My very first comment about this book is that I will not discuss the confirmation hearings. Justice Thomas does talk about it in his book but I am not going to comment nor will I opine as to who was right and who was wrong. I'll leave it to others to opine on that part of the book.
I picked up this book last Wednesday night and could not put it down until I was done. It is very well written and gives us the inside track to Clarence Thomas. I don't often use the word excellent but I will here - the book was excellent. Over the years we have heard many things about Justice Thomas some of which have not been favorable. Probably the most annoying is that he is mediocre and stands in the shadow of Antonin Scalia. Well in reading this book, and I plan to read some of his decisions, I'm convinced that he is more than mediocre. The first thing you find out in this book is that Thomas grew from abject poverty to become a United States Supreme Court justice. If that is not an American dream I don't know what is.
We first meet Thomas as he describes meeting his biological father who promises he and his brother watches that they waited for but never received. We learn,"The house in which I was born was a shanty with no bathroom and no electricity except for a single light in the living room." We also learn that in the wintertime they had to plug up the holes with newspapers. Considering this, it is amazing that Thomas made it through adulthood. But the reason he did was because he was his Grandfather's Son. After moving with his mother and brother from the shanty they eventually go to live with his grandfather and grandmother. It is during these years that Justice Thomas adopts the kind of values that has taken him to the Supreme Court.
From Pinpoint to a more sedate area of Savannah Georgia, Thomas and his brother Myers moved into their grandparents' home. Thomas writes:
"Even then I understood that he had rescued me from difficult
circumstances, but it was not until long afterword that I grasped
how profoundly Daddy, Aunt Tina, and the nuns of St. Benedict's
had changed my life. Sometimes their strict rules chafed, but they
also gave me a feeling of security, and above all they opened doors
of opportunity leading to a path that took me far from the cramped
world into which I had been born. In Pinpoint I was a little Negro
boy growing up among hardworking but uneducated people. From
there I moved to the confusion and squalor of a run-down tenement
in Savannah, where I led a life of being cold and not knowing when I
would feel warmth again, of constant, gnawing hunger and not knowing
when I would eat again, a life in which knowledge trickled in by the
thimbleful when I yearned for floods of truth. To stay there would have
doomed me to a dismal life of ignorance, perhaps even crime-a life lost
before it started."
Justice Thomas leads us through a life filled with dread, like when he was made fun of for being darkskinned; a life filled with hate by those who told him he would never amount to anything because he was black; a life filled with opportunities like when he got into Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Yale Law Schools. And his journey from radical liberal to Republican. From his disappointment in learning that he was accepted into Yale under affirmative action to his first job with John Danforth who became a lifelong friend. But most of all we learn about Thomas' deep and unbridled love for this country and his questioning of the world around him and his role in it with values that seemed different. His search for self was heart warming. His humanity shone through this book.
There are several reasons why I enjoyed this book: 1) This is a true American story; 2) This was an educational experience for me; 3) Our early political awakenings were somewhat similar; 4) I have found a new respect for Justice Thomas; and 5) He is a man of conviction. This shouted out to me: "I'd already noticed that it was the liberals, not conservatives, who were more likely to condescend to blacks." The book has been blasted by some and praised by others. Some of the vitriol, not surprising, have been coming from other blacks. I've read some of it and had commented on another blog where hating Justice Thomas is an everyday thing. From claiming that Thomas hates himself and other blacks to him claiming victimhood these other blacks are just that, other. The book is a very good read and everyone regardless of political or social ideology should read it. After all, that's how we learn right?
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