You Are What You Remember
Poet Shane McCrae reflects on memory, identity, race, and more in the memoir of his childhood kidnapping.
By Cort Gatliff
As far as kidnappings go, poet Shane McCrae’s was perfectly respectable. There were no weapons or zip ties, no ransoms, no “strangers pulling up next to a child in a parking lot,” as he puts it. Instead, his white supremacist maternal grandparents dressed him for the journey, held his three-year-old hand, and flew with him from Oregon to Texas, putting multiple states between him and his black father. When his father went to pick him up several days later, he discovered an empty house—“even the curtains are gone”—where he expected to find his son. McCrae’s mother, convinced he’d be better off living with her parents and fearful they’d take him out of the country if she revealed his whereabouts, remained silent, flitting in and out of his life as an occasional visitor.
We tend to think of kidnappings as incidents that occur on a specific day, in a particular instant. A child is there, then they’re gone. But in Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, McCrae’s excellent new memoir about his harrowing childhood, he shows that disappearance is more a process than a point in time. In the months and years that followed the day he was taken, McCrae was taught to hate his father, his father’s family, and his father’s (and his) skin color. “From the kidnapping on, nobody mentions my father to me except to tell me he didn’t want me, but that’s OK because he’s black, and I shouldn’t want him right back,” McCrae writes. “I grow up screaming I don’t want him right back.”
Now, several decades removed from the distressing events of his youth, McCrae, a National Book Award finalist who teaches writing at Columbia University and is the poetry editor of Image, is looking back to grapple with what exactly was done to him. The result is a powerful reflection on memory, identity, boyhood, and race in America that often reads more like a poem than a straightforward narrative.
The lyricism of Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is to be expected from such a celebrated poet, but it also serves to highlight one of the book’s central themes: the nature of memory. Despite what we may want to believe, we rarely think in crisp sentences with linear, journalistic accuracy. That’s not how the mind normally works, especially when thinking about the past. We may have some clear snapshots, but most of our recollections provide the general shape and texture of things rather than the things themselves. Part of the genius of this book is McCrae’s ability to effectively convey the experience of memory retrieval, especially as it relates to traumatic events. “Living with blocked memories isn’t like being a rootless plant, it’s like being a plant with roots that don’t touch anything,” he writes.
Despite what we may want to believe, we rarely think in crisp sentences with linear, journalistic accuracy.
Throughout the book, he recalls the same scenes and stories several times, often rendering them differently with each retelling. His thoughts drift seamlessly from assertions to questions to philosophical interrogations of reality, all in the same sentence, occasionally without clear punctuation. Some of this feels like reading the thoughts of a forensic detective examining a crime scene from various angles to get to the truth. “What is remembering if not giving each bloody knife a body?” he asks. Other times, the memories are flat out contradictory. Reflecting on his abusive grandfather, he writes, “I know he never had a set of weights in the garage, but I remember he had a set of weights in the garage.” People from one city and one season of life impossibly show up in memories formed in another city during a different season of life. McCrae remembers going to a Piggly Wiggly with his grandfather, only to learn from Google that there’s no evidence this particular Piggly Wiggly ever existed. “Does the self end where misremembering the self begins?” McCrae writes. “Did I kill myself to save myself?” Many of his memories are intentionally distorted by his grandparents, who recognize that if he internalizes their lies about his past and identity, then his kidnapping, a kind of death, will be complete.
The particulars of McCrae’s life are extraordinary, but there’s something familiar, relatable, and mundane about the way he depicts boyhood in America in the late eighties and early nineties. Young McCrae feels most free when he’s outside skateboarding, climbing fences, and playing with neighborhood kids in his cul-de-sac—versions of things all adolescent boys do to get out of the house and away from authority figures. And yet the closed doors of his home hid profound suffering, unbeknownst to his friends. There are subtle hints, too, that they also may have been enduring their own forms of trauma. I found myself thinking of the neighborhood kids I used to skate with, the ones whose parents weren’t around or who had a disquieting stepfather, and wondering what they faced when they turned in for the evening. How many stories akin to McCrae’s go untold?
Despite the unreliable memories picked apart and woven together throughout this book, one specific date is fixed clearly in McCrae’s mind: October 25, 1990, the day he wrote his first poem, after hearing Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” read by a character in a film shown to his tenth-grade class as part of the school’s anti-suicide initiative:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
That day, he scribbled eight poems in a Mead notebook and took the first steps down a path, without knowing exactly where it would take him. In Plath’s words about death, McCrae found new life.
The very fact of his writing this book proves that, in a fundamental sense, the kidnapping failed. I’ll leave it to the reader to discover where McCrae’s search—for identity, for belonging, for the truth, for his father—leads him. But the book’s epigraph, a quotation from philosopher and theologian Catherine Pickstock, is fitting: “Every story is by definition a resurrection story.” Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is no exception.
Cort Gatliff is the Assistant Minister for Discipleship at South Highland Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping was published by Scribner on August 1, 2023. Fare Forward appreciates the provision of an advance copy for our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
