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\u201cThe weird thing about growing up kidnapped,\u201d Shane McCrae, the 47-year-old American poet, told me in his melodious, reedy voice one rainy afternoon in May, \u201cis if it happens early enough, there\u2019s a way in which you kind of don\u2019t know.\u201d\n\nThere was no reason for McCrae to have known. What unfolded in McCrae\u2019s childhood \u2014 between a day in June 1979 when his white grandmother took him from his Black father and disappeared, and another day, 13 years later, when McCrae opened a phone book in Salem, Ore., found a name he hoped was his father\u2019s and placed a call \u2014 is both an unambiguous story of abduction and a convoluted story of complicity. It loops through the American landscape, from Oregon to Texas to California to Oregon again, and, even now, wends through the vaster emotional country of a child and his parents. And because so much of what happened to McCrae happened in homes where he was beaten and lied to and threatened, where he was made to understand that Black people were inferior to whites, where he was taught to hail Hitler, where he was told that his dark skin meant he tanned easily but, no, not that he was Black, it\u2019s a story that\u2019s been hard for McCrae to piece together.\n\nMcCrae\u2019s new book, the memoir \u201cPulling the Chariot of the Sun,\u201d is his attempt to construct, at a remove of four decades, an understanding of what happened and what it has come to mean. The memoir takes the reader through McCrae\u2019s childhood, from his earliest memories after being taken from his father to when, at 16, he found him again.