Pulling the Chariot of the Sun
A Memoir of a Kidnapping
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3.0 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
