In the days of toteminovidia, they called me “found,” and when, at 19 years old and three cases, they revealed my fragile body and rendered a verdict, they began to believe them. My name is Thomas Bowmont Callahan. I am 19 years old, and my body has always been a crime—a collection of bones and muscles that never formed properly. Born prematurely in 1840, two months premature, during one of the coldest winters Mississippi has ever seen, I was taken away. My mother, Sarah Bowmont Callahan, unexpectedly went into labor during dinner; my father is a thoughtful mother to visiting judges and planters. The midwife, who is her principal, a slave to the administrator, Mama Ruth, who is received among the white children at the front door, pointed 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.” But my mother, delirious with fever and exhaustion, refused to accept that prognosis. “He’ll survive,” she whispered, cradling my tiny body to her chest. “I know he will. The sound of his heartbeat. It’s faint, but he’s fighting.” She was right. I survived that first night, the next, and the primary one. But survival isn’t the same as flourishing. At one age, I weighed a mere three kilograms. At six months, the others don’t share their own heads. One year, when other children are already solid, and some steps are taking them, I’m barely accessible. The doctors my father brought in from Nachez, Vixsburg, and even from as far away as New Orleans, all say the same thing: premature birth stunted my development in a way that will affect my entire life. My mother died when I was six, a result of the fever that swept through Mississippi in 1846. I remember her lying in bed, her skin stained by old parchment, her eyes yellow and unfocused. As punishment, she sent me to bed the day before her death. “Thomas,” she whispered, her meaning barely audible. “You’re subject to challenges throughout your life. People will ignore you. Death the next morning. And I won’t fully know its words until years later. My father, Judge William Callahan, was a man in every way I was. He stood six feet tall, had a broad ridge, and a voice that could silence an entire courtroom with a single word. He built his fortune from scratch. Starting as a poor Alabama lawyer, he married into the family’s modest Bowmont plantation, and through shrewd investments and strategic land acquisitions, he transformed those 800 acres into an 8,000-acre technology empire.

The Callahan Plantation was situated on high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, 15 miles south of Nachez, in what was considered the most fertile soil in the South. The main house was a Greek Revival mansion that my father had built in 1835. The two-story, white-painted brick building featured massive Doric columns, wide galleries on both levels, and tall windows that let in the river breeze.

Inside, crystal chandeliers hung from 15-foot ceilings, imported furniture filled rooms large enough to accommodate balls for 100 guests, and Persian rugs covered polished heart pine floors. Behind the main building stretched a working plantation: a cotton gin, a blacksmith shop, a carpenter’s shop, a smokehouse, a laundry, a kitchen building, a manager’s house, and beyond that, the living quarters.

Rows of small huts housed 300 slaves in conditions that contrasted sharply with the luxury of the mansion. I grew up in this world of immense wealth built on extreme brutality, though as a child I didn’t understand the full consequences.

I was homeschooled by a succession of tutors my father employed. I was too frail to endure the rigors of school, too sickly to live in a boarding school attended by other planters’ sons. Instead, I studied Greek and Latin, mathematics and literature, history and philosophy in the quiet of my father’s library.

At 19, I was 5’2″ tall, the height of a boy entering puberty, not a young man. I was slim, weighing about 110 pounds, and my bones were so delicate that Dr. Harrison once said I had a birdlike skeleton. My chest was slightly sunken inward, a condition doctors called pectus excavatum, the result of ribs that had never properly formed. My hands trembled constantly, and this tremor made it difficult to perform simple tasks like writing, holding a cup, and concentrating.

My eyesight was terrible, requiring thick glasses that magnified my pale blue eyes to almost comical proportions. Without them, the world was blurry. My voice never fully deepened, remaining on an awkward scale between boy and man. My hair was thin and light brown, thinning even at my young age. My skin was pale, almost translucent, revealing every vein beneath the surface.

But the worst part, the one that ultimately decided my fate, was my complete lack of masculine development. I had no facial hair at all, only a few thin strands above my upper lip, which I shaved more out of hope than necessity. My body was hairless, smooth as a baby’s, and medical tests confirmed my father’s suspicions: my reproductive organs were severely underdeveloped, rendering me infertile.

The examinations began shortly after my eighteenth birthday, in January 1858. My father arranged for me to meet a potential wife, Martha Henderson, the daughter of a wealthy Port Gibson planter.

The meeting was a disaster. Marta looked at me and couldn’t hide her disgust. She made polite conversation for exactly 15 minutes, then admitted to having a headache and left. I heard her say to my mother as they were leaving, “Father can’t seriously expect me to marry this… this child. He looks like he’ll break in half on our wedding night.”

After this humiliation, my father summoned Dr. Harrison. Dr. Samuel Harrison was the most prominent physician in Nachez, a Yale-educated man in his fifties who specialized in what he called men’s health and heredity. He arrived at Callahan Plantation on a humid February morning, carrying a leather doctor’s bag and exuding a clinical detachment.

My father left us alone in his office. Dr. Harrison ordered me to completely undress and then conducted the most humiliating hour of my life. He measured me—height, weight, chest circumference, limb length. He examined every inch of my body, jotting down notes in a small leather notebook. He paid particular attention to my groin, manipulating my underdeveloped testicles, commenting aloud on their size and consistency.

“Well below normal,” he muttered as he typed. “Pre-pubescent skin appearance and texture. H.”

When he finished, he told me to get dressed and called my father back into the room.

“Judge Callahan,” Dr. Harrison said, settling into his leather chair. “I’ll be direct. Your son’s condition isn’t just a constitutional defect. He suffers from what we call hypogonadism, or underdevelopment of the reproductive organs. This was likely caused by his premature birth and subsequent developmental delays.”

My father’s face remained impassive. “What does this mean for his future, for his marriage, and for continuing his family line?”

Dr. Harrison looked at me, then back at my father. “Judge, the likelihood of your son fathering children is practically zero. His testicular tissue is insufficient for spermatogenesis, the production of viable sperm. His hormone production is clearly deficient, as evidenced by his lack of secondary sexual characteristics. Even if he were to marry, consummation would be difficult, and conception, in my opinion, would be impossible.”

The word hung in the air like a death sentence. Impossible. My father was silent for a long moment. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“As certain as medicine allows. I’ve seen maybe a dozen such cases in my career. None of them resulted in the birth of a child.”