Anyone who has spent time in the presence of Clarence Thomas off the bench is sure to feel the contradiction: He seems such a genuinely nice man, but this side of his personality never ever shows in his judicial opinions. A good case can be made that the attitudes that constitute personality are fundamentally important in a Supreme Court justice, whose decisions in close cases (and almost all of those in the Supreme Court are) usually turn on intangibles like reverence for the Founders or sympathy for the little guy. In person, Thomas exudes such sympathy, but it never shows in his opinions—why not? Part of the answer lies in his lifelong affinity with Bigger Thomas, the protagonist in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Bigger yearned for a dogma that would help him understand his role in the perplexing world, and, in a far more sophisticated way, so does Justice Thomas. He finds that dogma in an originalism so severe that even its protagonists question his version. Yet he persists, even though this makes him less and less relevant to the Court’s continuing dialogue. There seems no way out of this blind alley, and Justice Thomas may end his days as professionally bitter and burnt out as Richard Wright was after a career that never again reached the heights of his early successes. But a hint of salvation may come from the example of another embittered black man, Malcolm X, as portrayed by the director Spike Lee. In the years immediately before Malcolm’s assassination, he seemed to soften his dogma and to allow more range to the benign aspects of his personality. Such a turn would make Clarence Thomas a better justice—but it does not seem to have much chance of happening.