Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping

by Shane McCrae

Overview

Vulture’s #1 Memoir of 2023

An unforgettable, “lyrical and poignant” (The Washington Post) memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents.

When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage—all the while believing they were doing what was best for him.

For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane’s grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.

A revelatory account of an American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is written with the virtuosity and heart of one of the finest poets writing today. A powerful reflection on what is broken in America—this is “an essential story for our times” (Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of White Girls).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668021743
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	08/01/2023
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	199,384
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award; Sometimes I Never Suffered, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and his most recent collection, The Many Hundreds of the Scent. McCrae is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1


Before I saw it cascading across the fabric store parking lot, tumbling across the fabric store parking lot like a gif of two impossibly small gray birds fighting that has been copied and pasted a hundred thousand times, reeling through the air above the fabric store parking lot, the four hundred thousand wings overlapping, intertwining, each of the paired birds seeming to flap away from its opponent even as it attacks its opponent, I hadn’t known rain could fall sideways. I was seven years old. Maybe I was nine years old—any age after my grandparents kidnapped me and took me to Texas. I was three when I was kidnapped, any age. The day must have been a Saturday or a Sunday because when my grandmother and I stepped from the fabric store we were shocked at how dark the day had become, so it must have been midday, me not in school. Unless it was a summer day. Usually whenever we shopped for fabric store things, whenever my grandmother shopped for fabric store things, we went to a Michaels in a strip mall down Highway 183 just far enough for the strip mall to seem alien, impossible to get home if I were ever left there, but on this day we had gone to a fabric store I had never seen before, its name a blank stucco edifice to me now. Am I misremembering it?

MY GRANDMOTHER—MY MOTHER’S mother—was white, like my grandfather and my mother; my father was black. When I was a child, whiteness and blackness weren’t facts about me—whiteness was a wheat field I stood in; blackness was a pit somewhere in that field, hidden by the somehow taller stalks growing from it, taller insofar as they grew from the fathomless bottom of the pit to match the height of the other stalks in the field, those growing from the near and solid earth. My grandparents and I lived in a yellow brick house, its color and composition indicative of a whimsy belonging to none of its inhabitants, though my grandfather repainted it occasionally, always yellow, and even if he hadn’t known about the yellow brick road when we first arrived at the yellow brick house, his family had been poor when he was young—no movies, few books, if any books—eventually he must have repainted the bricks yellow with The Wizard of Oz in his head, a yellow brick house in Round Rock, a suburb of Austin. We lived in a house funnier than the person who made it funny was. Over the next few years, assuming I was seven the day I first saw rain fall sideways, over the next few years, our house was up for sale, and while our house wasn’t selling, my grandmother would become an independent real estate agent and a real estate appraiser. At first she would work as a real estate agent for an agency with a brown and yellow corporate color scheme, then she would work for an agency with a red and white corporate color scheme, like the colors of the H-E-B grocery store sign, except the H-E-B sign was red with a ring of white between the red of the body of the sign and the sign’s red border, but I imagined white at the edges of the sign, or deep inside the sign—I imagined white as the finishing touch to every colored thing. The first time she took me to the H-E-B, near enough to home that I could walk home if I were left there, but far enough away from home that I would give up on the way, after we had finished shopping, just after we had gotten into the Datsun, a 1981 desert-sand-colored Datsun 210 hatchback, to drive home, my grandmother told me H-E-B stood for Herbert E. Butts, and I thought that was hilarious, but the other day I read somewhere, or thought I read somewhere, that Herbert E. Butts did a significant amount of charitable work while he was alive. But was his name even Herbert E. Butts? Am I misremembering it?

The brown and yellow agency would become the red and white agency, and my grandmother would be swept up and carried by the change.

