He was considered unfit for reproduction — his father gave him to the strongest enslaved woman 1859. They called him defective during his youth, and by age 19, after three physicians had examined his frail body and delivered identical conclusions, Thomas Bowmont Callahan had…

 

My name is Thomas Bowmont Callahan. I’m 19 years old and my body has always been a betrayal—a collection of failures written in bone and muscle that never properly formed. I was born premature in January 1840, arriving 2 months early during one of the coldest winters Mississippi had seen in decades.

 

 

My mother, Sarah Bowmont Callahan, went into labor unexpectedly during a dinner party my father was hosting for visiting judges and planters. The midwife who attended her, a enslaved woman named Mama Ruth, who delivered half the white babies in the county, took one look at me and shook her head.