While the Locust Slept: A Memoir (Native Voices)

In stark, haunting prose, first-time author Peter Razor recalls his early years as a ward of the State of Minnesota. Told in flashbacks and relying on research from his own case files, Razor manages to piece 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, Razor spent his childhood at the hands of abusive workers who thought of him as nothing more than 'a dirty Injun'. He endures years of beatings 'with a broom or radiator brush -- whatever was handy' until, one night while he is asleep, one of the matrons attacks him with a hammer. Fearing for his life, he makes two failed attempts to run away from the orphanage. Quickly labelled a trouble-maker, he is later indentured as a hired hand to a farm family. The farmer beats him, clothes him in rags, and treats him like a slave, often working him to exhaustion without food or water. Remarkably, Razor struggles to attend high school and begins to dream of another life, but first he must endure the darkest and most vicious attack yet.