Shane McCrae is an acclaimed American poet. He has been recognized with several awards, has published a dozen books and is a professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University in New York.
She is also a kidnapping survivor. At age 3, his white maternal grandmother abruptly separated him from his black father, his primary caregiver, and took him to live more than 3,000 miles away.
Shane grew up in a deeply racist environment in which he never integrated, until at 16 he discovered a truth that changed his life forever.
This is his story of what he experienced:
I grew up in a suburb near Austin, Texas with my maternal grandmother and her husband. They were both white, but not me, I’m black.
They always told me that my mother couldn’t take care of me. And that my dad had moved to Brazil because he didn’t love me or care to be in contact with me. They told me that he had a new family and that he didn’t need me. That’s why he lived with them.
They were so determined to make me hate my father that they told me that someone in his family had broken into the house and stolen the Christmas presents.
I was vaguely aware that he was black, but it wasn’t something my grandparents talked about much. What they wanted me to understand was that my father had not been there for me, that he had abandoned my mother when I was born, and that he had no interest in me.
My feelings towards him were, of course, anger.
But I didn’t really think about him too much either. She didn’t know anything about him. She didn’t even know his name until he was like 10 years old.
My grandparents
My grandmother was a Nazi sympathizer. Because of her, I became interested in World War II.
When he realized that, he insisted on putting me on the German side. He taught me the Nazi salute and told me that the Nazis had lost the war because they ran out of gas and their tanks stopped working.
He never once mentioned the Holocaust.
My grandfather, who was not my mother’s father but my grandmother’s husband at the time, was a white supremacist. He believed that he and people like him, white males, should be at the center of the world, at the top of humanity, by a kind of biological right. He shamelessly defended that others were inferior.
If a black player was on TV, he always pointed out how stupid he sounded.
He was also homophobic. He had a habit of hitting those who were not like him, especially men who he believed were homosexuals. That was a habit he maintained throughout his life. He was very violent and bragged about it.
The school
In second grade, I started going to public school.
I remember there were very few black children. Very few. Maybe one in my grade and one in a more advanced grade.
I’m not sure how the white kids realized I was black.
Not that it was a secret, but it just wasn’t something I was aware of at the time. It wasn’t something I talked about.
What might have looked like games from the outside were actually very physical and very violent attacks, and they tended to be a bunch of white kids against me. Anyway, I experienced a lot of aggression and exclusion at that time.
And living where I lived, I had the feeling that being black was extremely isolating. Very few people I knew looked like me.
an asterisk
My grandparents with me were not racist in a direct and open way.
Being one would have interfered with his attempts to imagine me as a white boy.
They used to tell me my skin was darker because I tanned so easily.
I remember one time I was dancing in some way that my grandfather considered black and he yelled at me, “You don’t want to look like those people, do you?”
In this way, he established in me the idea that there was a way of behaving that was black and that was not good.
I didn’t quite understand what it meant to act black, what it constituted to be black. But I knew that it could be accidentally at any time and that it shouldn’t be.
Being a black kid being raised by white racists ended up feeling like you weren’t really in the world, like you were an asterisk on a page: you were relevant to what was happening on the page, but you weren’t really part of it.
A hell
Even being quite young, I was very aware that I was not happy, and my sadness revolved around my grandfather.
He was very abusive. He was physically abusive and he was emotionally abusive. He was not a good person.
And it seems to me that from a very young age I became an expert at blocking out the abusive things he did to me from my mind. I didn’t really notice much until one day when I had breakfast with my grandmother when I was 20 or 22 years old.
There I found out that when I was three years old, when I had just started living with them, my grandfather threw me against a wall because I was crying for my dad. He again hit me until I was unconscious. And the beatings didn’t stop until my grandmother divorced him, when I was 14 years old. I didn’t remember any of that.
In all this time, my mother never lived with me, but sometimes she came to visit. Every time she did it, she told me that I could come live with her whenever I wanted.
But as horrible as the situation was at home, I didn’t want to leave my grandparents. They were the only parents I knew.
I loved my mother, but I couldn’t conceptualize her as my mother. She called her by her name and she called my grandmother mom.
My sadness
Living in Texas, having friends mattered immensely to me. It’s hard to describe how strong my desperation for friends was. And he had them. I managed to make a few. Two or three.
When I was 11 years old, my grandparents and I moved to Livermore, Northern California.
I was devastated.
I felt like I couldn’t get over it and I actually couldn’t get over it until much later.
At the time, I thought I was devastated just to be leaving my friends. But much later I would learn that, in part, friendship was so important to me because of what had happened to me that I couldn’t even remember.
When we moved to California, I thought my life was over and, in a way, I wanted it to be over. I didn’t want to get over that injury, I didn’t want to.
Until I was 13, I slept with the ceiling light in my room on, sometimes with the clothes I had worn that day, and even with shoes.
Most of my childhood I felt like I had to be prepared to be kidnapped at any moment.
At school, I always dressed in black. He had a black trench coat and a bunch of black clothes that he always wore.
I had no idea how to be a goth, but I wanted to be. What I liked most was the idea of seeing myself and being sad.
I decided to withdraw from what one considered the normal life of a child and stop paying attention in class. I didn’t care about anything anymore and I was very, very sad. I was locked in my own world.
I felt like I wasn’t going to do anything with my life. I assumed that one day I was going to get a minimum wage job and that that would be my life.
But I also wasn’t convinced that I wouldn’t end up dying for some unknown reason or committing suicide.
