Meet-the-Author Recording with Sharon Cameron

Bluebird |

Sharon Cameron introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating Bluebird.

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Sharon Cameron: Hi, this is Sharon Cameron and I am the author of Bluebird. Bluebird is the coming together of two pieces of American history that existed side by side in 1946. One inspirational, one shameful, both fascinating and both forgotten. The first piece of forgotten history is Powell House, a diverse multi-religious program run by Quaker volunteers from an exclusive mansion on the Upper East Side of New York City, a place created to extend practical friendship and unconditional love to refugees rebuilding their lives in the United States. The second is Project Bluebird, a secret operation of horrific psychological and medical experimentation run by the CIA. The aim of which was to split the human personality and gain control of the human mind. It sounds like science fiction, but these experiments were real, performed on unwitting, unconsenting American citizens using methods straight from the records of the concentration camps. And just like many other areas of science during the cold war, I believe our government was paying Nazi war criminals to do them.

From pre and post-war Berlin to the bebop clubs of Harlem, Bluebird was one of the most complicated research projects I've ever taken on. Maps and personal accounts from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the Nuremberg trial transcripts, records of medical procedures and field hospitals, sorting the conspiracy theories away from the real documentation of Project Bluebird now available from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act. But it was the archives of the American Friends Service Committee, the AFSC, the Quaker service wing who ran Powell House that was absolutely incredible.

Letters, diaries, budgets, photographs, case studies of refugees, even an unpublished memoir, it all gave me so much depth and showed me a place so
far ahead of its time in terms of social justice that was hard to believe it existed. But the best was sitting in the living room of a ninety-nine-year-old Quaker, a beautiful soul who had spent two years at Powell House and a lifetime of service in the AFSC serving the human race. Listening to her memories was such a privilege. And of course she's a character in the book. And she gave me so much hope. She reminded me that the light always exists, that for every Project Bluebird, there is a Powell House. That for every injustice, there is a justice. That while Project Bluebird was sanctioning crimes against humanity, the AFSC was winning the Nobel Peace Prize for decades of humanitarian efforts that spanned the globe.

Light exists even when there is so much darkness.
That was true in 1946 and I believe it's still true now.

I'm going to read now from the first pages of Bluebird. The main character is Eva, a refugee of war coming to America, only Eva is not coming to start a new life. She is coming to seek justice and a Nazi who has slipped its net. And she is coming with a secret, a secret that neither the Americans nor the Soviets should have, the secret of Project Bluebird.

Chapter One.
August, 1946.

It is a land without rubble. Eva leans over the top rail of the ship gazing across the leaden sea, and there are no piles of charred stone. No smoking pits or chunks of broken concrete, just walls, a city of them, whole and strong looking, rising brick by solid brick. Beautiful unbombed buildings floating in a bank of gray and city fog. This is a new world now. That's what they'd told her. The old world is ash, burnt like paper in the fire winds of Berlin. Sometimes, Eva thinks, people tell you lies.

There's supposed to be a statue, but she can't find it in the mist. Up onto the first rung of the rail and Eva leans out again, hands-free, knees braced against the metal hooked in placed by her shoe heels. She can see the tops of heads and hats on the lower deck, water churning into foam far below them and the city spreads bigger, closer, anchored to the moving horizon.

She closes her eyes, lets the wind snatch her hair, slap her cheeks. It's like driving fast with the windows down, like diving off a cliff. It feels a little like flying.

This Meet-the-Author Recording with Sharon Cameron was exclusively created in September 2021 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Scholastic.