Falling into Place

"The woman in front of me was in no shape to be on television. Her face was lifeless-her eyes red, swollen, vacant. She met my gaze as if begging to be told what to do, but I had no idea how to help her and felt every bit as lost as she looked."

So begins the spiritual memoir of Nez Perce Indian Hattie Kauffman known to millions for her work as a network news correspondent for CBS News and ABC's Good Morning America. The surprise for readers is that the woman she is describing-the one with the red eyes and vacant stare-is her own reflection.

"My words bounced off her cold image in the mirror. She wasn't listening.

I turned away, but movement felt nearly impossible under the weight of limbs too heavy to lift. My mind felt as though it were slipping in and out of time and I struggled to stay focused on what I was doing."

Hattie's gripping testimony unfolds in her critically acclaimed book, Falling Into Place. She describes growing up in extreme poverty, one of seven children whose parents moved them from the reservation in Idaho to the city of Seattle.

"We kids didn't know it at the time, but our parents' marriage was falling apart. They were fighting, drinking and disappearing. I don't tell this story to denounce them," Hattie explained. "My parents were doing the best they could and eventually their ship would right itself but we had some rough sailing for quite a stretch there... which happened to be my formative years."

The kids were often home alone, sometimes for days at a time. With no adults around to pay the bills, the lights were shut off, then the heat and eventually the water.

"In my book I describe an afternoon in which I'm in charge of my three younger sisters, and there's nothing to eat. After searching through the kitchen cupboards, I eventually find a bit of jam in the bottom of a jar and quickly scoop it into my mouth just as the youngest sister, the one we call 'Baby', starts to cry. Immediately, I'm overwhelmed with a sense of guilt.

"Now of course, I probably couldn't have given you a definition of the word 'guilt' at the time. I was only four. But the sense that I had done something wrong by eating that tiny bit of food rather than saving it for Baby stuck with me. And if you ask, what was a significant event in my childhood, I'd have to say it was the time I ate the jam because it made me feel from then on that I had to somehow make up for my guilt; that I had to try to make things right."

Like many children in alcoholic homes, Hattie tried 'to make things right'... but found she was at the mercy of the adults around her. Excerpts from her book illustrate the chaos.

"I wake at night to the roar of Mom, Dad, and the occasional others who stumble in with them. Like my parents, the drinking buddies appear and then vanish. Bursts of laughter careen into foul words as they battle, weep, pass out and wake up mean. One of them cuts off my hair.

Smeared orange lipstick colors her frown.

"Lice," the lips spit at my tangles. "Nits."

Scissors, in unsteady hands, clip back and forth across my head.

I don't know who she is.

"There," the bright lips pronounce. "That's better." She drops the scissors and sways out of the mess that is our living room on a morning after.

There were frequent and unexpected trips back to the reservation.

"Wake up. Hattie, wake up."

I am seven years old and my little sister Carla is shaking me awake. Blinking against the brightness of the light bulb overhead, I give her a cranky face, roll over and close my eyes again.

"Wake up. We're going to Idaho," she urges.

I sit up. It is the middle of the night. Every light in the house is on. Bleary eyed, I see Carla has a paper bag in her hand and is looking for clothes to throw into it, while the youngest two girls are still asleep at my feet. The scene doesn't make sense to my drowsy brain.

"Come on girls," Mom's yell comes from the bottom of the stairs, in the high, nasally pitch that lets me know I'd better jump. It's another After Closing Time Road Trip.

We never know when one might happen. A year could go by or we might have two in one month. It could be in the summer or during the school year. We groggily pile into the back seat of the car. She throws a blanket over us and we speed off into the night. Somewhere in the desert, sunrise will jerk us awake. Mom might have pulled over and be asleep, or she might be squinting hard against the light, still driving, a beer bottle between her knees."

But amid the chaos, there was one adult shining like a light: Hattie's aunt.

"I was seven years old when my Aunt Teddy taught me the 23rd Psalm. I had no idea what the words meant but I repeated them back to her until I had it memorized."

