My Grandfather's Son

"I was nine years old when I met my father."

The opening paragraph of My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir—the autobiography of Clarence Thomas:

I was nine years old when I met my father. His name was M. C. Thomas, and my birth certificate describes him as a "laborer." My mother divorced him in 1950 and he moved north to Philadelphia, leaving his family behind in Pinpoint, the tiny Georgia community where I was born. I saw him only twice when I was young. The first time was when my mother called her parents, with whom my brother Myers and I then lived, and told them that someone at her place wanted to see us. They called a cab and sent us to her housing-project apartment, where my father was waiting. "I am your daddy," he told us in a firm, shameless voice that carried no hint of remorse for his inexplicable absence from our lives. He said nothing about loving or missing us, and we didn't say much in return—it was as though we were meeting a total stranger—but he treated us politely enough, and even promised to send us a pair of Elgin watches with flexible bands, which were popular at the time. Though we watched the mail every day, the watches never came, and when a year or so had gone by, my grandparents bought them for us instead. My father had broken the only promise he ever made to us. After that we heard nothing more from him, not even a Christmas or birthday card. For years my brother and I would ask ourselves how a man could show no interest in his own children. I still wonder.

The second paragraph.

I saw him for the second time after I graduated from high school. He had come to see his own father in Montgomery, not far from Pinpoint, and I went there to visit him. I felt I owed it to him—he was, after all, my father, and he had let my grandparents raise me without interference—but Myers would have nothing to do with "C," as we called him, saying that the only father we had was our grandfather. That may sound harsh, but it was nothing more than the truth, for me as much as my brother. In every way that counts, I am my grandfather's son. I even called him Daddy because that was what my mother called him. (His friends called him Mike.) He was dark, strong, proud, and determined to mold me in his image. For a time I rejected what he taught me, but even then I still yearned for his approval. He was the one hero in my life. What I am is what he made me.

The third paragraph.

I am descended from the West African slaves who lived on the barrier islands and in the low country of Georgia, South Carolina, and coastal northern Florida. In Georgia my people were called Geechees; in South Carolina, Gullahs. They were isolated from the rest of the population, black and white alike, and so maintained their distinctive dialect and culture well into the twentieth century. What little remains of Geechee life is now celebrated by scholars of black folklore, but when I was a boy, "Geechee" was a derogatory term for Georgians who had profoundly Negroid features and spoke with a foreign-sounding accent similar to the dialects heard on certain Caribbean islands.

And the fourth paragraph.

Much of my family tree is lost to me, its secrets having gone to the grave with my grandparents, but I know that Daddy's people worked on a three-thousand-acre rice plantation in Liberty County, just south of Savannah, and after their manumission they stayed nearby. The maternal side of my mother's family also came from Liberty County, and probably worked on the same plantation, most of which has remained intact. Not long ago I saw it for the first time—during my youth blacks never went there unless they had a good reason—and found that the old barn in which my great-great-grandparents surely labored a century and a half ago is now a bed-and-breakfast inn whose Web site calls it "a perfect honeymoon hideaway." You'd never guess that slaves once worked there.

Skipping ahead to chapter 7—Clarence Thomas is now the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

By then I had an even more important reason to keep on getting up every day. My divorce from Kathy would soon become final, and we'd agreed that Jamal [his son] would come to live with me in September. This meant that I had to find a larger apartment—and buy some furniture, too, something I'd never bothered to do. I found an inexpensive three-bedroom apartment in Hyattsville, Maryland, a few blocks outside the District of Columbia. The building was full of cockroaches and the walls were paper thin, but I couldn't afford anything better, especially after I went further into debt to buy beds, bureaus, desks, and a couple of chairs. Fortunately, Jamal proved to be both independent and dependable, and I soon found that I could trust him to take care of himself. At first he spent weekends with Kathy, but the two of us lived together full time after she moved back to New England in 1985. In our spare time we ran errands, took trips, played video games, listened to music, watched TV, and ate too much. Taking care of my son while holding down a demanding job was difficult, but it helped to ease my guilt and gave me another reason to go on living.

Taking a break from the endless string of twelve-hour days at the EEOC, he begins watching TV documentaries about World War II.

I wanted more out of life than an endless string of twelve-hour days. In time I found it, with the unwitting help of my son. Jamal and I bought a small color television and our first VCR in late 1985, and within a few weeks I'd become fascinated by TV documentaries about World War II. How, I asked myself, had Adolf Hitler gained control of one of the most culturally advanced countries in the world? Why had so many of the world's leaders, both in America and Europe, been so slow to confront him? In an effort to answer these questions, I started watching programs about Winston Churchill, the one person who had understood and opposed Hitler early on. This led me to start reading about him, and the more I read, the more impressed I was by his prescience—and his personality. My interest in Churchill kindled a love of reading for its own sake that I'd failed to acquire in college. Before long I was gobbling up such fat tomes as Paul Johnson's Modern Times and A History of Christianity, after which I branched out to Lincoln biographies. For lighter fare I treated myself to the western novels of Louis L'Amour, and I also reread The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, whose scathing criticisms of the dangers of centralized government impressed me even more after working in Washington.

And from chapter 8.

Later that month I attended a law-and-literature conference at Princeton University. One of the speakers was James McPherson, the author of Battle Cry of Freedom, a one-volume history of the Civil War that had sparked my interest in that great conflict and become one of my favorite books. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to hear McPherson speak, and I'd just bought my dream car, a Corvette ZR-1, so I decided to drive to Princeton to take part in the conference.

This is one of my favorite autobiographies. More from it in the weeks to come.