My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir
by Clarence Thomas
HarperCollins, $26.95

I. The Curse

Clarence Thomas has lived most of his life under the spell of a curse. The curse came down on him from the mouth of his hero and grandfather, the great Meyers Anderson. And it came at a terribly vulnerable time in the life of young Clarence.

Meyers Anderson and his wife Christine raised their grandson from the age of seven. More than anyone, Meyers Anderson was the person who shaped Clarence Thomas; he rescued Thomas from poverty, sent him to Catholic schools, and instilled in him discipline and determination.

What did young Clarence do to bring down the wrath of Meyers Anderson? Anyone who listens to Thomas speak for more than five minutes, anyone who reads his memoir, will hear a familiar ring in the answer. Clarence Thomas dared to think for himself. Thomas, who was always unsure about his calling and who had become disillusioned by the racism he found in the Catholic Church, quit the seminary and quit the Church, ending the dream of becoming Savannah, Georgia's first black priest.

First came the wrath. Meyers Anderson expelled Clarence Thomas from the only home he had known for 12 years, and he ended all financial support. Then, while Clarence staggered from the rejection, his grandfather laid the curse on him: You'll probably end up like your no-good daddy and all those other no-good Pinpoint Negroes. (Pinpoint, Georgia is the small poor, rural hamlet where Clarence Thomas was born. His sister still lives there today.)

To grasp how searing this event was for Thomas, we have to understand that Meyers Anderson was the third figure in his life to reject him.

Thomas was abandoned by his father from birth. He was seven years old when his mother—poor and overwhelmed—sent him and his brother to her father, Meyers Anderson. Thomas' mother made a decision that was to prove enormously helpful for her children, but Thomas, as a child, experienced the move to his grandfather's as abandonment. He writes that the move came without any warning or explanation. Meyers Anderson and his wife Christine provided Thomas and his brother with a comfortable home and ample food, an environment that contrasted sharply with the cold, cramped, dilapidated apartment where they had lived with their mother.

The improvement in his living condition came with a price: Thomas and his brother had to submit to the rigid, unyielding rule of their grandfather. Anderson was a successful small businessman who delivered coal and wood to Savannah's black community. He sometimes awakened Clarence at 3 a.m. in the morning to help make deliveries. To keep Clarence and his brother out of trouble in the city, Anderson built a farm house in the country. Each summer, Thomas toiled on the farm in the Georgia heat from before sunrise to past nightfall.

Meyers Anderson never hugged his grandson or uttered one word of praise. There was only the work and the threat of rejection. "The door to the house, he said, swung both ways," Thomas writes, quoting his grandfather. "It had swung inward on our arrival, but if we didn't behave, he warned ominously, it would swing outward."

An altar boy who had an emerging interest in the priesthood, Thomas won admission to a Catholic boarding school for pre-seminary students. The pre-seminary academy was expensive, and Meyers Anderson agreed to pay for the academy on one condition: "If you go, you can't quit." Thomas, 15 years old, agreed.

St. John Vianney on the Isle of Hope was Clarence Thomas' first experience attending school with white people. Thomas was one of two blacks in the entering class, and after the other black student quit, he was the lone black.

Away from home for the first time, under enormous pressure and fear--fear of failing and disappointing his grandfather, fear of confirming white stereotypes, fear of being insulted by classmates who made insensitive and racist comments--Thomas endured and excelled, graduating with high marks.

He headed off to the seminary in Missouri. By Christmas of his first year, he had decided against the priesthood. For the sin of changing his mind, for breaking the agreement he had with his grandfather, Thomas was cast out by the man whose opinion and support meant the most to him. In Thomas' memoir, he reveals that from the moment his grandfather expelled him and uttered the curse, he was determined to prove it wrong.

But curses are tricky things. You can't disprove a curse any more than you can disprove a racist stereotype. You can disavow a curse, defy it, or ignore it out of the conviction that it is nonsense. Working to disprove a curse can easily strengthen its hold over you. Answering it guarantees a life of fear: every misstep, every miscalculation, could be evidence that the curse is correct.

II. Personal Politics

There are some pleasant surprises we discover about Clarence Thomas from his memoir. We learn that one of his favorite drinks in his college days was Ripple. Fans of Sanford & Son will remember Redd Foxx, playing ornery junkman Fred Sanford, proclaiming his fondness for "Champipple," a combination of champagne and ripple. For anyone who wonders whether Thomas, the anti-affirmative-action icon, was ever truly steeped in urban black culture, the mention of ripple should put the matter to rest.

