While the Locust Slept: A Memoir (Native Voices)

While the Locust Slept: A Memoir (Native Voices)

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. 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. 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. "Peter Razor's coming-of-age story is a shocking revelation and succeeds where most other Native American autobiographies have failed.  While the Locust Slept  never confuses honesty with the truth, never descends into racial blaming, and refuses to use Ojibwe culture as a mirror in which the travesties of modern times are reflected. Instead, in a voice as simple and innocent as our childhood should be, he lets his experiences as an orphan tell the harrowing story of a lost generation of Indian children.  While the Locust Slept  is a treasure." David Treuer, author of  Little  and  The Hiawatha "Peter Razor spins an intense and endearing tale of an American Indian youth abandoned to the cruel mercy of the state. As memoir, his voice is amazingly distinctive--giving a cultural story of human survival. As history, his work informs us of an almost hidden, dark time in our past." Mark Anthonly Rolo (Bad River Ojibwe), former editor of  The Circle , and author of  My Mother is Now Earth “Razor’s story is a revelation . . . and is part of an honorable tradition of memoir writing by Native American writers, including Linda Hogan, Paula Gunn Allen, [and] N. Scott Momaday.” Library Journal “A stirring tale of a Native American childhood . . . recounted in spare prose loaded with feeling and insight. . . . [A] valuable coming of age story.” Publishers Weekly “Starvation, savage kicks, plotted escapes . . . not tales from a penal colony, these episodes were part of Peter Razor’s early life, spent as a ward of the state. . . .  While the Locust Slept  is the evenhanded, compelling tale of his harrowing childhood. . . .  While the Locust Slept  is memoir of the best kind—a clear testimony to events of [the] past.” Ripsaw News "A perfectly pitched memoir." Kirkus While the Locust Slept By Peter Razor MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS Copyright © 2001 Minnesota Historical Society All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87351-439-2 Chapter 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