Solving the mystery of Clarence Thomas.

Here's a WaPo article by Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher that's adapted from their new book "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas." They tell the story of Thomas's nephew, Mark Elliot Martin, who is serving a 30-year sentence for drug dealing. Thomas has custody of Martin's son, Mark Elliot Martin Jr.

When he began raising Mark -- Thomas has one adult son from a previous marriage -- he altered his Supreme Court schedule. He sent Mark to private schools, gave him extra homework to improve his math and reading, taught him to dribble with his left hand. And Mark responded. He excelled in school, became a Harry Potter fan and took up golf, and as a teenager he is comfortable around some of the most brilliant legal minds in the country.

Mark's father was another story. Thomas had tried desperately to reach him, without success. Though Martin was good with his hands and worked for a time repairing piers at a marina near Pin Point, he injured himself and lost that job. And because he was illiterate, according to his attorney, he had little means of supporting himself. He was on probation and out of work when his luck turned worse....

When the drug bust went down, Thomas was so disappointed that he offered no legal advice, no pep talk, nothing. Thomas's mother said he had tried in vain to help his nephew many times. " 'Mark, please, you got them pretty little kids. Please,' " she recalled her son pleading. But Thomas couldn't get through, and now he really was through.

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....

Thomas is not popular among the other inmates, the nephew [said in an interview]...

"They always asking, 'Why he ain't got you out of this stuff?'"

And so it goes. The book is based on interviews from family and others, but not Thomas himself, who declined to talk to the authors. So we must endure grudging commentary like that from the nephew or this, from Thomas's sister:

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."

And here's Thomas's mother:

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."

I'm sure there is more in the book than this sort of thing, which is dispiriting and, it seems, unfair.

Here's Yale lawprof Kenji Yoshino reviewing the book:

We're introduced to the many Thomases we have never seen: the RV-driving Thomas, the Ayn Rand-loving Thomas, the Catholic Thomas and others.

The book's main flaw is its failure to give us more of one particular Thomas: Justice Thomas. For a biography of a jurist, Supreme Discomfort is surprisingly short on Thomas's legal decisions and philosophy....

Merida and Fletcher also fail to grapple adequately with the justice's jurisprudential methodology....

It is hard, though, to quarrel too much with a book that solves the great Thomas mystery: his legendary silence. One conventional explanation is that Thomas is still smarting from the Anita Hill scandal that occupied his confirmation hearing, an explanation that seems less plausible with every passing year. Merida and Fletcher explain his courtroom demeanor by suggesting that silence is the closest Thomas can come to opting out of the scripts that eddy around him. "If you can't be free," the poet Rita Dove writes, "be a mystery." It is a serious indictment of race relations in this country that, in 2007, the nation's most powerful African Americans are still not permitted to be individuals.

Can you "solve" a mystery by "suggesting" something? I don't think so, even if a poet's purported wisdom is tossed in. I'm not buying the theory that such an extraordinary man is "silenced" by "scripts" that are imposed on black people. The man has overcome so much in his life. It's insulting to portray him as flummoxed by "scripts," "stories," and "narratives." Yoshino is delivering a strong dose of his own theories here, and it will help you understand what he's saying here if you know what he wrote in his book "Covering."

Now, "Covering" is a terrific memoir. Thinking about it, I realize that what I want to read about Clarence Thomas is his own memoir. He has things to say, and some of them he has already told us.

Here's the best explanation I've read of why he keeps silent on the bench:

Since Justice Thomas joined the bench in 1991, he has offered limited comments about his reticence, leaving it to friends and former law clerks to defend his practice. They dismissed any suggestions that his relative silence reflected any lack of intellectual confidence. But during an informal chat with high school students the day after the court's ruling in Bush v. Gore, the justice offered his most extensive explanation.

He said his fellow justices are so talkative that if he just waits, someone will ask the questions he might have asked. ''Unless I want an answer I don't ask things,'' he said. ''I don't ask for entertainment, I don't ask to give people a hard time.''

Then he offered a reason no one had ever suggested. He said his poor upbringing in Georgia had an effect on his inclination not to ask questions. When he was 16, he said, and the only black student in his seminary class, he was used to speaking in a low country dialect known as Gullah. ''People praise it now,'' he said. ''But they used to make fun of us back then.''

As a result, he said, he ''just started developing the habit of listening.''

Why doesn't that "solve" the "mystery"?

Maybe everyone is picking the solution that works best with what they already want to say about Thomas or -- as with Yoshino -- what they've already said generally about how they think the world works.