The man described as the most conservative judge on the most conservative court of the past 50 years has shown signs of transcending partisanship. On several occasions, he intervened to help Democratic judges, appointees of Bill Clinton, whose nominations had been blocked by Republicans. Thomas made a few phone calls and the nominees, who were black and decidedly not conservative, won their appointments. Thomas doesn't discuss these actions in his memoir, which ends just as he joins the high court in 1991. We learn these facts, instead, from Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas, a thoughtful biography published earlier this year by Washington Post reporters Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher.

Thomas is the most accessible member of the court, by all journalistic accounts, and the favorite justice among the workers who maintain the Supreme Court building. In 1997, he adopted his grand-nephew after the boy's father, Thomas' nephew, was arrested on drug charges. Thomas and his wife, Virginia, almost certainly saved the boy from a life of poverty and disappointment.

In the 16 years since he arrived on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has emerged as an intellectual icon in conservative intellectual circles. The accusation leveled by liberals in his early years—that he was a parrot of Justice Antonin Scalia—has been dispelled. It is now clear that Clarence Thomas is significantly to the right of Scalia.

Alas, Thomas, as revealed in the memoir, is a severely wounded man. He still believes he was the victim of a "high-tech lynching" at the hands of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "An Invitation to a Lynching" is how he titles the chapter recounting his nomination to the High Court and the ensuing Judiciary Committee hearings. He restates this reckless, incomprehensible accusation with the same ferocity now as he did then, a decade and a half ago. The charge was obscene then and is obscene now, more so now for the fact that he has had 16 years to reconsider the matter from the perch of the most powerful court in the land. Suffice it to say that no victim of lynching got anywhere near a courthouse or a judge, let alone had a chance to occupy the judge's chair.

Thomas' invocation of lynching to describe a political conflict that he ultimately won suggests a pathological insecurity and near paranoia. And indeed these traits are on display throughout the memoir. Thomas compares his political struggles (opposition from Democrats and liberals) to the struggles of Bigger Thomas of Richard Wright's Native Son. He compares his Senate confirmation hearings to the trial against Tom Robinson, the black man wrongly accused of rape in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Thomas thinks his insecurity and fear stems from his determination to assert his "independence"; it's the price he pays, he thinks, for daring to challenge the civil rights establishment and white liberals.

The memoir makes clear, however, that Thomas was an anguished and tormented man long before Anita Hill stepped onto the national stage and accused him of sexually harassing her.

Some of Thomas' anguish stems from growing up in the pre-civil rights South, where black people lived in fear: in fear of white people, in fear of the law, in fear of confirming the stigma attached to being black. The extremely dark-skinned Thomas is still haunted by the teasing of his black classmates in Savannah, Georgia, who called him "ABC": America's Blackest Child. (Strangely, he carries no such grudge against the whites who held political power in the South and who enforced the regime of legalized racism and violence.)

The brunt of Thomas' anger is reserved for white liberals, academics, the civil rights establishment, the so-called light-skinned black elite, and journalists. He's mad at white liberals for the sin of helping him and a small number of other black students win admission to Yale University Law School.

Thomas' experience at Yale plays a central role in the narrative of his emerging conservatism. He'd performed well academically at Holy Cross, but at Yale, he says, he didn't receive the respect he deserved from white students and faculty. He provides no example of this. When he failed to land a prize job his final year, Thomas was devastated.

In a tortuous leap of logic that reveals more about him than it does about liberals, Thomas blames his difficulty in finding a job on the "stigmatizing effects" of affirmative action. "One high-priced lawyer after another treated me dismissively, making it clear that they had no interest in me despite my Ivy League pedigree," he writes. "Many asked pointed questions unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated."

Instead of aiming his anger at these lawyers and their apparent prejudice, Thomas does a 180 degree turn and blames the policy that helped place him in the position to be interviewed in the first place. He seems to have little awareness that America was in the beginning throes of integration in 1974. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been enacted only 10 years earlier, and the elite law firms (and elite law schools like Yale) were only beginning to add blacks in any significant number. And there is, of course, another possible explanation for his job struggles, one Thomas doesn't seem to consider. Perhaps the lawyers charged with scrutinizing applicants were genuinely unimpressed by him.

In any case, Thomas' version of this story is incomplete. According to Ken Foskett, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and author of Judging Thomas, a largely sympathetic biography, Thomas was offered a job by Kilpatrick, Cody, Rogers, McClatchey & Regenstein, a white Atlanta firm. The firm was looking to bring on its first black associate, but the hiring committee was divided. The firm's younger lawyers wanted to bring him on; the older lawyers opposed. The firm ultimately offered Thomas a job that paid $15,000 a year, a big improvement over the offer he accepted from Missouri Attorney General John Danforth. Thomas rejected the Atlanta offer, according to Foskett, as he had already committed to Danforth.

