The Sunday Read: ‘The Kidnapped Child Who Became a Poet’

The Daily

The New York Times

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4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

“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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Wyatt Mason and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine.
0:08.1	This week's Sunday read is my recent article for the magazine about the 48-year-old American
0:12.9	poet, Shane McCray.
0:16.6	Since 2009, McCray has published 13 collections of verse, some 800 pages of supremely accomplished
0:24.4	work.
0:25.9	He writes deeply about race, about marriage, and about sin and pergation.
0:32.3	Through it all, he's been exploring the complexities of his biography, an exploration which prompts
0:37.8	this latest peace of mind on the occasion of his just published memoir, pulling the
0:43.0	chariot of the sun.
0:46.4	McCray explores the extraordinary events of his childhood when he was kidnapped at age
0:51.2	three from his black father by his white maternal grandparents.
0:56.6	They took him from Salem, Oregon, to just outside of Austin, Texas, raising him under the
1:01.8	premise that his father had abandoned him before he was born.
1:06.7	They also tried to keep McCray's racial identity from him, raising this black kid with the
1:11.5	understanding that he was a white kid who just tan easily.
1:16.0	He was brought up in this brutal racist household by a grandfather who beat him and lied
1:20.8	to him, and by a grandmother who, as much as she showed him love, was also a wildly
1:26.0	manipulative influence, brutal, in her own way.
1:30.6	McCray's personal history was a nightmare from which he doubted he could awake.
1:37.7	McCray's memoir is a very complicated piece of prose.
1:41.9	Some episodes are told many times, attempts by McCray to understand what might have happened.
1:48.5	My story for the magazine explores all of that, but it also goes to another place that
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