Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping by Shane McCrae

Author:Shane McCrae
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

A teenager is a person who has begun to realize they are a person. I became a teenager early, during my first months in California, when I was eleven. While my peers at East Avenue were starting to think about the lives they might someday have, I could think only about the life I already had, and from which I was sure I would never recover—never as a teenager could I imagine a future for myself; by the time I was fifteen I was certain I would die when I was eighteen, because what’s beyond eighteen? When I was a child, I wanted to grow up to become a baseball player; when I was a slightly older child, after I got hit in the eye with a baseball, I thought I might grow up to work at IBM because my grandfather worked there; when I was a teenager, I couldn’t imagine growing up. I didn’t aspire to be more than the harm done to me, I didn’t want to outgrow it—my grandfather had started beating me almost immediately after my grandparents kidnapped me; the chain of beatings bound me to the kidnapping, that great wound at the beginning of my life, and before the beginning of my life, before the kidnapping, I was waiting still, unharmed, not a separate self, but my actual self, my whole self, from which fragments proliferated forward through time as me. To imagine my future life would have been to lose sight of the chain binding me to that distant self.

Being a teenager is years of struggle to overcome the shock of recognizing the existence of other people. I don’t remember a single beating; I don’t remember ever talking to anyone about my grandfather hitting me. But I remember my eventual best friend in Livermore, Chris, who became my best friend after Derek stopped being my best friend, saying to me once, “Your grandfather is the biggest man I’ve ever seen.” Chris and I might have been thirteen or almost thirteen, we might have begun to invest our bodies with sad notice. My grandfather seemed always to be lifting weights in the garage, though I never saw him lifting weights—he seemed for a year, two years? starting maybe a year after we moved to California, always to be lifting weights insofar as his arms and chest seemed to be slowly attacking his button-up shirts from the inside. He had been working out for about eight years, but never before the last year or two with such frequency. And I remember sitting on the floor in the East Avenue Middle School library with my homeroom class, maybe with the entire eighth grade—I remember feeling that the end of my time at East Avenue was too near, feeling panicked, feeling that the end of my time in Livermore, also, was too near, I must have known I would be going to live with my mother soon—watching a presentation on child abuse, maybe seventh graders and sixth graders

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