Dates: September 1884 - December 1889 | Locations: West Adams residence, Los Angeles (primarily) | Sam's Age: 1 year 5 months to 6 years old
The first thing Sam learned to do was to move.
By November 1884, when he was 1 year and 5 months old, his legs had learned the work of standing. He pulled himself up on furniture with the fierce concentration of a small explorer discovering his own capacity. His mother watched him with pure joy—the kind that had nothing to do with the world and everything to do with watching her son discover what his body could do.
"Look," Evelyn said to Thomas, who had appeared in the doorway. "Look what he's doing."
Sam took a step. Then another. Then toppled forward into his mother's waiting arms, and she caught him, laughing—that bell sound that had meant safety since his birth.
"Again," she encouraged, setting him upright. "Try again."
He did. Again and again, falling and being caught, until his legs found something like rhythm. By the end of the afternoon, he had crossed the room three times without falling. By December, he was walking steadily, though still uncertain on curves.
Thomas watched these developments with quiet pride. His son was becoming mobile, becoming capable. This was good. This was natural. This was what children did.
The world existed outside these celebrations, and Thomas knew it. But for now, in this house, in these moments, his son was learning to walk. That mattered.
The Hartwell store became a ghost story in the house. Not explicitly—no one sat Sam down and explained what had happened. But the absence was loud. Thomas no longer spoke of acquiring fabric from there. Evelyn's careful descriptions of how goods should be sourced shifted subtly. There was a geography to survival, and Hartwell's had become a place you simply didn't go.
Instead, Thomas began visiting a different kind of merchant.
By 1885, a small but growing network of Black-owned businesses were establishing themselves in Los Angeles. Some were successful; most were precarious. But they existed, and they operated on a different principle than Hartwell's. There was no question of whether a Black man could afford goods. The question was different: How do we help each other survive?
Thomas brought Sam along on some of these visits—short trips to suppliers, to the offices of men who were building infrastructure from nothing. Sam was too young to understand transactions, but he absorbed the tone of these spaces. When Thomas entered a Black merchant's shop, his shoulders relaxed slightly. The performance he maintained in white spaces—the careful deference, the strategic humility—could be set down. Not entirely. There was still strategy, still calculation. But it was a different kind.
At the Black-owned bank that had recently opened on Central Avenue, the men greeted Thomas with genuine respect. No condescension masked as politeness. No underlying question about his legitimacy. They treated his money as money, not as a curiosity.
This was the repositioning that Thomas had begun in the months after Hartwell's. It was slower, more cumbersome than white credit would have been. It was also more reliable.
By 1886, there were certain names that appeared in conversation with increasing frequency.
Biddy Mason was one of them. Sam first heard the name in passing—his mother mentioning her to a neighbor, his father speaking of her with a particular kind of respect when discussing community matters. She was a figure, Sam understood early, without quite knowing why. Someone important in a way that wasn't about money alone, though money was involved.
The first time Sam saw her was at the FAME Church service in July 1886. She was difficult to miss—tall, with gray threading through her hair, moving through the church with the kind of presence that made people acknowledge her without words. Thomas nodded to her. Evelyn's posture shifted slightly, a subtle adjustment that suggested recognition of hierarchy.
After the service, Biddy Mason came to speak with them briefly. Her hands, when she touched Sam's face in greeting, were strong and weathered. She didn't speak to him directly, but she observed him with an intensity that registered despite his youth—the kind of attention that takes inventory.
"He's well-formed," she said to Evelyn. Not a question. An assessment.
"Yes," Evelyn said simply.
Biddy Mason came to the house for the first time in September 1886, invited for a meal. There was preparation for this visit—Evelyn cleaned more carefully, planned the menu with deliberation, dressed more formally than usual. This was not a casual visit.
Biddy Mason arrived with cloth-wrapped food despite being a guest—bread, dried fruit, things that suggested both generosity and pragmatism. She moved through the house like someone visiting family, not like a stranger. She and Thomas discussed business, real estate, community matters. She examined Sam not as a novelty but as a matter of natural interest, the way one might examine a young plant to see how it was growing.
She became a regular visitor after that—not frequent, but regular. Once a month, perhaps. Sometimes with food, sometimes simply to sit and observe the workings of the household. She was Biddy Mason, and her presence in the house carried weight that Sam's young consciousness registered without needing to understand it.
1887 came with a particular kind of anxiety that wasn't present before.
News from the South arrived in fragments through the church network, through letters that Thomas read with his face becoming increasingly drawn. Stories of lynchings. Of organized violence. Of entire communities being destroyed by mobs that operated with impunity because the law protected them rather than constrained them.
Los Angeles was not the South. But Los Angeles was watching the South, learning from it. The informal racism Sam had known—the exclusion, the contempt, the structural barriers—was hardening into something more deliberate.
Thomas began keeping newspapers. He would read them in his study late into the evening, his expression dark. Sam, on the rare occasions when he wandered near that room, could sense the weight of what his father was absorbing. The 42-year-old consciousness understood immediately: Thomas was trying to anticipate. To understand the shape of what was coming.
"They're codifying it," Thomas said to Evelyn one night, thinking Sam was asleep. "What was custom is becoming law. What was assumed is becoming official."
