A poet pieces together an uncertain past in 'Memoir of a Kidnapping'

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. When poet and author Shane McCrae was 3 years old, he was kidnapped, but it would take him most of his childhood to realize it. McCrae's new memoir, "Pulling The Chariot Of The Sun," is an unflinching test of a child's memory - how he came to understand that his maternal grandparents, who were white supremacists, kidnapped him from his father, who was Black. McCrae grew up being taught by his grandparents that Black people were inferior to white people. He was taught to heil Hitler, and he was told that his Black father did not want him.

Shane McCrae is an associate professor in the creative writing MFA program at Columbia University. He is the author of 13 poetry collections, including "Mule," "Blood," "In The Language Of My Captor" and "Sometimes I Never Suffered." McCrae is currently poetry editor of the magazine Image. "Pulling The Chariot Of The Sun: A Memoir Of A Kidnapping" is McCrae's first memoir.

Shane McCrae, welcome to FRESH AIR.

SHANE MCCRAE: Thank you for having me.

MOSLEY: You know, one of the first questions that came up for me, and I'm sure many others, is why white supremacists would kidnap a Black child, even if that child is their grandson. And right off the top, within the first few pages, you give a theory. Can I have you read it?

MCCRAE: (Reading) They raised me, but I don't know what my kidnappers thought of me, except I know they disliked my Blackness and probably valued me less than they would have valued a white child. But they wouldn't have kidnapped me if I had been white. Or they might have. My grandmother might have, but for a different reason. Because they kidnapped me to get me away from Blackness, thereby making a place for Blackness in their home.

MOSLEY: Why do you think your white grandparents made a place for Blackness in their home? Do you think - maybe, do you think, they thought you might pass for white?

MCCRAE: I don't think they thought that I would pass for white, exactly. You know, I was darker than they were. And when I asked them why I was darker, they said because I tanned easily. And so I think that at least physically, they didn't think I would pass for white. But I think that it's possible that they were trying to make me not Black in my mind, maybe, or at least to make me disinclined to want to discover my own Blackness and thereby become fully - and not just physically, not just visibly - become fully a Black person.

MOSLEY: You were 3 years old when your grandparents took you from your father in Oregon and then moved to Texas. Can you briefly share how they were able to do that, as you pieced it together?

MCCRAE: Sure. And, you know, I'm still learning details of the story, but as I understand it, my father's father had died. And this was the beginning of June in 1979. And so I was three months away from turning 4. And my father wanted to take me to Phoenix, Ariz., for the funeral. I was with him in Salem, Ore., at the time. And my grandparents asked him if, before he took me to Phoenix, they could have me for the night or for a weekend - I'm not entirely sure. And he said, yes, that would be fine.

And then - you know, so I went with my grandparents. My grandmother was the one who asked. I went with her to my grandparents' house. My father thought that they were still living in Salem, Ore. He wasn't really in touch with them very much - I think largely to do with the racism. He was obviously in touch with my mother, but not her parents. But they no longer lived in Salem, Ore. They lived in Portland, Ore. And so when they took me, they took me to Portland, Ore.

When the time came for them to bring me back, they didn't bring me back. My father couldn't get in touch with them. He couldn't get in touch with my mother. He went to the last house that they had been at, which is, as he understood it, the last place that they had lived, that they were still living there. And he went there, and their - the house was for sale. It was empty.

And some time after that - it must have been several days. He had no idea where I was, as I said, and he couldn't reach my mother - they took me to Round Rock, Texas, which is a suburb of Austin. And they told my mother that if she ever tried to get custody of me, and I also think if she ever tried to tell my father where I was, that she would never see me again. They would disappear to Mexico, and she would never be able to find me. And that was it.

MOSLEY: How did your grandparents explain why you were living with them and not your mom or your dad?

