While the Locust Slept. Peter Razor

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       From the Records of the State of Minnesota, County of Ramsey,District Court, Juvenile Division, April 19, 1930,hearing on abandoned children:

      Miss Wittman: This child, Peter, has been in a boarding home since October 1929.

      Judge: What do you recommend?

      Miss Wittman: Commitment to Owatonna.

      Judge: The Court being advised in the premises, finds that the said Peter Razor is a dependent child and in need of guardianship, education, care, and control.

      1

      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 СКАЧАТЬ