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

Some long-timers fear that wealthy developers will convert Pin Point into a mini Hilton Head and that it will soon lose its soul and character. With the community aging, some have asked, how long can people hold on to their properties? "If ever there was a time to stick together, it's now," said Charles Harris, president of the Pin Point Betterment Association. He only wishes Thomas would take more of an active interest in his birthplace. "It looks like to me a person of his status could tell us something or give us some advice on how to save it."

Sure, Sills says, the justice's advice and contacts could help the quality of life in Pin Point. But the pastor thinks that too much is expected of Thomas. "I think if our people took more time to encourage him," admonished Sills, "he'd do more."

Pin Point Comes to Thomas

Thomas maintains a distant but emotional attachment to his home town. He is always curious. Sometimes he will ask his old friends about Pin Point's youths. Why are so many of them throwing their lives away? He'll talk about the need to sit with some of the senior citizens before their perspectives on history are lost. Each summer, his curiosity is stoked further when a slice of Pin Point comes to him.

Famble and his wife, Odessa, rent a van and drive from Georgia to Fairfax Station to visit the Thomases. They bring with them Thomas's mother and stepfather, who live in Savannah, Thomas's cousin Isaac Martin, and usually the justice's sister. They spend a week relaxing and reminiscing. They barbecue on his deck, drop in at the Supreme Court's gift shop, stay up late playing cards in the kitchen ("I Declare War"). They go to the outlet malls. They take day trips: One summer it was Luray Caverns, a popular tourist attraction in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley; another year it was Gettysburg, Pa., where they toured the Civil War battle site.

"When we get there," observes Famble, "he lets the whole world go and deals with us."

And there is a lot to let go. Some who have visited Thomas in his chambers at the court have noticed how much he broods -- about the slights of his childhood, the teasing he absorbed over his dark skin, the racism he encountered in seminary, the rejections he faced coming out of law school. Struggle is a theme he returns to again and again, even in public appearances.

During a visit once to the Virginia Home for Boys & Girls, he encountered a hyperactive boy who had trouble concentrating. He had never sat still longer than 15 minutes, he told Thomas. "It's hard in school," the boy said. "I know it," Thomas replied, "but it's hard for me."

Reconnecting With Family

Thomas hails from a family in which he has no peers -- no one educated at a leading university, no one who eats out at four-star steakhouses, no one who travels to Italy to lecture or commands $1.5 million for a memoir. Given a generous boost from his grandparents, Thomas flourished. The ambivalence -- at times, perhaps shame -- he felt about some members of his family has been hard to shake.

Emma Mae Martin, who was once publicly singled out by her brother as an example of the debilitating effects of welfare dependency, is a high school dropout who later earned her diploma in night school as an adult. She and her brother don't talk politics or law or philosophy. Their conversations tend to be about, "well, not much really," Martin said. "Find out how I'm doing, what I'm up to, that's about it."

She lives her life and lets him be. "He's supposed to be a judge," she said, "but you can't judge anybody unless you judge yourself. I've never judged anybody, but people judge me all the time."

For many years, Thomas and his mother were not close, either. Her favorite son was Myers Thomas, Clarence's younger brother, who died in 2000 of a heart attack suffered during a morning jog. "Myers was the kindest-hearted one," she said. He called often, came to visit when she was lonely, took her for rides. "I had more dealing with Myers," she explained. "Me and Myers were more really open and close together."

Though Thomas had not always thought the best of his mother as a parent, when Myers died suddenly, it tore him apart and caused him to reexamine the life he was leading. "When my brother died," Thomas said later, "it showed me the other perspective, that not only do we do things in our professional life, but there is the family side of life -- the things that really matter."

He knew what Myers had meant to his mother, and gradually Thomas stepped into the role his brother had played.

In one particularly poignant moment for Leola Williams, the name she took after her fourth marriage, to David Williams in 1983, Thomas readied his mother for something he had long intended to tell her. "And I'm just sitting up, now I want to hear what it is," she recounted. And Thomas told her: "I just want to let you know that I love you. Hadn't been for you, I wouldn't have been here today. Hadn't been for you having me, I wouldn't be where I am today. So I give it all to you."

During summer, after the court has adjourned, Thomas loves nothing more than to be behind the wheel of his 40-foot motor home, tooling down the open road with his wife, Ginni, and his great-nephew Mark -- and a slice of Pin Point in tow. Growing up, he had never ventured beyond three counties in Georgia. Now, the experience has become essential to his happiness.

As Thomas once put it: "It allows me a sense of freedom."

Adapted from the book "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas" by Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher, Doubleday, New York, © 2007.