MCCRAE: Well, you know, what they would tell me - which, you know, I don't know that we had this conversation very much, except for probably when I was very little - was that my mother thought she was too young to take care of me. And they didn't really explain to me why I wasn't living with my father except that my father didn't want me. And so it wasn't really an explanation, exactly.

MOSLEY: Those days when your father was searching for you and couldn't find you, there was also another complication there that you would later learn as an adult, but your father's name wasn't on your birth certificate. Why was that?

MCCRAE: Well, my grandfather communicated to my father through an intermediary - it might have been my mother; it might have been my grandmother - that if my father were to allow my grandfather's last name to be on my birth certificate - my mother's father, which was obviously - it was also my mother's last name. If my father were to allow his name to be on my birth certificate as my last name, that when my grandfather died, I would inherit his property. He had never had a child of his own. My mother - never had a biological child of his own. My mother had been adopted by him when she was 13. And so the idea was, yes, if I had his last name, then I would inherit from him. And my father thought that that was - he was OK with that.

MOSLEY: Yeah. And the complication in that, at least from your father's perspective, is that, you know, when you try to get law enforcement involved, what recourse would he have? What would he be able to say? My child has been kidnapped from their grandparents, but there is no record that I'm even his father.

MCCRAE: Yeah. Yeah, he didn't realize that at the time, but that - by doing that, he ended up taking away a lot of his own power.

MOSLEY: You know, Shane, the striking part of this memoir is the way you interrogate your memory. None of your memories are stated as fact. Why is that?

MCCRAE: Well, I mean, there's a couple reasons. You know, I distrust memoirs that state memories as, you know, perfectly clearly remembered facts. But also, you know, I don't remember things clearly at all. I feel I have zero confidence about any of my childhood memories, with a few exceptions. And that's partly to do with - I started erasing my own memories, blocking painful memories, when I was very, very little, probably when I was kidnapped. And I did that throughout my childhood. And my practice of it was very, very severe. And so that I ended up blocking all kinds of memories - as I said, sort of most of them. And so I just can't feel confident about any of them. But, you know, and that's my experience of memory.

MOSLEY: You mentioned your grandfather was abusive towards you. He was also maybe the most outwardly racist. What did that look like?

MCCRAE: It was a - there's a sort of general disgust about Black folks. Like, if he would see them on television, he would make, you know, some comments or, you know, stories he would tell about them. And, you know, he would just make small comments like, you know, he would see a Black athlete on television being interviewed and comment about how, according to his standards or whatever, they weren't articulate.

There was a - just a particular incident. I came into the house from the backyard - at least as I'm remembering it now - and it must have been a weekend because my grandfather - it was in the daytime. I was going to go to a school dance and my grandfather was in the house, and I was kind of bopping my head back-and-forth. For my grandfather, this was a specifically Black gesture. And he was - his face - he got this look of disgust on his face. And he - you know, he yelled at me and said, you know, you don't want to look like them, do you? And what he meant was Black people.

MOSLEY: I just wonder, like, what that does to a person, like, as you start to build identity of who you are as a Black man. People associate so much of Blackness with, like, a being - like, a culture, like music and, you know, food and stuff like that, which Blackness is so much more than that. But you...

MCCRAE: Sure.

MOSLEY: ...Were kind of taught that, like, these representations are, like, things that you should not be. How do you reconcile or grapple with that?

MCCRAE: I don't know whether it is something that I really grapple with. When I was younger - when I was a small child, I did sort of recognize Blackness as, you know, who I was. And so I couldn't internalize completely the things that my grandfather would say. Like, I didn't convert them into sort of fuel for self-loathing. It didn't - doesn't feel like - and I don't think it did feel like - something that I really had to come to terms with. I think even as a small child, I was aware that he was wrong to feel the way that he felt. It's just that I wasn't really in a position to defend myself against the things that he said.

MOSLEY: But do you ever think about, like, why they would care about you at all since they were racist and you were a Black child?

