Justice Thomas's Life A Tangle of Poverty, Privilege and Race

This time, Uncle Clarence just kept his distance. And his sister, Emma Mae Martin, didn't say a word, "just left it alone," as she put it. She didn't even ask her well-connected brother for help. "Nope, nope, no, no," she said emphatically, signaling the strain in their relationship. "He didn't want to get involved anyway," she added.

Reached at the Federal Correctional Institution in Coleman, Fla., Mark Martin was doing the kind of long, difficult stretch that saps one's spirit. "Down here it's hard," he said in a telephone interview. "Any given day you can die." He has since been transferred to a federal prison in South Carolina.

And being Clarence Thomas's nephew has no benefits in prison. "I try to avoid letting people know who he is to me because they might want to do something to me because of him," Martin said.

Thomas is not popular among the other inmates, the nephew emphasized. Most consider the justice a sellout, believing that a black jurist should not support draconian penalties but should question why the nation's drug laws hit low-level dealers and African Americans disproportionately hard. On the court, Thomas has largely backed the government's position on drug crimes and incarceration, including on questions of inmate property forfeiture, visitation rights and maximum sentences for repeat offenders.

"They always asking, 'Why he ain't got you out of this stuff?' " said Martin. "They say he could help change the law and he doesn't." Not long ago, Martin decided to try to help himself. He figured he'd study up on the law, so he asked his uncle if he would mind sending him some law texts. "He said he would try to get some books to me as soon as he can."

Ties to His Home Town

Pin Point, population 275, is just seven-tenths of a mile from one end to the other. But getting your mind around it takes some time. It was once a plantation site, carved up and sold to blacks in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Many of the original lots are held by the heirs of the former slaves who bought the parcels more than a century ago.

This is where Clarence Thomas was born twice -- physically on June 23, 1948, as the second child of M.C. and Leola Thomas, then symbolically in the summer of 1991 as the humble young judge who rose from poverty and was tapped by President George H.W. Bush as the second African American nominated to the Supreme Court. This turned Thomas into an emblem of America's racial progress and made Pin Point a fabled corner of the South.

But the truth is that Thomas's rise was never anchored in Pin Point, as White House advisers led the public to believe. His family's house had burned down when he was 6, and for most of his young life he was raised comfortably in Savannah by his grandfather Myers Anderson, one of the black community's leading businessmen.

When Thomas does return to Pin Point now, he comes quietly and leaves quickly. He is not a frequent visitor. Some residents note he missed Pin Point's last two summer reunions, in 2000 and 2004. Thomas's sister says her brother has never even been inside her home. "No, I don't think so," Martin said.

Pin Point is beautiful, in a sleepy, antebellum way -- the tall oaks draped with Spanish moss, the gentle summer breezes. The community's valuable waterfront property looks out on Shipyard Creek, where commercial crabbers still ply their trade and high tides overtake the marsh in the middle of the day. Just beyond the creek and the marsh is Moon River, named for Johnny Mercer's 1961 ballad.

"This is paradise here," said Abe Famble, Thomas's closest childhood friend.

But Pin Point is not just quaint; it's also tragic. Eighty percent of its inhabitants live below the poverty line. The lone church, which Thomas's mother attends, is next to a cemetery where the weeds are often taller than the headstones. The one business in Pin Point -- A.S. Varn and Son's oyster and crab company -- shut down in 1985. This was where generations of Pin Point residents, including most of Thomas's family, picked crabs and earned 5 cents a pound. Today, Pin Point claims a U.S. Supreme Court justice as its most noted son but can't muster enough political clout, or wherewithal, to get a historical marker celebrating this fact.