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.

She was right. I survived that first night and the next and the next. But surviving isn’t the same as thriving. At one month, I weighed barely six pounds. At 6 months, I still couldn’t hold up my own head. At one year, when other babies were standing and some were taking their first steps, I could barely sit upright.

The doctors my father brought in from Nachez, from Vixsburg, from as far away as New Orleans, all said the same thing: Premature birth had stunted my development in ways that would affect me for life