“In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”

—Alex Haley

AUTHOR COMMENT

Blackbird
was a book I needed to write. Dead parents, a spate of homelessness, and countless moves from Nevada to California and back to Nevada had me emerge from my childhood in a spinning haze.

The voice I discovered was that of a child who seemed to be in shock. Writing was like debriefing a disoriented witness. As I wrote, I tried to form opinions about all I had gone through, but like my narrator, I could only feel numb and amazed. I found myself asking a series of questions instead:
Did my life have some meaning beyond all the loss? Was there some higher purpose to suffering? Could a person heal from such a childhood?

Over the next few years, a series of extraordinary events unfolded and are detailed within this book. It seemed that in writing
Blackbird
, I had begun a long journey that, in the end, would provide answers to all my questions and much more.

Blackbird
was a witness account conveyed by a little girl.
Found
is a widened perspective narrated by a reflective woman and mother. Both memoirs are my truth. As part of the creative process, I have taken liberty with conversations, with time, and with identity.

My great hope is that this story will be of benefit to all who read it.

—JENNIFER LAUCK
PORTLAND, OREGON
2010

“I am now seventy-one years old, I feel, still, deep in my mind, my first experience, my mother’s care. I can still feel it. That immediately gives me inner peace, inner calmness. The mother’s physical touch is the greatest factor for the healthy development of the brain. This is not due to religious faith, but because of the biological factor.”

—HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA
VANCOUVER DIALOGUES
2007

“The separation from the mother’s body, at birth, is the most dreadful thing. The baby was one with the mother and then the people take the child away and put him somewhere else. Dreadful.”

—ECKHART TOLLE
FREEDOM FROM THE WORLD

ONE

WHEN I WAS BORN

I WAS GIVEN the perfect name, although it would take the better part of forty-six years to puzzle this perfection out.

Jennifer, popular in the ’60s, is my first name and seems on the surface to be a fad. But in the end, it is my first name that leads me home.

Lauck, my last name, is the family surname and a German derivative of
lock
.
Lock
weaves a path of connection, at the root, to the verb form of
luck
. Coincidently, pull
a
from Lauck and there it is again. Luck. Of all the things I have been in this life, it is most accurate to say I’ve been lucky, indeed.

And here comes Caste, my middle name, which is core to the circumstances from which I began my life.

Caste originates from the Latin
castus
, meaning chaste, pure, innocent. As
caste
traveled through Portugal and Spain, it shifted to
casto,
meaning lineage, race, breed. In English, caste most often loses its silent
e
and becomes just
cast
.

While there are many meanings to the word
cast
, the markers on my map are these: to cast is to throw something away from yourself, usually with force; to cast also means to remove or banish something from your mind deliberately, decisively, and often with great difficulty. A castaway is one set adrift. An outcast has been rejected by a particular group or by society as a whole.

I WAS BORN in Nevada, which jigsaws against California. Most Nevadans occupy the narrow band of land situated along the western and southern borders. The population clusters in the big cities of Las Vegas, Carson City, and Reno, and then spreads wide in the smaller towns of Elko, Fallon, and Lovelock.

The largest part of Nevada is owned by the military and is unoccupied. At the bottom corner of the state, five hundred miles from Reno and seventy-five miles from Vegas, the U.S. Department of Energy operates the Nevada Test Site. Between 1951 and 1992, more than a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated at the Nevada Test Site. Octopus clouds could be seen from Las Vegas and it was not uncommon for tourists to gather on hotel balconies to gape at supernatural detonations that smeared the sky.

I wonder what these day-trippers thought as they watched tendrils of radioactive debris spiral back to earth. Were they afraid? Or did they feel proud, confident, and safe somehow, in the knowledge that these bombs were being perfected? And what of their senses? Did they notice the texture of the air transform from clear and clean to spiky and bright? Underfoot, did they feel the earth
buck and then collapse? Could they detect any reorganization of atoms within their own cells?

OVER THE MONTHS I gestated, during 1963, more than forty nuclear bombs were detonated at the Nevada Test Site. They were given names like Chipmunk, Gerbil, and Pleasant. The combined explosive power of those blasts was equal to thirty-eight attacks on Hiroshima.

