Dates: May 1896 - December 1896 | Locations: West Adams, downtown Los Angeles, FAME Church | Sam's Age: 12 years old
The newspaper arrived on a Tuesday morning in May 1896, and it carried the decision that would reshape how Sam understood everything that followed.
Plessy v. Ferguson. The Supreme Court had decided that segregation was constitutional—that the separation of races did not violate the Constitution so long as the accommodations were "separate but equal." Thomas read the reprinted decision at the breakfast table while Sam and Evelyn watched. His expression did not change as he read, but Sam had learned to recognize the particular stillness that descended over his father's features when he was absorbing information that altered something fundamental.
"They've made it law," Thomas said finally, setting down the newspaper. "What was custom has become constitutional."
Evelyn's hand tightened around her coffee cup. "What does it mean for us?"
"It means other states will follow. It means what we have avoided in California—the formal legal architecture of separation—now has a template. It means that what is currently only practice will become law, and once it is law, changing it becomes immeasurably harder."
Thomas folded the newspaper carefully. "It also means that people who were uncertain about whether they could treat us as lesser now have permission. Legal permission. The hesitation is gone."
The effects were not immediate, but they were unmistakable.
A week after the decision arrived, Thomas came home from the bank with a particular expression—not anger, but something quieter. Confirmation of something he had anticipated.
"Robert Chen came asking to withdraw his funds," Thomas told Evelyn. "He was nervous, but he came. Withdrew everything. I asked him why, and he said his employer had advised him that it was no longer safe to bank with colored institutions. That the law had made it clear which institutions were proper and which were not."
"Did you try to convince him?" Evelyn asked.
"No," Thomas said. "What would I say? That the law doesn't mean what it says? We both know it does. Or it will. Once enough people believe it, it becomes true."
Sam listened to this exchange and felt something shift in how he understood the world. The decision was not just a legal matter. It was permission. Permission for people to act on inclinations they had been holding in check. Permission to treat segregation as natural, inevitable, right.
At school, the effects arrived in smaller ways that nonetheless registered clearly. Miss Catherine, their teacher, was white—a woman of perhaps forty who had taught at the FAME Church school for several years with what Sam had always interpreted as genuine commitment to her students. But in the weeks after Plessy, something shifted in how she moved through the classroom. She was still competent, still technically kind. But there was now a distance that had not been there before. She called on white students first, even when Black students had their hands raised. She spent more time with certain students and less with others, and the pattern corresponded exactly to color.
One afternoon in June, Miss Catherine returned papers to the class. Sam received his back with a mark that was lower than he expected—a ninety-two instead of the ninety-eight that his work had clearly warranted. He said nothing, but he noticed that a white student with similar work had received a ninety-five.
After class, he approached Miss Catherine's desk. "I wanted to ask about the marking on my essay."
Miss Catherine looked up from her papers. "Yes?"
"I'm not certain I understand why the marking is what it is. The writing seems comparable to other papers."
"Your work is good," Miss Catherine said, and there was something in her tone that made clear she was not actually answering his question. "But there is always room for improvement. I'm sure you understand that standards must be maintained."
Sam understood. He understood perfectly. The standard had shifted. The standard now had color.
That evening, Thomas found Sam in the study, reading.
"How was school?" Thomas asked.
"Miss Catherine marked my essay lower than it deserved," Sam said simply.
Thomas was quiet for a moment. "Because of the essay?"
"No," Sam said. "Because of me."
Thomas nodded slowly. "Yes. That will begin to happen more now. The decision gave people permission. Permission to act on things they were already thinking but were restraining themselves from doing. Before, they had to pretend the restraint was principle. Now they can acknowledge it as law."
He sat across from Sam. "This is the education that matters now. Learning to recognize when you are being treated as lesser because of what you are, and learning to continue functioning despite that recognition. Many people cannot do this. They become paralyzed by the injustice of it, or they become bitter in ways that destroy them. You will need to do both—recognize the injustice and continue functioning."
"How?" Sam asked.
"That is what we will be teaching you," Thomas said. "Not the theory of it. The practice of it."
By the autumn of 1896, Sam's body began its own rebellion.
His voice deepened and cracked unpredictably, sometimes dropping into registers that embarrassed him in class. His limbs lengthened faster than his coordination could manage, leaving him gangly and uncertain in his own skin. Hair appeared in places it hadn't before—under his arms, on his legs, in the space between his waist and thighs that created new confusion and shame when he bathed.
The physical changes would have been manageable on their own. Boys around him were experiencing the same transformations, and most moved through them with a kind of careless obliviousness that Sam found simultaneously enviable and incomprehensible. They joked about their changing bodies. They compared themselves. They seemed to move through the awkwardness without the constant self-consciousness that plagued Sam.
But Sam's body was changing in a context that had just shifted dramatically. His body was becoming visibly masculine at the exact moment the law had clarified that his masculine body was a threat, was improper, was something that needed to be contained and controlled.
At fourteen, he would be considered a man in the way that mattered—in the way that made him dangerous. But at twelve, he was still supposed to be a boy. The contradiction created a kind of constant dissonance in how he moved through the world.
Miss Catherine's eye contact changed. Where she had once looked at him directly, now her gaze seemed to slide away slightly, or to fix on some point just beyond his face. Other white adults began to address him more formally, with less of the casual ease they had shown when he was clearly a child. The way white men looked at him in public spaces shifted—there was now an element of assessment, as though they were calculating something about him based on his increasing height, his deepening voice, the way his body was becoming recognizably masculine.
One Saturday in November, Sam went to the market with his mother. A white woman was examining produce near him. She glanced at him, then away. Then back again, longer, and her expression changed—a quick flash of something that might have been fear or disgust before she turned and moved to another section of the market.
