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Table of Contents
About The Book
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).
Excerpt
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.
Reading Group Guide
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Introduction
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 a singularly American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is crafted with the virtuosity and heart of one of the finest poets writing today. It is a powerful reflection on what is broken in America—but also what might heal and make it whole again.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. Shane is a poet, and this background is reflected throughout this lyrical memoir. Discuss some of the most poetic passages of the book. How do poetics or lyrical prose help craft the story Shane wants to convey?
2. The act of naming—and the lack of it—takes on an important role in forming Shane’s conception of self, as well as his conception of those around him. For example, the central adult figure throughout the book takes on many names: grandmother, “Mom,” kidnapper. Discuss other examples of how naming functions throughout this memoir.
3. Even though Shane is candid about not remembering much of his childhood, in-depth details abound as he pieces together a mosaic of his life, whether it’s the dining room table on page 7 or the kind of gum his grandmother chewed on page 42. What significance does detail play in Shane’s memories and in memory in general?
4. Toward the beginning of the book, the titular metaphor of the “chariot of the sun” is introduced, which the narrator pulls through “clouds so thick and dark he can’t see the chariot behind him, though its heat reaches through the clouds and scorches his back, though he thinks he is running from the thing he is pulling” (page 21). How does this metaphor function throughout the rest of the book?
5. Vehicles can be found in many parts of the story, whether they’re chariots for pulling, cars for warming, or bikes for riding wheelies down the street. What do you make of this motif? Do you think each kind of vehicle signifies something different from the others?
6. This is a memoir comprised of vignettes, and the structure of the text is fragmented. How does the fragmented nature of the text further illustrate Shane’s story?
7. The color white appears in various motifs throughout the book, most often in relation to race but also to describe the quartz by the riverbank and the material of a headstone. Why do you think this reappears? Can you think of more occurrences of white objects or references throughout the book?
8. Shane refers to having memory holes and “blocked memories,” often candidly telling us he doesn’t know whether he’s directly recalling a memory. How do these memory holes relate to structure of book? Does the fragmented structure leave anything unsaid? If so, what? Does the structure of the text create a kind of redemption for Shane’s lapses in memory?
9. How did each of Shane’s hometowns differ from one another? How did his inner world change as his physical world did?
10. “Eventually you have to start hiding to stay lost,” writes Shane. Feeling (and being!) lost is a huge theme in the book. What kind of relationship does the author have with lostness? How and when has that relationship fluctuated?
11. Shane asks if it’s “possible to disown up” (page 15). Do you think it is?
12. The search for identity is one of the central themes of the book. When was a time in your life when you were searching for identity? What people, places, and details did you cling to, and why?
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (August 1, 2023)
- Length: 272 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668021743
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Raves and Reviews
Vulture’s #1 Memoir of 2023
“As he excavates and untangles muddied memories, contends with ambivalent feelings about his grandmother and mother, and ultimately comes to terms with their unforgivable robbery of a relationship with both his father and his true, full self, McCrae’s pain bleeds through his words—but so too does a gentle sense of acceptance. We are lucky to bear witness.” —Vulture, Best Memoir of 2023
“Like many accomplished memoirs that have followed from St. Augustine’s pioneering Confessions, McCrae’s explores memory’s uncertain contours, but like few memoirs before it, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun offers the experience, in prose, of that uncertainty. . . . [his memoir is] a portrait of a poet as a young Black man—a boy raised in a particular crucible of capture that, as part of its power, enacts the American story of seizure and captivity of Black people by white tormentors.” —The New York Times Magazine
“Lyrical and poignant . . . McCrae, an award-winning poet, paints a striking depiction of his childhood trauma and the depths of his desire to understand and heal.” —The Washington Post
“A singular story that's also a universal truth in our country, told in beautifully poetic prose.” —Good Housekeeping, One of the Most Anticipated Fall Books of 2023
“An exceptional memoir . . . 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.” —Publishers Weekly
“Intricately wrought and unrelenting in its honesty… the text sings with a gorgeously wrought tension… original and satisfying.” —Kirkus
“Written in lush prose with paragraphs you want to swim in, this disturbing, inspiring read will transfix the busiest reader and make everyone contemplate one’s own family and its context in the country at large.” —Zibby Owens, Good Morning America
“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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of White Girls
“Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is the kind of story that pulls you right in with its voice, the kind of book that sways you with heart-wrenching honesty and beautiful music. There is something magnetic to this story-telling, which gives us an incantation of memory that is as moving as it is spell-binding. For what tears up the family in this book is what tears up this country still, prevents it from finding itself. McCrae's voice is vulnerable and direct and precise, the voice of a poet who teaches us again what musical prose can do. This is such a compelling and necessary book.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
“Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is a memoir, and a poem, and a story, and a collection of songs about identity and personal history and place and time and race and America: but any description of it, any attempt to confine it within the boundaries of genre or form, is doomed to failure. This is a singular book. McCrae writes like a fencer, tracing indelible figures in the reader's mind: a child in a fabric store, a car in a rainstorm, a wild hideaway between buildings in a subdivision. It's a book by a man who was kidnapped as a child, and raised by his kidnappers, and no further attempt to describe what's in these pages can prepare the reader for the hardness of the story nor the dazzling light of McCrae's prose. We live in a glut of memoir. McCrae's book will endure long after the glut has subsided.” —John Darnielle, author of Devil House
“Shane McCrae’s extraordinary memoir is a kinaesthetic feat in the art of remembering, a complex layering of, and a laying bare of, the trauma of a stolen Black identity. Each meticulous, mellifluous, sentence charts a journey with multiple detours, dead ends and unexpected destinations. It is befitting that catharsis comes through language itself, the language of poetry. Ambitious and profound, this book will leave an indelible imprint on the mind of the reader. ” —Patience Agbabi, author of Telling Tales
“A precise articulation of memory, its making and unmaking, McCrae’s book is a vivid, churning, and compulsive account of one man’s personal reckoning with race, prejudice, and the ideologies that haunt modern America. Written with a sharp and constantly-searching language, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is as acute in its thinking as it is brave in its emotional charge.” —Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
“A moving, slippery and imagistic prose memoir by one of my favourite lyric poets writing today.” —Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance
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