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from the road in a lawn shaded by big trees. Behind it, scattered over a broad hilltop, were the dormitories, the dining hall, the school building, and the gymnasium. When I lit there, I felt so far away from home that I might as well have been in another world.
    My first memory is of the long driveway sweeping up among the trees to the superintendent’s house. And then, immediately, I remember meeting face to face, across the top of a large desk, the superintendent himself, Brother Whitespade, one of the crossest of Christians, who said in a big, pretty voice, “IAh! This will be Mr. Crow.”
    Brother Whitespade’s desk was as wide as a field. It was as wide maybe as an ocean. For a minute or two I didn’t think I could see across it. And then I could see Brother Whitespade over there, looking at me pointedly through a pair of steel-rimmed eyeglasses and smiling in a way that gave me no comfort. His stare was the most concentrated part of him. Otherwise he was a soft man with a smooth face, wavy hair, and a tight collar. But all that he was seemed to be gathered up in his eyes and pointed across that wide desk at me.
    I knew all of a sudden that I was facing a man who was filled with power, and that I had no power, none. I could not have told you this then, for the knowledge did not come to me in words. It came into me as a hollow place that opened slowly and ached under my breastbone. I knew that I had come there by no thought of my own. I was a long way removed from any thought of my own. I had no thought.
    I was who? A little somebody who could have been anybody, looking
across that wide desk at Brother Whitespade. I knew that I could not even leave until he told me to go.
    â€œJonah Crow,” he said, looking at a paper on his desk. And then he looked back at me. “Mr. Crow, since I believe you have not yet found your way to Nineveh, I will call you J.”
    And I saw him write in large, curving strokes my name as it was to be: “J. Crow.”
    I remember waking up in my dormitory room the first several mornings, for maybe a minute or two not knowing where I was, and then knowing. I would recognize the chest of drawers, the two chairs, the table, the two iron cots, the other boy still asleep. And I would be filled with a strange objectless fear, as if in the twinkling of an eye I had been changed not only into another world but into another body. Shrunken by fear, I lay on my back and looked straight up at the ceiling, waiting for something to move.
    When the wake-up bell sounded over the hilltop and the other boy stirred in his bed and this new world began to assemble itself in small motions and sounds, the fear left me. I would know then that I would make it until night, when again in the narrow cot in the dark room I would cover my head and, in despair of anything else to do, go immediately to sleep.
    I thought at first that Brother Whitespade, by changing my name to J., had made me a special case. But I soon found out that all of us orphans—who were called “students”—were known by the initial letters of our first names along with our last names. My roommate, for example, was T. Warnick. If the institution had received a second Warnickby the name, say, of Thomas Robert, he would have to be called R. Warnick. If he had had no middle name, he would have been assigned an initial arbitrarily: N. Warnick or P. Warnick, whatever Brother Whitespade chose. The girls too all were named by the same method. We were thus not quite nameless, but also not quite named. The effect was curious. For a while anyhow, and for how long a while it would be hard to say, we all acted on the assumption that we were no longer the persons we had been—which for all practical purposes was the correct assumption. We became in some way faceless to ourselves and to one another. You would discover,
for example, that E. Lawler’s original first name was Elizabeth. But she would not look like