MCCRAE: Well, I think one way to think about it - although racism often has horrific personal and interpersonal effects, racism, I think, in the mind of the racist tends to operate according to generalities. And so it's not - often enough, it isn't personal. It's to do with groups, not individuals. Even if a white racist sees a Black person and feels, you know, anger, hatred, whatever, the Black person that they're seeing is standing in for Black people. And so I think that maybe because I was a child, maybe because I was their grandchild, it probably didn't take a lot of effort on their part to get past seeing me as representative of Blackness to seeing me as their grandchild. I think that it's easy enough when you're dealing one-on-one with a person to stop seeing them as representative of a group.

MOSLEY: Right. It's why racist people can say, like, I have a Black friend or I have a...

MCCRAE: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...Black best friend 'cause they can see the individual, like, not as part of this general collective that you're talking about.

MCCRAE: Yeah, I think that when racists say I have Black friends, they basically always mean it. Like, they really do have Black friends.

MOSLEY: Shane, let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest today is author and poet Shane McCrae. He's written a new book, "Pulling The Chariot Of The Sun: A Memoir Of A Kidnapping," which pieces together how McCrae's white grandparents kidnapped him from his Black father when he was 3 years old to hide his Blackness from him. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SLOWBERN'S "WHEN WAR WAS KING")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today we're talking to Shane McCrae, poet and author of a new book called "Pulling The Chariot Of The Sun: A Memoir Of A Kidnapping." When McCrae was 3, his grandparents, who were white, kidnapped him from his Black father. From McCrae's account, they would go on to make sure he never knew the full story, raising him to keep up fabrications about his origins and his identity as a Black biracial boy. McCrae is the author of 13 books of poetry and is an associate professor in the creative writing MFA program at Columbia University. He is currently poetry editor of the magazine Image.

Shane, you lived with your grandparents from the time you were 3 years old until you were about 13, and then you moved in with your mother. And your grandmother later told you it was because she thought your grandfather would kill you that you were sent to live with her.

MCCRAE: Yeah. I think I might have been 14, but yeah.

MOSLEY: There was a moment - there was a particular incident that brought up those fears for her between you and your grandfather. Can you share it?

MCCRAE: What had happened was my grandfather had hit me hard enough to knock me down. And I was either 13 or 14. And apparently, in an unusual gesture of defiance, I had stood up again and I had gotten right in his face, which is not apparently something that I ordinarily did. And my grandmother, who had never, as I understand it, tried to protect me before, she saw that moment - the moment where I was being a little bit defiant - as the really dangerous moment. And that's - apparently about a week later they sent me to stay with my mother.

MOSLEY: You started thinking intentionally about your father I think when you were around 11. What kinds of stuff would you think about?

MCCRAE: You know, I would wonder why - because as I understood it, he didn't want me - I would wonder why he didn't want me. And when I had thought about him before that, I just had a kind of vague anger or maybe even rage, because my understanding was, you know, not only did he not want me, but he had abandoned my mother either in the hospital or when I was - you know, when she was about to give birth or...

MOSLEY: That's the story - right? - that you were told. Yup.

MCCRAE: ...Something like that. Yeah. And so I found that really enraging. But when I was around 11, I started to wonder what he might be like and, again, as I said, why he didn't want me around. And my grandparents and my grandmother had told me that he had a whole separate family and that he lived in Brazil with his new family.

MOSLEY: Wow.

MCCRAE: Yeah. Yeah.

MOSLEY: That had to get your imagination going as a kid.

MCCRAE: Sure. I had - I always had a kind of vague picture of his Brazilian home. But - and I think my understanding - I think that my grandmother told me that story. So, you know, although my grandparents had always told me that he didn't want me, you know, the he's also in Brazil with a new family - those were - those details - Brazil, the new family - were meant to sort of reinforce this idea that I shouldn't try to find him, and I shouldn't worry about it. Because he's not thinking about me. He's in a totally different part of the world and living a totally different life. And so I should just not worry about it.

MOSLEY: And then at around 16, in what sounds like a really random story, but it kind of isn't, you decided to look him up in a phone book.