This is strange. Thomas was married and had a young son by the time he graduated from Yale. The Atlanta offer was the job of his dreams, in the capital of his home state. It is unlikely that Danforth would have seriously objected if Thomas had accepted the late offer. And if he had, so what? Apparently in Thomas' mind, a job offered late was tantamount to rejection. One can almost see the curse here working its harmful magic. The search for a job wasn't simply a search for a job. It was a search for dignity. But the focus on dignity led Thomas to reject what he most wanted.

Thomas' attempt to connect his turn against affirmative action to his experience at Yale completely breaks down when we read in Foskett's biography about the reason John Danforth, a hero to Thomas, came to Yale. Danforth later became a Senator from Missouri and Thomas' sponsor during his nomination to the Supreme Court.

"I was looking for a black lawyer," Danforth told Foskett. "Politically, I thought it was important. I didn't want when asked the question, Well how many African Americans are working in your office? I didn't want to say none."

Danforth told Foskett that anyone who could make it through Yale Law School, he figured at the time, could certainly do the work in his office. Thomas never discusses how he escaped the stigmatizing effects of being hired by someone determined to hire a black lawyer. And it's not surprising that he avoids addressing Danforth's comments. Danforth's desire to integrate his office was laudable and his effort reveals how the blurry line can be between integration and affirmative action.

III. A Curse Not Scorned

Thomas has a bust of his grandfather in his chambers. In the memoir, he quotes his grandfather on almost every other page. There is a desperate quality to the way Thomas tries to root his conservative politics in the life of Meyers Anderson. If he can connect his views to those of a plain-spoken black man who lived most of his life under Jim Crow segregation, Thomas seems to think, he can fend off allegations that his conservatism represents a betrayal of black Americans.

This is Thomas' insecurity at work. It is a defensive stance, designed to convince himself as much as it is to convince others. If Thomas were more confident and less terrified of every sling and arrow of political criticism aimed his way, he would stop quoting his grandfather and simply make the argument for why conservatism is good for black Americans. But this is a man who was rejected by his three primary caregivers and cursed by his hero. He lives in dread fear of further rejection.

It is easy to see why Thomas would deploy Meyers Anderson in service of his conservative ideology. Anderson often rose at 2:30 or 3 am. Though illiterate, he was extremely smart and extraordinarily disciplined. His success at running his own business in the segregated South (as well as owning several rental properties and a farm) was an enormous achievement against incredible odds.

But Thomas' view of his grandfather is one-dimensional. There is no reason to think that Meyers Anderson was politically conservative. By Thomas' own account, Anderson had been a supporter of the NAACP. He mortgaged his house "routinely" to pay the bond for student protesters arrested for challenging segregation in Savannah. His closest friends told Merida and Fletcher that Anderson was not at all pleased by Thomas' service in the Reagan Administration.

And the icon of discipline wasn't always so disciplined. As a young man, Meyers Anderson fathered two daughters out of wedlock by two different women. And he abandoned both of them. One reason Thomas' mother seems to have been in such dire straights at the time she handed her sons to her father was that she had grown up without the support of her father.

Indeed Anderson initially refused to take responsibility for Clarence and his brother. In an episode well documented by Thomas' biographers, Meyers Anderson initially rebuffed his daughter when she brought her two children to his house. But Christine Anderson, Meyers' wife, intervened to help her step-daughter and step-grandchildren. She defiantly told her husband to pack his bags: the children were staying. Meyers Anderson relented, and Thomas and his brother moved in. It's not clear that Thomas knows about this episode. He has become so media-phobic that he avoids reading anything journalists write about him.

And then there is the cruelty of the curse. Perhaps the old man intended only to motivate his grandson. If so, it was a thoroughly misguided and destructive gesture. Anderson announced the curse at least twice: on expulsion day and on the day Clarence Thomas boarded the train to New England to attend Holy Cross College.

Anderson had two obvious chances to lift the curse, times when his simple presence would have told his grandson he was more than a no-good Negro. But Anderson refused to attend Thomas' graduation from Holy Cross or his graduation from Yale Law School. In each instance, Thomas was devastated. But he still cannot bring himself to criticize Anderson or to see him in all his complexity.

Clarence Thomas is now 59. My Grandfather's Son has climbed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It's time for him to repudiate the curse as the demoralizing, racist foolishness that it is. Taking this step would require him to develop a more complex and complicated view of his hero, Meyers Anderson. But Clarence Thomas isn't much interested in the complexity and complication of life. The Grandfather's Son remains under the spell of the curse.