But she would never be rich, not on her own. But every once in a while she would try to get rich—like the time when, after we saw a story about the Cabbage Patch Kids craze on the news, I remember lingering shots of long, empty aisles where the dolls had been, me wondering whether the aisles were aisles in the local Toys “R” Us, she tracked down a lone Cabbage Patch Kid, a black boy doll named Fritz, then, using Fritz’s tiny black body as a guide, she stitched her own dolls, white dolls, she called “Abbage Patch Kids,” making copies of Fritz’s birth certificate with the photocopier she had bought for her real estate business, but with both the C in “Cabbage” and the X in “Xavier,” the name of the creator of Cabbage Patch Kids, whited out. She tried to sell the dolls at a garage sale we had a few weeks later, then again at a garage sale we had a few years later, then she gave up. Abbage Patch Kids by Avier.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/26/2023

Poet and National Book Award finalist McCrae (In the Language of My Captor) recounts the jaw-dropping circumstances of his childhood in this exceptional memoir. In 1978, when McCrae was three years old, his white supremacist grandparents kidnapped him from Oregon and transported him to Texas, where they raised him as their own child, hoping to “save” him from the influence of his Black father (his mother, having been abused by her parents, didn’t intervene). McCrae was frequently beaten and belittled by his grandfather, who taunted him for being half Black (“You don’t want to look like them, do you?”). Never given the full story of his lineage, he began to mix the lies his grandparents told him with his own fuzzy memories of the past—in one lyrical passage, he remembers running down the aisle of a fabric store “from illusion to illusion” and into the arms of his grandmother, which he knows can’t be true, because she “wasn’t often physically affectionate.” At age 15, McCrae discovered poetry and threw himself into it wholesale; the confidence he drew from writing moved him to find his father, which he hazily recounts here, copping to the fact that his memories of the reunion are choppy and inconsistent. McCrae’s account of the abuses he endured are unflinching, but readers will walk away with a stronger sense of awe than pity, both for his resilience and his command of language. This gorgeous meditation on family, race, and identity isn’t easy to shake. Agent: Alice Whitwham, Elyse Cheney Literary. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Shane McCrae’s powerful, indelible poet’s voice has now extended to the memoir, and how fortunate are we that the very things that distinguish his verse—truth-telling, sharp observation, more than a sense of the moment, profundity worn lightly—grace his harrowing and enlightening tale about race, and what makes an American family, and why. An essential story for our times.” —Hilton Als

From the Publisher

2023-04-24
A poet describes a traumatic upbringing after being kidnapped.

McCrae, a Guggenheim fellow, Whiting and Lannan Literary Award winner, and professor of writing at Columbia, was 3 years old when he was kidnapped from his father by his maternal grandparents, who were White supremacists. It took him years to understand what had happened—to even associate the word kidnap with himself—and his new book traces his attempt to reconstruct meaning from a life that was rooted, early on, in lies and abuse. The author’s father was Black, his mother was White, and his grandparents carried a deeply ingrained racism. McCrae is an acclaimed poet, and the tools of that trade are evident here, as he emphasizes metaphors, symbols, and images over character. He writes of his grandfather: “I know my life continued after him, like a plant growing alone in a hole the size of a house. Here I am in my life, in the middle of it, but I have buried so many memories of my life with my grandfather that my life is like a plant grown in a house-sized hole, a void.” McCrae’s attention to word choice is studied and precise, and at times, he repeats certain words or phrases: “We left the Piggly Wiggly carrying something red. My grandfather left the Piggly Wiggly carrying something red. Or the packaging was mostly another color, but the product inside the packaging was red, and was represented by an attractively staged photograph, mostly red.” The first half of the text sings with a gorgeously wrought tension. In the second half, however, the tension starts to sag. In these chapters, McCrae is a young teenager learning to skateboard, but his prose doesn’t carry the nearly excruciating tautness of the early pages. Still, as a whole, the book is original and satisfying.

Intricately wrought and unrelenting in its honesty.

Kirkus Reviews

Shane McCrae’s powerful, indelible poet’s voice has now extended to the memoir, and how fortunate are we that the very things that distinguish his verse—truth-telling, sharp observation, more than a sense of the moment, profundity worn lightly—grace his harrowing and enlightening tale about race, and what makes an American family, and why. An essential story for our times.”

Pulitzer Prize winning writer and theater critic Hilton Als