“The weird thing about growing up kidnapped,” Shane McCrae, the
47-year-old American poet, told me in his melodious, reedy voice
one rainy afternoon in May, “is if it happens early enough,
there’s a way in which you kind of don’t know.”
There was no reason for McCrae to have known. What unfolded in
McCrae’s childhood — between a day in June 1979 when his white
grandmother took him from his Black father and disappeared, and
another day, 13 years later, when McCrae opened a phone book in
Salem, Ore., found a name he hoped was his father’s and placed a
call — is both an unambiguous story of abduction and a convoluted
story of complicity. It loops through the American landscape,
from Oregon to Texas to California to Oregon again, and, even
now, wends through the vaster emotional country of a child and
his parents. And because so much of what happened to McCrae
happened in homes where he was beaten and lied to and threatened,
where he was made to understand that Black people were inferior
to whites, where he was taught to hail Hitler, where he was told
that his dark skin meant he tanned easily but, no, not that he
was Black, it’s a story that’s been hard for McCrae to piece
together.
McCrae’s new book, the memoir “Pulling the Chariot of the Sun,”
is his attempt to construct, at a remove of four decades, an
understanding of what happened and what it has come to mean. The
memoir takes the reader through McCrae’s childhood, from his
earliest memories after being taken from his father to when, at
16, he found him again.
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