“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.
his story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
The Voters Willing to Abandon Biden Over Gaza
The Alabama Ruling That Could Stop Families From Having Kids
The Sunday Read: ‘How Do You Make a Weed Empire? Sell It Like Streetwear.’
Trump’s Cash Crunch
Putin’s Opposition Ponders a Future Without Aleksei Navalny
What Happens if America Turns Its Back on Its Allies in Europe
Stranded in Rafah as an Israeli Invasion Looms
The Booming Business of Cutting Babies’ Tongues
Sunday Special: Un-Marry Me!
An Explosive Hearing in Trump’s Georgia Election Case
How China Broke One Man’s Dreams
The Biden Problem Democrats Can No Longer Ignore
Why the Race to Replace George Santos Is So Close
Why Boeing’s Top Airplanes Keep Failing
The Sunday Read: ‘The Unthinkable Mental Health Crisis That Shook a New England College’
Kick Trump Off the Ballot? Even Liberal Justices Are Skeptical
A Guilty Verdict For a Mass Shooter’s Mother
El Salvador Decimated Gangs. But at What Cost?
The U.N. Scandal Threatening Crucial Aid to Gaza
The 1948 Economic Moment That Might Explain Our Own
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Up First
Post Reports
The Journal.
The Ezra Klein Show
Today, Explained