The words 'The Lord is my Shepard' were the first seeds planted. It is a good thing that God is patient because the harvest would be a long time coming. As a hardened teenager, Hattie rejected her Aunt's teaching. The scene from her book is wrenching.

"I don't want the white man's God," I whisper harshly into the phone, turning my back so my sisters and brother won't hear me. We are gathered around the phone in the living room, which we do whenever Aunty Teddy calls.

"Oh, Hattie," Teddy begins, her voice thin and tinny over the long distance line.

It is 1970. I am fifteen and disgusted that I was ever taken in by her words. No loving God could have created my world.

"It's not a white man's God, Hattie. Christ died for all people."

"The missionaries just wanted to steal our land," I sneer.

"The government needed to tame the Indians, so they sent in the Christians."

"But..."

"I don't want to hear anymore. I'm finished with it."

I drop the receiver dismissively into the hand of the next sister in line waiting to talk to Aunt Teddy. In rejecting her God, I am pushing away the only person who has consistently been kind to me. I walk away hollow.

And Hattie admits that she remained hollow for decades. Perhaps spurred by that childhood urge 'to make things right' she poured herself into work...getting a scholarship to college, climbing out of poverty and becoming a successful TV reporter and anchorwoman. But she told Indian Life that there came a day when she felt the emptiness of her life.

"I was 52 years old and in the middle of an unexpected divorce. I had achieved a lot in my career, earning a big salary and living in a nice home but the upheaval revealed the fragility of it all. I realized there wasn't anything solid underneath me."

It was at that time that she began to feel the pull of God even in the middle of shooting a news story, as she describes in another scene from Falling Into Place:

"Our assignment was a feature story on a thriving home business that sold products from Africa. I interviewed the owner, a billowy black woman, who told me God had awakened her one morning with the distinct message that she must help women in Africa.

I gave a routine, disconnected nod-partly in an attempt to mask my annoyance at being dragged all the way up here to talk to a crazy woman who seriously believed God had spoken to her, and partly because no matter what she was saying, I simply could not bring myself to fully engage with her. Her responses sounded like static in my ears. I hardly asked a single follow-up question to anything she said. So she kept speaking and I kept nodding. But as we went on, her dark eyes bored into mine.

"God woke me up," she repeated.

With repeated experiences like that one, it seemed God was waking Hattie up too. Remembering her late Aunt Teddy, Hattie began to recall the words of the 23rd Psalm. And then, she started to pray. One morning, while sitting alone in a hotel room, resting with her eyes closed, she felt the touch of a hand upon the top of her head...

"... the way a parent might touch a child in tender love. The warm pressure of the hand upon my hair cupped me just above my right temple. It was lovely and so real that I opened my eyes to see whose hand it might be..."

She was alone in the room, and yet this was the turning point. Hattie finally began to realize that the Lord was there for her and had been all along. On a publicity tour for her book, she was asked if she found God or God found her.

"God didn't have to find me...He knew where I was all the time. I was the hungry girl, trying to control her world, scrambling to get somewhere and be someone. Later, the woman trying to be liked, always on guard, never at rest. It was only when I was so broken in spirit that I could no longer even pretend to be in control that I looked up... God? Are you real?"

Hattie was baptized and with the help of the Holy Spirit was able to look back on her life with a new perspective. She explained in this recent interview:

"It wasn't just forgiving my parents. It made me aware of how much resentment I had been carrying around. I finally realized I had to forgive me. I had to exhale, unclench my fists, relax my shoulders. I forgave myself for seeking God in all these false roads-ignoring, denouncing, denying.

Today, she is finally at peace and living a new life in the Lord Jesus Christ.

-Hattie Kauffman was the first Native American journalist to ever report on a national network evening news broadcast. For over 20 years, she was an on-camera correspondent and frequent guest anchor for ABC and CBS. She is a tribal member of the Nez Perce of Idaho and also a speaker and writer.

This article was adapted from excerpts from Falling into Place: A Memoir of Overcoming by Hattie Kauffman, published by Baker Books ©2013 and used with permission of the author and Baker Publishing Group. Her book is available at local bookstores, through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.