Date: June 15, 1883 Location: Whitfield residence, West Adams, Los Angeles Sam's Age: 3 days old
Three days in and Sam had learned the basic mechanics: cry, eat, sleep, shit yourself, repeat. The body had its own intelligence that had nothing to do with the consciousness trapped inside it. Every two hours, hunger clawed at his gut like something alive. His lungs had learned to produce different kinds of cries—he could distinguish between the desperate hunger cry and the tired cry, even though he wasn't consciously controlling either one.
This is insane, he thought while Evelyn held him to her breast. I have a master's degree and I'm literally helpless.
The milk was warm and endless. His body drank it with an efficiency that would have impressed him if he'd had the capacity for anything beyond base survival. Through the fog of sensation, he could hear voices in the adjoining room. His father's, careful and low. A woman's voice he didn't recognize—the midwife, probably, or maybe a neighbor.
"A healthy boy," a woman was saying. "Strong lungs. He'll do well."
Do well at what? Sam thought bitterly. Existing while Black? That's not an accomplishment, that's a gamble.
The milk stopped. Evelyn shifted him, and he felt the strange sensation of being moved through air, the jostling that made his stomach rebel. She patted his back and he burped with a force that surprised both of them. She laughed—a sound like bells, genuine and unguarded—and pressed a kiss to his forehead.
"My clever boy," she whispered.
You have no idea, Sam thought. You have no idea what I know. What I'm going to have to watch happen.
He knew she'd live forty-one more years. He knew she'd die on February 14, 1924, from the Spanish flu. He knew she wouldn't see the Roaring Twenties in their full glory, wouldn't meet her grandchildren, wouldn't know what her son became. He knew all of this the way he knew his own name—not as memory, but as fact downloaded directly into his consciousness at birth.
The weight of it was almost heavier than the baby's body could carry.
Thomas appeared in the doorway. He'd changed clothes since the birth—was wearing his formal vest, the one with the gold buttons. His expression was careful, contained. Sam was beginning to understand that his father moved through the world like a man walking across ice, never quite trusting his footing.
"How is he?" Thomas asked.
"Perfect," Evelyn said. "Samuel is perfect."
Thomas came closer and looked at the baby with an intensity that made Sam uncomfortable, even in this state. It was the look of a man calculating odds, assessing risk. "He'll need to be," Thomas said quietly. "More than perfect, actually. He'll need to be twice as smart and three times as careful."
"Don't say that," Evelyn said, but her voice had shifted. The joy was still there, but underneath it was something harder. Fear, maybe. Or resignation.
"It's not saying it that will make it true," Thomas said. "It's already true. You know it as well as I do."
Sam's body was tired. The milk had done its work, and his eyelids were heavy. But his mind—the part of him that was still 42 years old, still carrying memories of a world that didn't exist yet—refused to sleep. He wanted to listen. Wanted to understand what his parents already knew about the shape of his life.
"We'll protect him," Evelyn said.
"We'll try," Thomas replied. And that qualifier—that single word—contained everything. The entire world, compressed into two letters.
The house around him was small but well-appointed. Sam had flashes of awareness during his waking moments—the wallpaper with its pattern of climbing vines, the oil lamp on the dresser casting shadows that moved like living things, the sound of the city beyond the windows. Los Angeles in 1883 was mostly quiet. Horses instead of cars. The smell of manure and dust and cooking food from somewhere nearby.
His room—and he understood with some surprise that this was his room, that he had a room, that his parents had prepared a space specifically for him—was painted pale blue. There was a crib with railings carved in a design that must have taken hours. A rocking chair where Evelyn spent most of her time when she wasn't sleeping.
On the second day, his grandmother came. Sam knew her name—Martha Whitfield, Thomas's mother—before she introduced herself. She was tall and thin, with gray threading through her hair, and her hands were calloused in a way that suggested a life of work. She didn't smile much, but when she looked at Sam, something in her face softened.
"He has his father's eyes," she said.
"He has your nose," Evelyn said, and there was something in her tone that suggested this was a compliment, though Sam couldn't imagine why his nose—tiny, flat, useful only for breathing—would matter to anyone.
Martha stayed for an hour. She sat in the rocking chair and watched Evelyn tend to Sam, and didn't offer advice or criticism, just presence. When she left, she pressed a small cloth into Evelyn's hand—something wrapped carefully, something precious. Sam would learn later it was a recipe for a poultice, a folk remedy passed down through generations, something Martha had used on her own children and her mother before her.
It was the kind of knowledge that wouldn't save anyone, not really, but it was all she had to give.
On the third night, Sam woke to the sound of his father pacing.
The house was dark except for moonlight coming through the window. His mother was asleep in the bed nearby, exhausted from the constant work of feeding and soothing and comforting. His father was walking the hallway, back and forth, the floorboards creaking under his weight with a rhythm that was almost musical.
Sam's baby-brain wanted to cry out—the hunger was there again, or maybe not hunger but discomfort, some small itch his body couldn't identify—but something in his father's footsteps made him stay quiet. This was something private. Something that belonged to Thomas alone.
He's scared, Sam understood. He's terrified. He made a son and now he has to figure out how to keep him alive in a world that wants him dead.
And Sam, locked in his baby's body with his 42-year-old consciousness, felt something crack open inside him. Some wall he'd built against the enormity of what was happening.
His father loved him. Already. Before he could do anything, before he could be anything, before he could prove his worth or his intelligence or his value. Thomas Whitfield loved his son, and that love was already a burden too heavy to carry.
Sam made a small sound—not quite a cry, just an exhale, a noise babies made. And his father stopped pacing. There was a moment of silence. Then footsteps coming toward the crib.
Thomas looked down at his newborn son, and Sam saw it all in his face: the hope, the dread, the determination, the helplessness. The knowledge that he could work, could plan, could strategize, and it might not be enough. That the world was not constructed with room for love to make a difference.
"Stay small," Thomas whispered. "Stay quiet. Learn to watch before you speak. Learn to see what people want and give them just enough of it. Learn to trust no one, but act as though you trust everyone."
That's not how you raise a child, Sam thought. That's how you raise a spy.
But he understood why. He would understand why for the next 105 years.
Thomas reached out and touched his son's face with one calloused finger, tracing the line of his cheek like he was memorizing it. Like he was trying to imprint his will into the baby's flesh—Be strong. Be careful. Survive.
Then he turned and left, returning to the hallway, resuming his pacing.
Sam's body, despite everything, drifted back toward sleep. His mind, though, stayed awake a little longer, holding onto the moment. Holding onto the knowledge that his father had just told him how to live. Not in words—in the weight of that single touch, in the desperation barely hidden beneath that whisper.
Stay small. Stay quiet. Learn.
Sam would spend the next 105 years doing exactly that. And spending the next 105 years understanding that it would never be enough.