Pulling the Chariot of the Sun

Starred review from June 26, 2023
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. Agent: Alice Whitwham, Elyse Cheney Literary.

December 1, 2023

Poet and National Book Award finalist McCrae's (In the Language of My Captor) debut memoir tells the story of his abduction. In 1978, when he was just three years old, his mother's white parents kidnapped him, taking him from his Black father and raising him in Texas. His grandparents warn his mother that she will never see her son again if she tries to tell the father where he is. McCrae's grandparents raise him according to their white-supremacist beliefs, telling him that he is white and encouraging him to hate his father. Narrating his own work, McCrae captures his bewildering feelings as he attempts (and often fails) to piece together his recollections of his childhood and teen years. Via powerfully poetic language, he allows his thoughts to wander, backtracking and moving forward repeatedly as he tries to separate fact from fiction. VERDICT McCrae has created a nonlinear and intricate patchwork, stitching together the forgetting and remembering wrought by childhood trauma. This poetic meditation on family and history should appeal to readers of Harrison Mooney's Invisible Boy and Natasha Trethewey's Memorial Drive.--Angel Caranna

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