didn’t want to be punished. I didn’t want to get crosswise with anybody who had authority to punish me; I had had enough of that at The Good Shepherd. I didn’t want ever again to stand in front of the desk of somebody who had more power than I had. If all that required was keeping a few rules that I didn’t much object to, then I would keep the rules.
Beyond that, I was more conscious than before that I was a beneficiary. I wanted to be worthy of my scholarship. If I came to look unworthy in other people’s eyes, I was afraid I would look unworthy in my own.
I worked harder in my classes at Pigeonville than I had at The Good Shepherd, but not a lot harder. I did the assignments and made tolerable grades, but I knew I could have done better. I was working against what I was now beginning to understand as a limitation of character. You can judge for yourself how much of a fault it was that I had what seemed an inborn dislike for doing anything that somebody else told me to do. And it wasn’t an ordinary dislike, either. There were lengths beyond which I just could not make myself go. When I reached this limit, the thought of approval or praise, let alone a better grade, did not even tempt me.
Pigeonville College had a much better library than The Good Shepherd, of course, and I spent a lot of my time there, reading in books and magazines. I’d had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn’t apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all. But it consoled me in a way too; I could see that if I got them all read and had no more surprises in that line, I would have been sorry.
For a while, anyhow, I had a pretty good life there at Pigeonville. I went to class and studied and read and waited my tables and did other odd jobs as they came up. The times were hard, but my tuition, room, and meals cost me nothing. And I never missed a chance to earn a little money. The word got around that I was a willing worker, and I did all kinds of hand-and-back jobs that earned me a dime here, a quarter there: mopped floors, washed windows, dug holes, mowed yards. I had never had any money of my own, or hardly enough to notice, and now it meant everything to me to have some. And once I made it, I kept it. Except for my clothes and books, I spent just nearly nothing. I would let the coins rattle in my pocket until I got enough to change into a bill, and then I would put the bill into my shoe, or poke it through a little hole in the lining of my jacket. I was as tight as a tick in those days, and would as soon have thrown my money away as trust it to a bank. You can bet I took care where I hung up my jacket or took off my shoes.
Here is the way I was in those days. My life just filled out into all the freedom it was allowed, like water seeking its level. My private life—my secret life, I might as well say, though really I had no secrets worth keeping—achieved length and breadth and height. After the first year, I asked for and was given a small single room, and in that way got shed of my roommate. I now had money that I had earned myself; I now had a few possessions that I had bought with my own money. These few things that were mine I cherished with a steady small exultation that was also mine. At night, shut in my little room with all my worldly possessions, I felt like a worm in an apple.
I had no social life to speak of—no friends, really. Working three times every day in a big dining room full of girls caused me to do some thinking, naturally. From time to time I thought about asking one girl or another to go out, but I never did. To tell the truth, at The Good Shepherd I had fallen into the habit of keeping myself to myself. I was shy and always full of thoughts and had no great craving for company. Whenever a teacher or anybody took up my old name and started using it, I would say, “Call me J.”
But finally the questions I had not thought of caught up with me, and had to be thought of, and had to be asked. Pigeonville was scrupulous about being religious. You couldn’t have got hired to teach there if you weren’t a member of the denomination, and most of the students were there because it was a church school. Several of the teachers—the ones I was most likely to have—were ordained preachers. You could say that the place had a pious atmosphere. It was an atmosphere that I finally had to think about, and when I thought about it I had to admit that I could not get comfortable in it; I could not breathe a full breath in it. Though I didn’t get out into the country as often as I used to—because I was busier and because Pigeonville was a bigger town than Canefield and harder to get out of—the atmosphere at the college always made me long for the open countryside and flowing streams. My on-the-side life as an odd-jobs man took me out into better air, and I was more and more consciously grateful for that.
I wish I could give you the right description of that atmosphere. It was soapy and paperish and shut-in and a little stale. It didn’t smell of anything bodily or earthly. A little whiff of tobacco smoke would have done wonders for it. The main thing was that it made me feel excluded from it, even while I was in it.
And then one day I asked myself, “How is it going to suit you to be called Brother Crow?” I walked around a while, saying over and over to myself, “Brother Crow, Brother Crow, Brother Crow.” It did not seem to be referring to me. I imagined hospitable, nice people saying to me before Sunday dinner, “Brother Crow, would you express our thanks?” And then I couldn’t imagine myself.
I took to studying the ones of my teachers who were also preachers, and also the preachers who came to speak in chapel and at various exercises. In most of them I saw the old division of body and soul that I had known at The Good Shepherd. The same rift ran through everything at Pigeonville College; the only difference was that I was able to see it more clearly, and to wonder at it. Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins—hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust—came from the soul. But these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.
Although I was shaken, maybe I could have clamped my mouth shut and gone ahead. But about then I began to get into different trouble and more serious. You might call it doctrinal trouble.
The trouble started because I began to doubt the main rock of the faith, which was that the Bible was true in every word. “I reckon there ain’t a scratch of a pen in it but what is true,” Uncle Othy used to say, but he spoke as of a distant wonder, and was not much concerned. The pious men of The Good Shepherd and Pigeonville were concerned. They had staked their immortal souls on the infallible truth of every pen scratch from “In the beginning” to “Amen.” But I had read all of it by then, and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?
For instance, there is a big difference between the old tribespeople’s coldhearted ferocity against their enemies and Jesus’ preaching of forgiveness and of love for your enemies. And there is a big difference again between Jesus’ unqualified command, “Love your enemies,” and Paul the Apostle’s “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men,” which amounts to permission not to live peaceably with all men. And what about the verse in the same chapter saying that we should do good to our enemy, “for in doing so thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head?” Where did Jesus ever see doing good as a form of revenge? I saw the Bible as pretty much slanting upward until it got to Jesus, who forgave even the ones who were killing Him while they were killing Him, and then slanting down again when it got to St. Paul. I was truly moved by the stories of Jesus in the Gospels. I could imagine them. The Nativity in the Gospel of Luke and the Resurrection in the Gospel of John I could just shut my eyes and see. I could imagine everything until I got to the letters of Paul.
Questions all of a sudden were clanging in my mind like Edgar Allan Poe’s brazen alarum bells. I still believed in the divinity and the teachings of Jesus and was determined to follow my purpose of preaching the Gospel—when I preached, I thought, I would just not mention the parts that gave me trouble—but it got so I couldn’t open a Bible without setting off a great jangling and wrangling of questions that almost deafened me.
If we are to understand the Bible as literally true, why are we permitted to hate our enemies? If Jesus meant what