My Grandfather`s Son, by Clarence Thomas: on Families & Children

As child, worked on family oil truck & family farm

He never praised us, just as he never hugged us. Whenever my grandmother urged him to tell us that we had done a good job, he replied, "That's their responsibility. Any job worth doing is worth doing right."

The family farm and our unheated oil truck became my most important classrooms, the schools in which Daddy passed on the wisdom he had acquired in the course of a long life as an ill-educated, modestly successful black man in the Deep South. Despite the hardships he had faced, there was no bitterness or self-pity in his heart. As for bad luck, he didn't believe in it.