"Get out of here. You don't belong here."
"I'm Judge Ellison."
"Hold still."
Derek Voss grabbed a fistful of Naomi Ellison's natural hair and yanked her head back against the metal chair. The electric clippers were already running in his other hand, buzzing inches from her face.
"You Black women always walk in here like you own the place," he said, loud enough for Pruitt to hear. "Let's fix that."
The first pass of the blade cut a clean stripe through 20 years of pride.
Shane Pruitt leaned against the wall, arms crossed, laughing. "Look at her, still making that face. Like she's better than us. You still feel special, sweetheart?"
Dark coils fell to the concrete floor. One by one.
Lieutenant Crane stood at the door and said nothing. Did nothing. Just watched.
Voss stepped back to admire what he'd done, head tilted. The way a man looks at something he's just broken on purpose.
"There. Now you look like you belong on the street where we found you."
Naomi didn't flinch. Didn't cry. Didn't beg.
She was counting the faces. Because in less than 18 hours, every single one of them would be standing in her courtroom.
The alarm on Naomi Ellison's phone went off at 5:47 a.m. The same time it had gone off every weekday morning for the past eight months.
She didn't hit snooze. She never hit snooze.
That was a habit she'd inherited from her mother, Gloria, who had spent 30 years rising before the sun to get to work on time. Not because anyone would notice if she was late, but because she refused to give them a reason to say she wasn't serious.
Naomi sat up in the quiet of her apartment and let the silence settle around her for exactly 60 seconds. One minute. That was her ritual. One minute of stillness before the weight of the day came crashing in.
The apartment was modest for a federal judge. A one-bedroom in a mid-rise on the east side of Columbus, Georgia. No housekeeper, no car service, no private chef. She ironed her own clothes. She made her own coffee.
Her neighbors knew her as the quiet woman on the fourth floor who smiled in the elevator and kept strange hours. None of them knew what she did for a living, and she preferred it that way.
She stood at the bathroom mirror and ran her fingers through her hair. Thick, natural, cut into a full crown that she'd worn the same way since law school.
Her mother used to call it her armor. "God gave you that hair, baby. Don't ever let anybody make you feel like it's too much."
Gloria Ellison had mopped the floors of the Muscogee County Federal Courthouse for 31 years.
She had started as a teenager, pushing a cleaning cart through those marble corridors before the lawyers arrived and after they left.