Chapter 8

And Carver, still looking at the map on my phone, said the sentence that I have quoted to more people than any other sentence in my life. He said:"Maintaining something and owning it are two different things."Sloan lowered her radio. She said, "Recorded owner of parcel 417-008 is Lenora Elaine Hale. Recorded 1984. Taxes current." She looked up. "It's not the association. It's not the management company. It's her."Carver stood up. He walked back up the path, maybe fifteen feet, and he looked at the aluminum sign: Private HOA Property. Residents Only. And then he looked down at the map on the phone in his hand. And then he looked back at the sign. I watched him do the arithmetic that Celeste had never once bothered to do.He turned around. He was not angry, and he was not sarcastic; he was just a man asking a question that needed an answer. He said, "So why did the association call the police on the landowner for trespassing on her own property?"Celeste did not answer that question. She has still never answered that question.Instead, she pivoted instantly with genuine agility and started talking about easements. She said the association certainly held an easement over the path, that it had been granted by the original developer, that recorded ownership was irrelevant because the association had established use rights, and that in any case, my mother was in violation of community regulations regarding non-resident access to amenities. She said the words "prescriptive easement," which I noticed because it is not a phrase people use by accident.Carver told her evenly that whether the association held an easement was not a police matter, and that if the association believed it had use rights, it should take that up with its attorney and the landowner. Then he said that based on the county records available to him, he had no basis whatsoever to treat Mrs. Hale as a trespasser, because she was the record owner of the ground she was sitting on.And then, because Celeste had begun to walk toward my mother while still talking, he added, "Ma'am, I'd ask you to step back and stop obstructing her access to her own property."She had called the police to remove my mother from that path; the police finished by asking her to get out of my mother's way.They left. Celeste got in her cart and drove off without a word to anyone, and the residents under the oaks drifted apart in that awkward way people do when the show ends and they realize they were the audience for something ugly.

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HOA Reported My Black Mom for Trespassing — Then Police Asked Who Owned the Property