I can’t think of any good memories from home. He was a person who was not well.
A poem
One day when I was in 10th grade, I saw a movie with Charlie Sheen. I don’t remember what his name was.
It was about a young man who became very depressed and eventually killed himself.
And at one point, his sister, to praise him, recited a part of the poem Lady Lazarus, by Sylvia Plath:
Die
It’s an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it to make it feel like hell.
I do it to make it feel real.
I guess you could say I have a calling.
I heard that and thought it was tremendously gothic.
It was wonderful. It was incomprehensible. He completely blew my mind.
That same day I wrote eight poems, and suddenly I realized that I was deeply committed to this thing that I knew nothing about.
I didn’t start reading other poets until a year later, but I kept writing these awfully bad poems, but they made me feel like I had a purpose.
A call
It was when I was 16 that I decided to look for my dad. I wanted to understand where he was coming from.
By then, I had not had contact with him for 13 years, a good part of which I had spent hating him and not wanting to see him. She didn’t know anything about him, but she didn’t want to hate him anymore.
The stories my grandmother had told me about stolen Christmas presents didn’t make much sense and I wanted to know the truth.
It was 1991. My grandparents had divorced and my grandmother and I had moved back to Salem, Oregon, where I was born.
I had managed to make some friends riding skateboards.
This was long before the days of cell phones, so one day I went to a random apartment. A young woman opened the door for me and I asked her if she could use her phone book. As strange as this may sound now, it wasn’t at all at the time.
She let me and my friends use the directory to find my father. And there he was: S. McCrae. Turns out he lived in the exact same town as me.
Years later I understood that my father had stayed to live there partly because he thought that with luck one day I would be able to find him.
My grandfather never said his name in my presence, but my grandmother did, although I didn’t know if his name was Stan Lee or Stanley, something the directory didn’t help me find out either.
After so many years of being taught to hate this person, I was left in a very strange state of shock.
I dialed his phone and we had a strange conversation.
The first thing I asked him was if he was Stanley McCrae. And then I told him who I was.
A truth
We met that same day. He came in the afternoon.
It was at that moment that I began to discover the overwhelming truth about my own past.
My grandparents took me from Salem, Oregon, and never told my father where I was. Essentially, I was kidnapped at 3 years old.
When that happened, my parents’ relationship had ended and I lived alone with my father. One day in 1978, my grandmother came home and asked my father if he could take care of me for a couple of days. My father agreed without suspecting anything.
My grandmother never took me back.
After three days, my father went to look for me at my grandparents’ house. When he arrived, it was empty. My grandmother had disappeared with me.
My mother had no idea what had happened at that moment. Months later she found out about her, but my grandparents threatened her that, if she told my father anything, they would go with me to Mexico and she would never see me again. My mother stopped answering my father’s calls.
My grandparents didn’t want me to grow up with my father because my father is black.
They knew he was looking for me and did everything to hide me from him.
Kidnapping
The weird thing about growing up sequestered is that if it happens early enough, you might not know anything. For me, being kidnapped was living my life without anyone telling me the fundamental premise.
That infinite sadness I felt upon separating from my friends in Texas was nothing other than the wound that my kidnapping had done to my notion of relationships and bonds with others.
Ah or ra I’m almost 50 years old and there is one thing that happened when I was almost four years old that is in my thoughts all the time. The reverberations of this event continue to determine my life, determining my relationships.
In some ways, it is the engine that has driven my entire life.
a meeting
The same day I met my father, he took me to meet my black family.
It was very exciting. She was so happy to do it.
Meeting them changed my perception of my place in the world. It wasn’t until that moment that I began to slowly develop a notion of my own blackness.
As I began to understand my own blackness, I began to feel like a more integrated person. I began to feel like my blackness was a part of me, which ultimately meant that I was a part of me.
I felt integrated into the story, part of the text and not just an asterisk.
My grandmother
After so many years, I don’t know if I can talk about my grandmother without being cruel.
I guess you could say that I don’t think she acted in a way that she herself perceived as evil.
I think he did the least he could. And I suspect he was very unhappy. I suspect that, if he had the choice, he would have had a totally different life.
I’m not sure if I ever confronted her about why she did what she did. Honestly, I don’t remember. But I do know that she told me that she wanted her to have, in her words, advantages of her. I guess she was referring to the advantages of being white.
Perhaps the reason she and my grandfather did what they did was their belief that white people were superior and simply had better lives.
I think they thought that kidnapping me would be killing several birds with one stone: they thought I could become white or that they could at least keep me away from my blackness, but also my grandfather, who was really my step-grandfather, couldn’t have children of his own. I think he saw me as an opportunity to have a child.
Honestly, I don’t think my well-being was a priority or even a secondary concern for them.
From all of this, I learned that racism is very often not personal.
Relationships informed and determined by racism are still complex relationships. Without trying to be ironic, they cannot be seen as something black and white.
My grandparents could be white supremacists and still want to raise a black child.
My children
After spending so much time longing for a family, my children are the best thing that has ever happened to me.
There is no experience like it. It is a tremendous and unlimited love. It’s really wonderful.
My oldest daughter is called Sylvia, after Sylvia Plath.
And in his last name he has McCrae, my father’s last name, which was not the one I grew up with but which I decided to take after meeting him again.
This year Shane McCrae published his first prose book, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping, which captures his memories of this story.
*This note is based on an interview given by Shane McCrae and Stanley McCrae to the BBC Outlook program and a recent BBC Mundo interview with Shane McCrae.
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