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.

I also began to browse books my father hadn’t known were in his library—volumes left behind by previous owners or accidentally included in lots purchased at estate sales. Among them were abolitionist literature, technically illegal in Mississippi: “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” published in 1845. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852. Essays by William Lloyd Garrison and other Northern abolitionists.

I read these forbidden books late at night, when the house was quiet, and they deeply disturbed me. I grew up accepting slavery as natural, divinely ordained, beneficial to both master and slave. The belief that enslaved people were inferior, childish, incapable of self-determination—this was what everyone around me believed and taught me.

But these books painted a different picture. Frederick Douglass wrote with an intelligence and eloquence that rivaled any white author I’ve read. He described the cruelty of slavery: floggings, the separation of families, sexual abuse, the psychological torture of being treated like property. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” though fiction, depicted the horrors of slavery with devastating emotional impact.

I began to notice things I had previously ignored. The scars on the backs of the farm workers’ hands. The way the slaves’ faces became blank and submissive as white men approached. Children who looked suspiciously like my father’s overseers. Women who disappeared from the fields for months at a time, then returned without the children they were apparently carrying.

But I did nothing about these observations. I was too weak, too dependent, too trapped in my own comfort to challenge the system. I told myself I was different from other slave owners, that I treated slaves with more kindness. But kindness doesn’t make slavery any less bad. It simply makes the owner feel better about participating in it.

In September 1858, my father made another attempt to find me a wife. He contacted families outside Mississippi—in Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia. He lowered his standards, appealing to families of lower social status and wealth. He offered increasingly generous dowries, guaranteeing that any woman who married me would live in luxury and want for nothing.

The responses were variations on the same theme. “Thank you for your generous offer, but Caroline is already scheduled for someone else.” “We appreciate your interest, but we don’t think she would be a suitable candidate.” “Although your son seems like a decent young man, we are looking for a situation with other prospects.”

That last one was especially cruel. “Different perspectives” is a polite way of saying that my husband might give us grandchildren.

In December 1858, my father stopped trying. Most evenings, we ate dinner together in silence. The clink of silver on porcelain was the only sound in the vast dining room. Sometimes he looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Disappointment, certainly, but also something akin to desperation.

The explosion occurred in March 1859. It was late at night, and my father had been drinking more than usual. I was in the library reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations when he burst in.

“Thomas, we need to talk.”

I put the book down. “Yes, Father.”

He sat down heavily, the bourbon sloshing in his glass. “I’m 58 years old. I could die tomorrow or live another 20 years, but either way, I’ll die eventually. And when I die, what happens to all this?” He gestured vaguely at the room, the house, and the plantation beyond.

“The estate will likely go to our closest male relative. Cousin Robert from Alabama.”

“Cousin Robert,” my father growled, “is an incompetent drunk who lost two small plantations to debt. He would sell the place within a year and drink away the profits. Everything I built, everything my father built before me, would be gone.”

“I’m sorry, Father. I know this isn’t the situation you wanted.”

“Sorry doesn’t solve the problem.” He stood up and began pacing the room. “For 18 months, I’ve tried everything. 18 months searching for a wife who would accept you despite your condition. No one will. No one wants a husband who can’t produce heirs. That’s reality.”