MCCRAE: Yeah. You know, as you mentioned earlier, the book is - a lot of it is about memory. And I tried to write it in a way that would evoke the kind of haziness of childhood memories, but also the feeling of not being able to remember something that you're nonetheless certain happened. And so...

MOSLEY: Yeah.

MCCRAE: ...The feeling of not being able to remember and trying to recover that memory - I tried to write it in a way that would evoke these things. But it was - in my memory, at least, I was skateboarding with friends, and I think because of a conversation I had with them, but maybe just because of something I brought up on my own, I decided to go - I thought, I'm going to look up my father. I'm going to - you know, I must have been in Salem. And I thought, I'm going to find out if he's here.

And this was rather a long time ago, decades ago. And it was a little weird at the time, but not as weird as it might sound now, to go knock on a stranger's door and ask to use their phone book. And that's what I did. And the person, as I remember it, a young white woman, let me and my friends in her house, and I looked up my father in the phone book. And then I knew that he was still there. He was in the town that I was in.

MOSLEY: When you finally called him, did you feel anything the first time you heard his voice?

MCCRAE: I did. I don't know. It's hard to explain because, you know, I felt shocked, and I felt glad and excited and maybe a little bit not knowing what I was going to do next, what's going to happen. Maybe a little frightened because I didn't know. You know, this was such a huge thing. And even though I was a teenager, you know, and there are ways in which teenagers aren't amazingly aware sometimes of what's going on, I still had the sense that my whole - my life was really going to change. Something...

MOSLEY: You knew it. Yeah.

MCCRAE: ...Big was happening. Yeah, I knew it. I knew something big was happening.

MOSLEY: What was it like to meet your father in person, to see him for the first time?

MCCRAE: You know, that's a very sensible question, and I understand it. And I don't know. I would like to have a really clear memory of it. But I think at the time - as I said, when we talked, I think it was a feeling of shock. And I don't think that that feeling ever really went away. I guess the best way I could describe it was a little bewildering.

He took me around to see a lot of members of my family, and it turns out that the town that I was - we were both living in, Salem, Ore., was just filled with people to whom I was related - having a strange feeling of, how many of these people have I seen on the street and not known? You know, my father was - he might have worked for the city at the time and might have been a - worked traffic enforcement. I know that he did this at least eventually, you know, where he would - parking meters and things like that. And I think he might have done that even before I met him. And so, you know, I'm almost certain that I saw him, and not - and didn't know it.

And so that was - because Salem's not a huge city. That was a - it was strange to think of that, sort of disorienting, but generally just sort of bewildered and a little bit in shock. That's how I felt.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. Our guest today is Shane McCrae, poet and author of a new memoir called "Pulling The Chariot Of The Sun." We'll have more after the break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF PODINGTON BEAR'S "FLOATING")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And if you're just joining us, my guest is poet and author Shane McCrae. He's written a new memoir called "Pulling The Chariot Of The Sun: A Memoir Of A Kidnapping." It's about how his own grandparents kidnapped him from his father when he was 3 years old. McCrae dropped out of high school and later earned a GED. He would also later earn a master's of fine arts from the University of Iowa and a law degree from Harvard Law School.

Shane, growing up, you really never envisioned your future. And I want to read a passage that explains this really well. It says, (reading) 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, the 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.

You know, Shane, that passage stopped me in my tracks because I feel like it sums up, in a way, how childhood trauma works. It offers kind of an explanation for the wounds we see in so many adults because you never grew up thinking about being something or somebody one day.

MCCRAE: Yeah, I guess when I think about it now, it's really odd. But, you know, it's very difficult to experience one's life as unusual or extraordinary in the midst of it. But the aspirations that I had as a child - you know, I think the one thing I remember wanting to be was a professional baseball player - never felt real. There was something even when I had aspirations, because I did as a small child. I didn't really give up on having those until I was about 11 or so. But I had them for a little while. And even when I had them, they didn't feel like a part of even an imaginary reality.