MY MOTHER WAS named Catherine. She lived in Reno and had blond hair and a heart-shaped face. Her eyes were a dove-soft shade of medium blue that might be called gray. She was seventeen.

My mother’s boyfriend was Bill. He was also seventeen and had moved to Reno from California. Bill was a tall, awkward teen who passed time with the boys who wore leather jackets and smoked cigarettes from packs rolled in their sleeves.

Being unmarried, pregnant, and a teenager in 1963 was a dangerous combination that blew nuclear families wide open. Loyalties melted. Love vaporized. Protection was withdrawn. Shamed and afraid, the girls were scuttled to secret locations. Evidence of their pregnancies was hidden. Once babies were born, papers were signed, birth certificates were altered, and files were sealed.

Catherine had heard the whispers about girls who got pregnant and knew they always vanished from the halls and the classrooms of her high school. She didn’t admit to being pregnant herself until she was five months along.

On a July morning, on or about the day a super bomb called The Sedan was dropped at the Nevada Test Site, Catherine told the truth.

In the same way the Nevada Test Site became a national sacrifice zone, meaning it became uninhabitable forevermore, Catherine’s teen landscape evaporated. Gone were the simple times of drive-in movies, date nights, and long, languid kisses in the back seat of a souped-up Chevy while “Moon River” spilled from the radio. No more whispered secrets to her best friend on the telephone, no more “Dear Diary, I kissed a boy for the first time,” and no more dreams of white weddings and picket fences waiting in the future.

Catherine’s world became an unfamiliar and unforgiving place. She was humiliated by her family, isolated from friends, forbidden to see Bill again, and restricted to her bedroom for the duration of her pregnancy. The only person allowed near Catherine was a private tutor with the unusual name of Carmel. Her name was not pronounced like Carmel, the sea-splashed town below Monterey, California. Carmel came out of the mouth as
car-mull
, like one might refer to caramel apples or caramel corn.

Bill wanted to marry Catherine. He believed it was right for a child to have a name and a father. His own father had disappeared before he had been born. His mother wasn’t even clear who his father had been—perhaps a man with the name Hamilton, or it could have been Wright. The vacuum in Bill’s life was something he didn’t want a child of his own to experience.

Catherine’s family refused the marriage option. Catherine was considered irresponsible and immature. Bill was classified as trash
and banished. Relinquishment was prearranged with Catholic Community Services of Northern Nevada.

OVER THAT LONG fall and into the winter, Catherine wept—of course she wept. She was scared, ashamed, and utterly alone. She kept up her schoolwork, though, and read a few novels to pass the time. Her favorite book was the Pulitzer Prize winner
Gone with the Wind
, that sweeping tale of the United States divided between north and south. The central character was Southern Belle Scarlett O’Hara and her home was the plantation Tara. Scarlet, spoiled and indulged, had to grow up during the Civil War and in the end, acquired strength from the land—from Tara.

Something in
Gone with the Wind
sparked inspiration in Catherine and she named me Tara and called me by that name again and again.

Did Catherine think, perhaps, if she named me then she would keep me? Or did she name me this so that I might become her strength? Or perhaps, like a good mother, she set this name into my heart as a way to give me the strength of the land, which I’d need if I didn’t have a mother.

Through the power of my mother’s imagination, she was able to transform me into something far greater than a dreadful mistake. And in naming me Tara, she also gave me directions home.

IN SEPTEMBER 1963, the Cuban and Russian governments placed nuclear bombs in Cuba.

In October 1963, the Cuban Missile Crisis ended when the Russian government agreed to dismantle the weapons in Cuba and the U.S. government agreed to dismantle similar nuclear weapons in Turkey.

In November 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In December 1963, I was born to Catherine and taken away.

TWO

WHAT CANNOT BE SEEN

IT’S HARD TO FOCUS and seeing into the distance is impossible. My eyes work best when I squint and I squint a lot.

One of my first memories is linked to my poor vision. I have a deep sense of strain between my eyes. This tension has been with me all of my life.