Evelyn's response was quiet. "Then we prepare."
By 1888, the network of Black business in Los Angeles had strengthened slightly, though "strengthened" was a relative term. It was more accurate to say that it had become more necessary. White merchants were becoming increasingly selective about whom they served. Credit that might have been extended five years earlier was now routinely denied. The mathematics of prejudice were becoming more explicit.
It was during this period that Thomas met Edward Thornton Blake.
Blake was a white investor from San Francisco, part of a wave of capital moving south to Los Angeles's developing markets. He was shrewd—he saw money where others saw only categories. And he saw that the growing Black community represented untapped economic potential. Not from charity. From calculation.
"These men," Blake said to Thomas during one of their early conversations in the bank's office, gesturing vaguely toward the downtown area where Black businesses were concentrating, "they're operating at a disadvantage because the institutions don't support them. But institutions can be created. And if someone were positioned correctly within that infrastructure..."
Thomas understood what Blake was suggesting. It was opportunity. It was also exposure. Working with Blake meant becoming more visible, which meant becoming more of a target.
"I need to consider," Thomas told him.
Blake smiled. It wasn't an unfriendly smile, but it contained something calculating. "Of course. But consider quickly. Opportunities like this don't remain open indefinitely."
That night, Thomas discussed it with Evelyn. Not with anger or certainty, but with the careful deliberation of someone weighing options that were all, fundamentally, risky.
"The money is real," he said. "The opportunity is real. But the exposure—"
"The exposure exists whether we take it or not," Evelyn said. "Your success is already visible. The question is whether you leverage it or whether you let it make you a target without purpose."
By 1889, Thomas had begun a careful partnership with Blake. It was limited, carefully structured, designed to minimize risk while creating new infrastructure for Black business in Los Angeles. It was also the beginning of something that would define the next decades of his life: the understanding that survival required not just avoidance, but strategic engagement.
Sam entered the community school through FAME Church in 1889, just before his sixth birthday. The school was small, run by educated Black women who had committed themselves to the work of teaching despite the limited resources. The building smelled of wood and chalk. The children were a mixture of ages—not enough formal structure for different grades, but rather different levels of learning happening simultaneously in the same space.
There was a girl named Josephine, seven years old, with quick eyes and quicker hands. There was a boy named William, too energetic to sit still, who learned letters by inscribing them in the dirt outside. There was Miss Catherine, the teacher, who moved between them with a kind of practical patience that suggested she had done this work for a long time and had learned not to expect gratitude from the institution or the society.
Sam simply was in this space. He attended school. He learned letters. He listened to Miss Catherine explain the mechanics of reading. He was a child among children, and the complexity of his consciousness remained invisible because it was expected to remain invisible. A child's job was to be quiet and absorb. Sam did this naturally.
On the rare occasions when he read ahead—when his understanding outpaced his peers—it was merely noted and moved past. Smart children existed. There was nothing remarkable about intelligence in a six-year-old. The remarkable thing was finding children who were not intelligent enough to learn when given the opportunity.
Late 1889 carried an undercurrent of increasing dread that had nothing to do with Sam's household specifically and everything to do with what was arriving.
Thomas came home with newspaper clippings. He read them, then destroyed them. But not before Sam's compartmentalized consciousness registered the headlines: violence increasing, laws passing, the architecture of Jim Crow being assembled state by state, piece by piece.
The Civil Rights Act—the one that had promised something—was being systematically dismantled through court decisions and legislative action. What had been law was becoming custom again, then becoming something harder than law: an assumption so fundamental it didn't need to be written down.
Biddy Mason visited in December 1889, as she had visited regularly across the past three years. She was noticeably smaller now, as though her body was beginning a slow process of dissolution. She moved more slowly, but her presence remained undimmed.
This time, she brought something specific. A book—Frederick Douglass's autobiography, bound in cloth, the pages worn from handling. She set it in Sam's small hands without ceremony.
"This is for when you're ready," she told him, and then to Evelyn: "When he can read it fully, when he's old enough to understand it, he should read it. It matters."
She said something quietly to Thomas before she left—words Sam didn't quite catch, but which made his father's expression shift with recognition.
"Thank you for seeing him," Thomas said as he walked her to the carriage.
Within the year, Biddy Mason would be dead. But she left behind more than a legacy. She left behind, for Sam, the understanding that there were people who had navigated impossible circumstances and survived them. That there was a history of resistance and strategy and dignity that preceded him.
By the end of 1889, Sam was six years old. He had learned to walk, to talk, to read, to navigate the spaces between who he was and what the world wanted him to be. He had learned his father's vulnerability and his mother's steel. He had learned that the world was becoming more dangerous, not less—that whatever safety existed was temporary and contingent.
The compartmentalization that had fractured his consciousness at nine months old had settled into something functional. It was no longer a crisis. It was simply how his mind operated: the baby consciousness engaging with the present, the adult consciousness observing from a distance, the gap between them bridged by performance and strategy.
This gap—this necessary separation of self from self—would define the next century of his life.
But for now, he was simply a child. Quiet. Observant in the way that careful children are observant. Ready to enter the next phase of his development, which would demand more from him than anything that had come before.