I was declared defective during the Toteminovida period, and at 19, after three doctors examined my fragile body and pronounced their verdict, I began to believe it.
My name is Thomas Bowmont Callahan. I am 19 years old, and my body has always been a betrayal: a collection of failures etched into my bones and muscles that never formed properly. I was born prematurely in January 1840, two months premature, during one of the harshest winters Mississippi had seen in decades.
My mother, Sarah Bowmont Callahan, gave birth suddenly during a dinner my father was hosting for visiting judges and landowners. The midwife attending her, a slave named Mama Ruth, who had delivered half the white babies in the county, glanced at me and shook her head.
“Judge Callahan,” he said to my father, “this baby won’t survive the night. He’s too small. He’s having trouble breathing. Prepare your wife for this loss.”
But my mother, delirious with fever and exhaustion, refused to accept this prognosis. “He will live,” she murmured, holding me close. “I’m sure of it. I can feel his heart beating. He’s weak, but he’s fighting.”
He was right. I survived that first night, and the nights that followed, and the nights that followed. But surviving doesn’t mean thriving. At one month old, I weighed just three kilos. At six months, I still couldn’t hold my head up. At one year old, while other babies were standing and some were taking their first steps, I could barely sit up.
The doctors my father brought in from Nachez, Vixsburg, and even New Orleans all said the same thing: my premature birth had stunted my development in ways that would affect me for the rest of my life.
My mother died when I was six, a victim of the yellow fever epidemic that ravaged Mississippi in 1846. I remember her bedridden, with skin the color of old parchment, her eyes yellow and dull. She called me to her bedside the day before she died.
“Thomas,” she murmured, her voice barely audible. “You will face hardships throughout your life. You will be underestimated. You will be pitied. You will be rejected. But you possess something far more precious than physical strength. You have your mind, your heart, your soul. Don’t let anyone make you feel incomplete.”
He died the next morning. And only years later did I fully understand his words.
My father, Judge William Callahan, was a massive man, unlike me in every way. Six feet tall, broad-shouldered, his voice could silence an entire courtroom with a single word. He had built his fortune from nothing. A penniless lawyer from Alabama, he had married into the modest Bowmont plantation family, and through shrewd investments and strategic land acquisitions, he had transformed his initial 2,000 acres into a 2,000-acre cotton empire.