Sam understood that something had crossed over in that moment. He was no longer a child whose race was an abstract matter. He was becoming a young man, and his race was becoming a physical fact written on his body in ways that seemed to frighten people.
Alongside the physical changes came something else—a new kind of awareness that centered in his body and created constant confusion.
He became aware of girls in ways he had not been aware of them before. Not as friends or classmates, but as objects of some feeling he couldn't quite name. A girl named Catherine in his class—no relation to Miss Catherine, a Black girl with quick eyes and careful bearing—suddenly seemed to occupy more of his consciousness than was reasonable. He found himself noticing how she moved, the sound of her voice, the way her hands looked when she wrote.
The wanting was physical. It arrived as a kind of constant low-level ache, a sensation centered between his legs that embarrassed him constantly and seemed to activate at the most inconvenient moments—in class, at church, when he was supposed to be concentrating on something else.
But beyond the physical wanting was something else: the awareness that this wanting was forbidden. It was forbidden in ways that were becoming legally clear, now that Plessy had given permission to formalize what had previously been only custom.
One afternoon in the autumn, a group of white boys passed him on the street. One of them looked at him with an expression that Sam recognized from his father's teachings as a warning. The boy's eyes moved down Sam's body—taking inventory, assessing threat—before he turned to his friends with a comment Sam didn't hear but understood completely.
Sam realized in that moment that the physical wanting that occupied so much of his consciousness was now officially dangerous. His body was not simply developing. His body was becoming criminal. The desires that were natural to an adolescent boy were being transformed, through law and social sanction, into something that could get him killed.
He went home and wrote in his ledger:
"November 1896. My body is becoming something I don't recognize. The changes are normal—I see other boys experiencing them—but the meaning of the changes is different for me. My body is becoming dangerous. Not to myself, but to myself in relation to others. I notice girls the way boys are supposed to notice girls. But the law has made that noticing criminal. I am becoming something that must be hidden, controlled, feared. I am becoming a man in a world that has decided that my manhood is a threat."
By December 1896, the school had changed in ways that made the Plessy decision viscerally real.
New students began arriving—children and adolescents from the South, refugees from the violence that had intensified following the legal permission that Plessy had granted. They arrived with stories they didn't fully articulate but that lived in their bodies and expressions. A boy named Marcus, perhaps thirteen, with eyes that had seen things that no thirteen-year-old should see. A girl named Sarah, ten years old, who flinched when white people approached suddenly.
Marcus became Sam's friend almost by accident. They sat near each other in class, and one day Marcus asked to borrow a pencil. The conversation that followed opened something in Marcus—a need to talk to someone who seemed to understand without needing to be told.
"In Georgia, they lynched a man two towns over," Marcus said one afternoon as they walked home from school. "My father said we had to leave or I might become the next one. Just for existing. Just for being a boy getting older."
Sam understood this intellectually—he had read about lynching in the California Eagle, had heard conversations in his father's study about violence in the South. But hearing it from Marcus, from a boy his own age who had actually fled, made it different. It made it real in a way that reading about it had not.
"Do you know when it will stop?" Marcus asked him.
Sam almost said: "I don't know." But something in him—the part that carried knowledge he couldn't explain—understood that the answer was more complicated. That Plessy had not created the violence, but had given it legal sanction. That the violence would not stop because the law had formalized the permission to pursue it.
"I don't think it will stop," Sam said finally. "Not soon."
Marcus nodded as though this was what he had expected. As though the confirmation of his darkest understanding was somehow necessary.
One evening in late December, Thomas found Sam in the study looking at a map of Los Angeles.
Sam was tracing property lines with his finger—the sections of the city marked with boundaries, the territories that were being carved into distinct spaces. West Adams, where their family lived. Downtown, where the bank operated. The emerging neighborhoods where property values were beginning to shift based on who was being permitted to live where.
"What are you studying?" Thomas asked.
"The places we can be," Sam said without looking up. "And the places we can't."
Thomas stood beside his son and looked at the map. He didn't correct him or offer reassurance. He simply looked at what Sam was seeing.
"The Plessy decision," Thomas said finally, "made something official that I have been navigating my entire life. I have always known where the boundaries are. I have always moved within them. But now those boundaries have legal standing. They are not just custom anymore. They are law."
He pointed to different sections of the map. "There—that neighborhood is closing to us. That business district is becoming harder to access. That school will begin to segregate in ways it hasn't before. The decision has given people permission to do what they were already thinking about doing, but were restraining themselves from."
"How do you endure it?" Sam asked. His voice was still unsteady, his adolescent tenor cracking slightly on the word "endure."
"By understanding that the map can change," Thomas said. "Not quickly. Not easily. But the boundaries drawn on paper today are not eternal. I have lived long enough to see boundaries move. And I will teach you how to position yourself so that when they move again, you are prepared."
He placed his hand on Sam's shoulder. "This law does not change the truth of who you are. It changes only what the world permits you to do with that truth. That is different. That is something we can work with."
Sam looked at the map, at the boundaries drawn in ink, at the spaces marked out for different kinds of people. He understood that his father was offering something important—not comfort, but strategy. Not denial of the reality, but a framework for surviving it.
"Will I be able to change it?" Sam asked. "When I'm old enough?"
Thomas was quiet for a moment. "I don't know. But you will understand how the system works in ways that might allow you to position yourself differently than I have been able to. That is all I can offer you right now."
He left Sam alone with the map, and Sam continued tracing the boundaries, learning them, understanding them, beginning to imagine how they might someday be redrawn.