HE'S powerful. He's conservative. His daddy was an oil man. He found God and stopped drinking in middle age. The certainty and simplicity of his world view infuriate his many opponents. George Bush? No. The autobiography that is making the American left wobble with rage this week is by Justice Clarence Thomas, the only black member of the Supreme Court. Mr Thomas was paid $1.5m for a memoir that stops dead the moment he joined the court in 1991. About his 16 years working there, he is silent. Perhaps he is planning a second volume. In the meantime, his account of the first 43 years of his life is absorbing and sometimes moving.

Mr Thomas was born in penury and grew up with bare feet and intestinal worms. The man he called “Daddy” was in fact his grandfather (his real father having abandoned him) who was an oil man in the sense that he delivered the stuff in a truck. He could barely read but lived a life of rigid self-discipline, and tried to instil the same values in his grandsons.

When Clarence and his brother Myers arrived, lugging a single grocery bag of possessions each, their grandfather said: “The damn vacation is over.” Clarence thought of the filthy outdoor lavatory he had shared with several other families in a slum in Savannah, and wondered which vacation he meant. Daddy made them work, work, work, at school and in the fields: planting beans, dodging snakes disturbed by the plough, skinning racoons and cleaning fish beneath a light that seemed to draw every insect in south-east Georgia. Daddy taught his grandson self-reliance. Though he found his grandfather's love too tough at the time, he describes him as “the greatest man I have ever known.” His memoir is called “My Grandfather's Son”.

Racially, Mr Thomas began with two handicaps. Not only was he a black boy in the segregated South; he was part of an isolated Creole-speaking community, the Geechees (or Gullahs), dismissed as yokels by other blacks. He pulled himself up by raw intellect and study, with the encouragement of stern nuns. He trained to become a priest, but dropped out when a classmate exulted in the murder of Martin Luther King. “Had the Church been as adamant about ending racism then as it is about ending abortion now,” he writes, his life might have taken a different path. His grandfather wept when he quit the seminary, and threw him out of the house. (They were later reconciled.)

None of these revelations will win Mr Thomas much sympathy. His critics on the left made up their minds long ago. That he is the most conservative judge on the Supreme Court is bad enough. That he is black compounds the offence. His roots are poor, goes the chorus, but he always sides with the rich. His family has suffered from harsh sentencing—he has adopted a great-nephew whose father was jailed for decades for selling crack—yet he fails to strike down such laws. He got into Yale because of racial preferences, but now wants to abolish them. Possibly no other black American is so widely loathed by his own. “Uncle Thomas is a traitor”, read the placards that greet him when he speaks. Al Sharpton has picketed his home. Ebony magazine spitefully omits him from its list of the 150 most influential black Americans. A rapper raps: “The white man ain't the devil I promise/ You want to see the devil take a look at Clarence Thomas.”

Mr Thomas is used to brickbats. At his confirmation hearings, Anita Hill, a former employee, accused him of having sexually harassed her several years before. She said he described to her scenes from porn films. He denied it all, and accused Senate Democrats of carrying out “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.” He was confirmed by the slimmest of margins. Both he and Ms Hill stand by their stories. No one else knows which of them committed perjury. Television coverage of Mr Thomas's book has focused like a cheap stage-light on this episode, though Mr Thomas has little new to say about it, save that he is still angry.

Critics and counter-criticism

But just as Bill Clinton's presidency was about more than stained dresses, so Mr Thomas's story is about more than Long Dong Silver. There are two substantive criticisms of him. One is that he is not clever enough to sit on the Supreme Court. He seldom speaks during public hearings, and his doubters whisper that he blindly follows Justice Antonin Scalia. But another recent book, Jan Crawford Greenburg's excellent “Supreme Conflict”, reveals that behind closed doors he is apparently cogent and forceful. A dissent he wrote for his third case on the court prompted both Mr Scalia and the then chief justice, William Rehnquist, to change their minds.

The second carp about Mr Thomas is that he is cruel. Rather than seeking justice, he coldly applies the law as it is written. To conservatives, that is his chief virtue. Judges who conjure up rights that are not mentioned in the constitution—such as the right to an abortion created by Roe v Wade in 1973—undermine the rule of law. He rules in favour of the rich if, and only if, that is what the constitution requires. He rules against racial preferences because he thinks the equal protection clause means what it says.

Mr Thomas would reverse not only Roe v Wade but also any ruling he deems ungrounded in the constitution's text. That puts him in a minority of one on the nine-strong bench; all the other justices like to pay at least some heed to precedent. But he does not care. It is up to lawmakers to make laws, he reckons. If the voters don't want change, politicians should persuade them, not just keep their heads down and hope that unelected judges will make the hard choices for them. His message to politicians echoes the simple homilies his grandfather taught him. Do your job. Take responsibility. No wonder he is so unpopular. But the court would be poorer without him.