she would not look precisely like E. Lawler, either. I remember walking around saying my name to myself—“Jonah Crow, Jonah Crow”—until it seemed that it could never have belonged to me or to anybody else.
At Squires Landing everything seemed to be held close in mind—in my mind or in some older or larger mind that my mind belonged to. The world was present when I shut my eyes, just as it was present when I opened them. At The Good Shepherd I entered for the first time a divided world—divided both from me and within itself. It was divided from me because it did not seem to be present unless I watched it. Within itself, it was divided between an ideal world of order, as prescribed and demanded by the institution, which was embodied most formidably by Brother Whitespade, and a real world of disorder, which we students brought in with us as a sort of infection. Though of course I could not sort it all out until afterward—not, really, until after I had come back to Port William—I know now that order was thought to emanate from the institution, and disorder from nature. Order was of the soul, whose claims the institution represented. Disorder was of the body, which was us.
We stood in line for meals, for our thrice-daily entrances into the school building, for church, for almost anything that required going through a door. There were daily inspections of our rooms. There were nightly bed checks. There were supervised study halls and recreation periods. We were all assigned jobs that were necessary to our own feeding and shelter, and of course our work was closely supervised. We all, I think, had the feeling that we were being watched, not by God, which was the endlessly repeated warning, but by Brother Whitespade and his faculty, who evidently lusted to know all that we least wanted to tell. And to these ever-watching eyes we reacted in ways peculiar to ourselves. Some lived lives of flagrant indifference or transparency, seeming to have no secrets that they wanted to keep. Others, like me, developed inward lives of the intensest privacy.
But whether we were loud or quiet, sociable or solitary, we were constantly involved in sins against the institutional order. We lived within a net of rules tightly strung between ourselves and the supposed disorder and wickedness of the world. But the meshes were always a little too wide; the net could never quite become a wall. There was leakage in both directions. Not all of us, maybe, but anyhow most of us boys were forever crossing back and forth between constraint and upheaval. And so we seemed forever involved in some form of punishment: gathering demerits, receiving hard licks on the seat of our pants, losing little privileges that seemed to have been given for the purpose of being revoked.
You will get the impression that I am looking back very critically at my old home and school, and I acknowledge that I am. But I mean to be critical only within measure. It is true that I dislike the life of institutions and organizations, and I am slow to trust people who willingly live such a life. This is not a prejudice, but a considered judgment, one that The Good Shepherd taught me to make, and so I acknowledge a considerable debt to that institution. But when, to be fair, I ask myself what I would do if confronted with a hundred or so orphan children of two sexes and diverse ages and characters all to be raised and educated together, then I remain a critic, but I can’t say with confidence that I would do better.
As a matter of fact, leaving all my criticisms in place, I can say that I have kept some fine memories of my years at The Good Shepherd. I remember getting up early to walk among the trees on the front lawn while the light was fresh and the dew undried and the official forces still asleep. And when I stood in line before going into the dining hall or the school building I could see, off on the horizon, a good old brick farmhouse with trees and brick outbuildings. It was all well proportioned and laid out. Especially in the sunlight of early morning or late afternoon, it looked to me like a vision of Paradise. And I like to remember myself standing in my fixed and appointed place, always a little lonely and a little homesick, watched and under suspicion, looking over at that beautiful house at the point of the meeting of earth and sky. I would let my mind go there and make itself at home.
Although I can’t say that I liked school, when I wanted to be I was a good enough student. I liked learning, especially the learning that could be got by reading. I made fair grades, but I and my teachers knew that I could have done better. I was, they said, like a good horse who would not work; I was a disappointment to them; I was wasting my God-given talents. And this gave me, I believe, the only self-determining power I had: I could withhold this single thing that was mine that I knew they wanted. I had ways of not allowing myself to be fully present in the classroom, even though I was physically confined there. I looked out the windows. A window opening on nothing but the blank sky was endlessly attractive to me; if I watched long enough, a bird or a cloud would appear within the frame, and I watched with patience. A window that looked out into a tree was a source of inexpressible happiness, for it permitted me to observe the foraging of the birds and the life history of leaves. When my attention was called back into the room, as sooner or later it always would be, I let my mind wander. I found out that I could not willfully place my mind elsewhere, but that, if I let it loose from what it was expected to be doing, it would go elsewhere. “J. Crow,” they would say, “I am not out there in that tree,” or “J. Crow, would you honor us by paying attention to this problem up here on the blackboard?”
And I would say “Yes, ma’am” or “Yes, sir,” as if only too happy to have their help in dealing with my waywardness.
If the classroom was not my natural habitat, the library pretty much was. The library was a long room across the back of Brother Whitespade’s house. There were lots of windows along the east wall, and comfortable chairs in front of the windows, tables here and there, and several tall cases of books. The books had mainly been donated, I think, and some of them practically nobody would have wanted to read, but there were some good ones too. The librarian was a nice lady named Mrs. Eades, who was hospitable and quiet and kind. Now and then our teachers would send us to the library on some project or other, but there were times too when we were free just to go: Saturday mornings, and every night between supper and study hall.
Back in a corner between a bookcase and one of the east windows, there was a small table where I liked to sit and read. It was one of the best places in the world to be on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the winter. And I like to remember sitting there on a bright Saturday morning in the spring, with the window open and the sun shining in and the spirea bushes in bloom outside. At first I read books about horses and dogs, because I wanted a horse and a dog. And then I read several books about a boy named William Greenhill, an orphan like me, and then The Swiss Family Robinson and The Boy’s King Arthur. I read the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, two more orphans, and Rip Van Winkle, and David Copperfield, another orphan.
One day I found in a trash can the hinder part of a little anthology of American poems. The cover and a lot of pages had been torn away, so that my copy began:
Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells ...
I thought tintinnabulation was the finest word I had ever seen. I kept that piece of a book with me until I came back to Port William. I still have it.
In my last years of high school I read Thomas Paine’s The Crisis and “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walden by Henry David Thoreau, a book that made me want to live in a cabin in the woods. I drew a picture of the cabin I wanted to live in, and drew the floor plan, and made a list of the furniture and dishes and utensils and other things I would need.
I don’t remember exactly when, but I started copying out passages that I liked into a tablet. And then I started making what I thought were improvements on the things I copied; I was uneasy about that, not being sure it was right. Also I kept a list of words I especially liked: independent, I remember, was one, and then tintinnabulation and self-reliant and free and outside. There got to be a good many.
Among
