for four seconds each. My grandmother taught me this in church when I was six, after a white man at a Waffle House called my grandfather an ugly word I refuse to repeat.
“You keep your breath,” she told me, “and you keep your mind. They can’t take either one unless you hand it to them.”
The sheriff’s office was a squat tan-brick building beside the courthouse square, with a flagpole out front and a faded sign: “Serving Pell County with Pride Since 1871.” Voss pulled around back to the
