Considered unfit to reproduce, his father gave him to the strongest slave woman in 1859.

At the time of Toteminovida, I was told that I was defective, and when I turned 19 and three doctors examined my fragile body and rendered their verdict, I began to believe them.

My name is Thomas Bowmont Callahan. I am nineteen years old, and my body has always been a betrayal: a mass of imperfections etched into bones and muscles that never truly formed. I was born prematurely in January 1840, two months before the term, during one of the most severe winters Mississippi had seen in decades.

My mother, Sarah Bowmont Callahan, gave birth suddenly during a dinner my father gave for the visiting judges and planters. The midwife who accompanied her, a slave named Mama Ruth, who had given birth to half the white children in the county, looked at me and shook her head.

“Judge Callahan,” he told my father, “this baby won’t survive the night. He’s too small. His breathing is shallow. You better prepare your wife for this loss.”

But my mother, delirious with fever and exhaustion, refused to accept this prognosis. “He will live,” she whispered, holding me close. “I know he will live. I can feel his heart beating. It beats faintly, but it’s fighting.”

He was right. I survived that first night, then the next, and the next again. But surviving doesn’t mean thriving. At one month old, I weighed only three kilos. At six months, I still couldn’t hold my head straight. At one year old, while the other children were already standing and some were taking their first steps, I could barely sit up.

The doctors my father brought from Nachez, Vixsburg, and even from areas as far away as 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 him in bed, his skin the color of old parchment, his eyes yellow and vacant. He called me to his bedside the day before he died.

“Thomas,” she murmured in a barely audible voice. “You will be challenging all your lives. We will underestimate you. We will pity you. We will reject you. But you have something far more precious than physical strength. You have a mind, a heart, a soul. Don’t let anyone make you feel incomplete.”

She died the next morning. It was only years later that I fully understood her words.

My father, Judge William Callahan, stood before me in imposing proportions. He stood 6 feet 11 inches tall, had broad shoulders, and a voice that could silence an entire courtroom with a single word. He built his fortune from nothing. A penniless lawyer in Alabama, he married a woman from his  family ‘s modest Bowmont plantation and, through wise investments and strategic land acquisitions, transformed those initial 800 acres into an 8,000-acre cotton empire.