‘A beautiful act of kindness and humanity’
Retired cop paid bill, left a note that Black lives matter
Sarena Griffin met her friends Erin Jones Walker and Ogemdi Adeboje for breakfast on a recent Monday morning at Bacon and Jam in Chicago’s Mount Greenwood neighborhood.
Griffin would be starting school the next day; she’s a kindergarten teacher at
The Nautilus School. Walker and Adeboje brought their daughters.
When it was time to pay for their food, the server brought over the bill and told Griffin and her friends that another patron already paid it.
“She was like, ‘I don’t know if you saw the guy sitting over there, but he paid your bill,’ ” Griffin said.
Griffin noticed a man glance at their table earlier, but she didn’t remember making eye contact. And he was gone by the time the server brought over the paid bill. But he wrote a note on the back.
“I retired from CPD after 33 years,” it read. “For 33 years I was prepared to give my life to protect yours. I always knew your lives mattered! Peace”
Griffin and Adeboje are Black. Walker is white. The man who paid the bill is white.
“I thought it was a beautiful gesture,” Griffin said. “It truly felt like a beautiful act of kindness and humanity.”
Griffin snapped a photo of the note with her phone. Adeboje took it home to save. When she got home, Griffin shared the photo on a couple of neighborhood Facebook pages she be
longs to — partly to see if anyone might know the retired police officer who bought them breakfast, partly to inject a little light into some social media feeds that have been getting pretty dark lately: disagree
ments over protests, casual insensitivity that sometimes parades as social commentary.
“I needed other people in this community to see what’s possible,” Griffin said.
No one stepped forward to claim the gesture, but the response, Griffin said, was heartwarming nonetheless.
“Everything from applause to ‘We just need some positivity,’ ” Griffin said. “The biggest thing was having a police officer, especially in the context of everything happening right now, see that Black lives matter and acknowledge that.”
I called Bacon and Jam to see if they had any hunches on who paid the bill.
“Honestly that happens all the time in here,” the woman who answered the phone said, after I told her the story. “But that’s so cool! Usually it’s police officers who get paid for, not the other way around.”
Mount Greenwood, on
Chicago’s Far Southwest Side, is home to a high concentration of police officers and firefighters.
Griffin said she’d like to meet the mystery patron.
“I would say, ‘Thank you for your service,’ ” Griffin said. “I would say, ‘Thank you for seeing me and my friends. Thank you for acknowledging the thing that I think a lot of people are having a hard time acknowledging: that I matter and my friends matter, obviously.’ I would love to have coffee with him. I would love to hear about his experiences as a police officer and tell him about my life as a Black mother.”
Griffin, who lives in the Chatham neighborhood, said she belongs to a group of parents who are advocat
ing for racial equity and culturally relevant instruction in their local schools. She knows conversations around race and justice and change can be uncomfortable.
“We have to find ways to have more conversations with our humanity intact,” she said. “So it’s not ‘us versus them.’ We have to be able to see the humanity in each other, and that’s what this gentleman did.”
I hope they get to have that coffee.