But my mother, delirious with fever and exhaustion, refused to accept this prognosis. "He'll live," she whispered, cradling my tiny body to her chest. "I know he'll live. I can feel his heartbeat. It's weak, but he's fighting."

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 old, I weighed a mere three kilograms. At six months old, I still couldn't hold my own head up. At one year old, when other children were already standing and some were taking their first steps, I could barely sit upright.

The doctors my father brought in from Nachez, from Vixsburg, and even from 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 swept through Mississippi in 1846. I remember her lying in bed, her skin the color of old parchment, her eyes yellow and unfocused. She called me to her bed the day before she died.

"Thomas," she whispered, her voice barely audible. "You will face challenges throughout your life. People will underestimate you. They will pity you. They will dismiss you. But you have something more valuable than physical strength. You have a mind, a heart, a soul. Don't let anyone make you feel less than complete."

She died the next morning. It wasn't until years later that I fully understood her words.

My father, Judge William Callahan, was an imposing man in every way I wasn't. He stood six feet tall, had broad shoulders, 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 initial 800 acres into an 8,000-acre cotton empire.