<strong>Through transcendent prose, an Ojibwe man chronicles his survival of abuse and bigotry at a state orphanage in the 1930s and the brutal farm indenture that followed.</strong><br><br>In stark, haunting prose, first-time author Peter Razor recalls his early years as a ward of the State of Minnesota. Disclosing his story through flashbacks and relying on research from his own case files, Razor pieces together the shattered fragments of his boyhood into a memoir that reads as compellingly as a novel.<br><br>Abandoned as an infant at the State Public School in Owatonna, Minnesota, Razor was raised by abusive workers who thought of him as nothing more than "a dirty Injun." Cut off from his family and his heritage, he turns inward, forced to learn about the world on his own. After failed attempts to run away from the orphanage, he is indentured by the state to an abusive, reclusive farm family. Beaten, poorly fed, clothed in rags, and worked like slave labor, he struggles to attend high school and begins to dream of another life. Razor's stark and often chilling story, devoid of self-pity, recalls with haunting clarity the years he, like the locust, patiently waited to awaken and emerge.
While the Locust Slept
By Peter RazorMINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS
Copyright © 2001 Minnesota Historical Society
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87351-439-2Chapter One
From high in the trees along the shady avenue, past Cottage Fifteen, a creature sang incessantly, and loudest on sweltering summer days. "Locust," the boys of C-15 whispered, when they heard the frantic solo. They were cicadas outside my window, preaching from the trees, but my child-self still hears their whirring and murmurs, locust, locust. I walked through weeds on the playground to see grasshoppers of all sizes leap and fly. When they settled, I watched them watching me. One, I learned, the one the boys called locust, slept seventeen years in darkness before soaring into the summer light.
* * *
It was overcast, almost dreary that day, the third Saturday of September 1944. I wore a soiled t-shirt and denims, and the slapping of my bare feet on the masonry floor echoed through the quiet halls of the Main Building. I rounded a bend and came to an abrupt stop. Miss Borsch stood talking to a middle-aged couple sitting on a hall bench. She smiled while pointing my way, but I sidled past them along the far wall looking straight ahead at the floor. I entered an office and placed papers on the desk but, when I turned to leave, Miss Borsch blocked the doorway.
"Peter, we've been looking for you," Miss Borsch said. "Miss Lewis said you would be running errands here. You must go to the cottage right now, get your things, and return here. Those folks in the hall have come to take you."
"Oh?"
"Yes. They live over a hundred miles away and need to return home in time for chores."
"What clothes should I take?" I asked.
"That's all taken care of. Just bring your personal things."
"I have no personal things," I replied and shrugged.
"Miss Lewis seems to think you have a pocket Bible and rosary," Miss Borsch said.
"Yeah, those," I said. "How much time do I get?"
"Can you take a bath, dress, and be back in an hour?" she asked. "Miss Lewis has clean clothes ready for you. The Schaulses will buy you dinner on the way."
"Schauls?" I murmured. "I'll try."
My thoughts danced between hope for a good life and dark omens as I showered and dressed. The rosary and pocket Bible in hand, I waited in the living room for Miss Lewis to sign me out of the cottage-for the last time. The matron said little, just drew a line through my name on the register, and my final departure from the cottage was of no more note than were I going out for chores.
Back at the Main Building, I was clean with combed hair, dark blue dress pants, and a light blue shirt. My Sunday suit and winter clothes were already in the car when I delivered the papers to the office. Miss Borsch stood beside me, and we faced the couple.
"John and Emma Schauls," she said, motioning toward them.
John stood, staring at me without smiling. Instinctively, I looked down, and we shook hands. His grasp was aggressive. I glanced up but his unblinking stare made me uneasy-like a strange chill had seeped into the room. He was only a bit taller than me but much larger, and his gray hair fringed a bald pate, prematurely for a man I was told was in his late thirties. Emma stood, forced an awkward smile, and laid her hand in mine, as she mumbled a greeting. She was close to forty and nearly cross-eyed so she wore thick glasses.
Miss Borsch's smile never faltered and she bantered nonstop about weather and farming.
"Peter has been with us all his life," Miss Borsch explained. "Now, he's ready to try farming."
I remained silent and stared at the floor.
My family fell apart shortly after I was born. The United Christian Charities of St. Paul was housing my parents and two older brothers at the time and helping my father search for work. He was from the Fond du Lac band of Minnesota Chippewas, named Ningoos at birth, and baptized Wilbur. He served with the expeditionary forces in France during the First World War and did not work much after marrying my mother in 1925.
My mother, Mary Razor, was quiet, given to depression. My father drank and was of little help nurturing the children. One of my brothers, Leonard, was hydrocephalic and retarded, and the other, Arnold, was still young. When the state social services ruled that my mother suffered from "confusion," they sent her along with Leonard to an asylum at St. Peter. Some of my relatives from Michigan came to take Arnold home with them, but they did not take me. They thought my head looked too large for my body and feared I would turn out like Leonard. So I stayed with my father. He was supposed to look after me while he continued searching for a job. Instead he went to Milwaukee. I was ten months old when he abandoned me.
The state placed me temporarily in the Christian Boarding Home for Children in St. Paul, where two months later a psychologist tested me and recorded: Peter Razor is of Indian heritage. He is of average intelligence and underweight. I was taken to Ramsey County court and declared a ward of the state, at which point I was ordered committed to the State Public School at Owatonna. My placement was delayed by a measles epidemic, but on April 30, 1930, I arrived in the State School nursery. I was seventeen months old.
The State Public School occupied hundreds of acres on the west side of Owatonna. Farm buildings, gardens, and croplands were west, and the campus east-next to the city. Most cottages, facilities, and the Main Building were on a central mound that created an impressive, almost medieval, skyline. The Main Building, a large t-shaped, castle-like structure, faced a street bordered by trimmed shrubs, imposing flower beds, and large, well-kept lawns. Visitors were greeted inside in ornate offices with a posh visitors' lounge and teams of smiling civil servants.
A private children's hospital had recovery and isolation wards and an operating room for general surgery, such as removing a child's tonsils or appendix. The hospital admitted all patients needing bed rest, including those with headaches or minor fevers. Cottages, numbered one to sixteen, separately housed boys and girls who transferred, as they grew, to cottages for older children.
In the cottages, away from public view, white-uniformed matrons reigned supreme. They lived full-time in apartments in the cottage and were called house mothers by the office. Assistants to the matrons wore colored uniforms specific to their positions and worked twenty-four hours on, then had twenty-four hours off. While on duty, they ate with the children and slept in small private rooms.
The school is closed now. Little remains but these buildings, and a cemetery at the southwest corner of the former campus. Nearly two hundred children who died of disease, accident, or other causes lie there. Those three years old or younger suffered a higher death rate than the older children-death from general debility or simply wasted away, the records say. Those without family were buried without ceremony. Children died on farm indenture and other placements, too. According to mortality statistics over one ten-year period, as many children died on placement as those on the school grounds.
State officials disagreed about how the school would affect children. About 1900, one officially recorded his concern: I fear we have...
