episode of really bad judgment and behavior. But it was not just luck. It was also the privilege of being pretty white girls that allowed us to get away with things that our black brothers, the young Michael Browns of the world, continue to be imprisoned and killed for.

It is obvious to me now – was obvious to me then, though I wasn’t able to admit it to myself, that I had a drug problem – an affinity for the white stuff that enabled me to justify some extremely risky, immoral behavior. It frightens me to discuss my behavior publicly – it doesn’t feel safe. To admit these youthful indiscretions potentially jeopardizes my professional reputation, sets a bad example for my eighteen-year old son (who should NOT get any ideas from this story – let’s talk), and may damage many friends’ and family members’ impression of just exactly “who” I am.  But then, being born black in America is not safe, especially if you are born black and male.

I often wonder what became of Mike and Lewis. I hope and trust that Mike went on to some middle-class occupation and the raising of a family somewhere close to his family of origin. But my friend Lewis – a man who was a father to four children, a man I watched take childlike delight in discovering a hermit crab in a conch shell on a Florida beach, who danced with joy on experiencing his first snowfall when we were stationed in Montana, who broke up a cowboy vs. biker face-off in Cut Bank, Montana simply by being a fierce black man in a town than had never seen one – well, I imagine he could be dead now, or in prison. I hope instead he is hanging out with his grandchildren.

Our paths crossed briefly and we engaged in some of the same dangerous behaviors. I pilfered with privilege. He didn’t have that option.

*Names have been changed in this story to respect the privacy of those mentioned.