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¢ 7 - can gel when he knows he can get no more. So stretched, hig tense personality re- flects the tensions of his job and his time and his nation. And somehow. also. his personality reflects the symmetry of the Constitution he serves and expounds. “Thurgood, says a psychologist friend, “is a delicate balance of turmoils.” He is a big (6 fl. 2 in.. 210 Jbs.), quick-footed man. with a voice that can he soft or raucous, manners that can be rude or gentle or courtly, and an emo- Uonal pattern that swings him like a pen- Julum from the serious to the absurd. His dignity can slide easily into arro- gance and his humility into self-abase- ment, but not for long. Humer—his own humor—brings him back toward center. Marshall will listen so avidly to his cal- leagues’ scholarship that he has been called a brain-picker, but he trades jokes 4 Out of the Congo. Thurguod Murshall says. “American Negroes have no ties with Africa. Their, history, begins, nght here.” Nevertheless. like a Virginia gentle- man recalling the ancestral manor in Gloucestershire, Marshall begins his fam- ily history in the old country with a great- grandfather on his mother’s side, “Way back before the Civil War. this rich man from Maryland went to the Congo on a hunting expedition or something. The whole lime he was there, this little black boy trailed him around. So when they got ready to come back to this country, they just picked him up and brought him along. The years passed and he grew up, and, boy, he grew up into one mean man. One day his owner came to him and said: ‘You're so evil I got to get rid of you. But I haven't the heart to sell you or give you to another man. So I'll tell you what I'll MOTHER MARSHALL AT Work (iN BaLTIMORE) Aristocracy means a chance to serve. with no man. Around him, the ceaseless ‘flow of anecdotes is all outward. Buf- foonery relaxes his tense spiritual muscles. Buffoonery and work. After the long, ar- gumentative conferences, after the horse- play and the backslapping, when he goes home to his lonely Harlem apartment, he becomes Thurgood Marshall the scholar, reading, noting, thinking, remembering— Jate into the night almost every night. He walks into a cheap Harlem bar and is greeted by friendly smiles, not because of what he has done for his race (the bar- flies probably don't know who he is), but because they know him as a man who tells funny stories about cotton hands and baseball games and “that little ol’ boy down in Texas.” He walks into the Su- preme Court and is greeted by respectful nods, not because he is a crusader, but because the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court know they can speak to Thurgood _Marshall_as Tawyer_to lawyer, technician to technician. “— 24 do: if youll get out of the town and county and state, I'll give you your free- dom.’ Well, my great-grandfather never said a word, just looked at him. And he walked off the place, settled down a couple miles away, raised his family and lived there till the day he died. And nobody ever Jaid a hand on him.” This most un-African parable of inde- pendence is succeeded in Marshall's reper- tory of family stories by his paternal grandfather, “a rough and tough sailor- man. He never knew what his first name was so he took two-~Thoroughgood and Thornygood, He drew two sailor’s pen- sioris till the day he died—one in each name. I was named Thoroughgood after him, but by the time I was in the second grade, J got tired of spelling all that and shortened it.” His maternal grandfather, Isaiah OC. B. {for Olive Branch, he said} Williams, also went to sea, came home with money and a taste for opera and Shakespeare. He opened a yrocerx on Baltimore's Den- meade Street. and sired six children. The first was Avonia Delicia and the second Avon (both for the bard's river}. the third was Denmedia Marketa (for the store}, another was Norma Arica (he heard Ver- ma in Arica, a Chilean port) and the re: maining two, for reasons lost to history. were Fearless Mentor and Ravine Silestria. Isaiah bought a house next to a white man who turned surly and mean. One dav the neighbor repented because the party fence between their property needed fix- ing; he suggested that they do the job to- gether, “After all,’ said the white man. “we belong to the same church and are going to the same heaven.” But Isaiah, re- membering the slights he had received, turned down the olive branch. “I'd rather go to hell.” he snapped. The chip-on-the-shoulder tradition was shared by Thurgood’s father. Will, a dining-car worker on the B. & QO. and later steward of Baltimore clubs, including the Gibson Island club. a yachtsman’s para- dise with jellyfish for serpents. Will. light- skinned and blue-eyed, used to tell Thur- good and his brother Aubrey, ‘If anyone calls you nigger, you not only got my per- mission to fight him—you got my orders to fight him.” Once, Thurgood followed orders. Delivery boy for a hat store, he was trying to board a trolley with a stack of hats so high he “couldn’t see over or around them. I was climbing aboard when a white man yanked me backwards. ‘Nigguh,’ he said, ‘don’t you push in front of no white lady again.’ I hadn't seen any white lady, so I tore into him. The hats scattered all over the street, and we both got arrested.” Scroonched Down, Will Marshail was always saying that he would “sleep in the streets” rather than betray his princi- ples. Thurgood says it too. But Thurgood ig no fanatic, and he has no martyr com- plex. He tells two stories to prove it. When his father got him a summer dining-car job on the B. & O., lanky Thur- good Marshall complained to the chief steward that his white waiter’s pants were too short. “Boy,” said the steward, “we can get a man to fit the pants a lot easier than we can get pants to fit the man. Why don’t you just kinda scroonch down in ‘em a little more?” Says Thurgood: “I scroonched.” The other story happened years later when Lawyer Marshall was in a smail Mississippi town, waiting for a train to Shreveport, La. “I was out there on the platform, try- ing to look small, when this cold-eyed man with a gun on his hip comes up. ‘Nigguh,’ he said, ‘I thought you ought to know the sun ain't nevuh set on a live nigguh in this town.’ So I wrapped my constitutional rights in Cellophane, tucked ’em in my hip pocket and got out of sight. And, believe me, I caught the next train out of there.” Whence this caution, moderation and restraint? Thurgood’s mother, Norma Arica, has been for 28 years a Balti- more schoolteacher and numbers six other TIME, SEPTEMBER 19, 1955 — mee ow ee eee Sg