And so - and I'm sure that had to do with the kidnapping, with this big injury. But at the time, I wasn't really reflective about it. I just didn't feel things in quite that way. You know, once I discovered poetry, you know, when I was 15 years old and really kind of got accustomed to the idea of writing it, which was probably when I was 16 - accustomed to the idea that it was something that I could maybe do, I started to have aspirations.

MOSLEY: What do you think it was about poetry that spoke to you? Because, you know, I mean, to be a 15-, 16-year-old boy in love with poetry, like, there was something that really hit you.

MCCRAE: Well, one of the things I love about poetry most now - and I couldn't have articulated it when I was 15 or 16 - is that a poem never exhausts itself. It's not like a newspaper article or something like that, where you kind of extract the information and you've got the thing. You've got what the thing was trying to do. A poem, you can interpret it for the rest of your life, if it's a successful poem. But also, it just seemed like it was the first thing I felt like I could do. I was excited about it. My estimation of my abilities was greatly disproportionate to my actual abilities, but I did feel excited about the possibility of writing poems.

MOSLEY: On your birth certificate, your grandparents made sure that you had their last name, but also that you were white.

MCCRAE: Yes.

MOSLEY: How do you identify now?

MCCRAE: Black.

MOSLEY: I'm just wondering, how does one overcome internalizing what you learned about being Black? Do you ever struggle with that? So much of our foundation is just the core of who we are, and you were taught to hate Blackness.

MCCRAE: I was taught that I should hate Blackness. But I don't think I was taught to hate Blackness in the sense that - whatever it was that my grandparents were trying to teach me about Blackness, they weren't successful at teaching me it. And so I'm aware of how they felt about it. But somehow - and I can't really, fully understand this, I suppose, because I was a child - I never really internalized it all the way. I think because maybe my good memories with my father were sort of protecting me, even if I wasn't aware of them. And so it hasn't really been a problem for me.

The thing that has been more difficult is that I was really raised in a very white context. And it wasn't until relatively recently, with the emergence of sort of - into public view various modes of Black masculinity that weren't so readily apparent decades ago - it wasn't until the relatively recent emergence of these that I sort of felt like, you know, my way of being Black was also a way of being Black.

MOSLEY: Ooh, say more. Can you give an example of what you mean? I think I know what you mean, but I want to want to know.

MCCRAE: Well, you know, it's a kind of funny term. But for me, it has been really miraculous - is this - the idea of the blerd (ph). That's, you know...

MOSLEY: Yeah.

MCCRAE: That's been...

MOSLEY: The Black nerd.

MCCRAE: Yeah, the Black nerd is hugely important to me. It felt like just becoming aware of it as a thing, kind of felt like freedom, you know? Because what blerdiness (ph) really means is the availability of being Black however you want to be Black, that you don't have to pick a particular way of doing it in order to be, you know, acceptably Black, whatever that would be. Like, it used to be that Black masculinity in particular was in a little box, you know? And this had a lot to do with public perceptions. It had a lot to do with just the way that Black men were allowed to be portrayed in various media. And the emergence of the blerd kind of broke that apart and allowed different kinds of portrayals to become part of public discourse. And what that really does is it opens up new identities. Those identities might have always been there, but it opens up a way for those identities to be recognized.

MOSLEY: That term blerd - I know what you mean in that 'cause I call myself that too. It was great to have language for that. When that became a sense of awareness for you, that that's what you are, were there any role models or any other folks that you look to that really - that you identify with that are considered blerds, I guess?

MCCRAE: Well, I think I first became aware of it - it was Donald Glover, maybe, honestly.

MOSLEY: Yeah?

MCCRAE: Watching him do stand-up was when I first started thinking about the blerd. I think the very, very, very, very first time, and I didn't have a term for it then, that I kind of became dimly aware was - it was a video for a song by The Cure. And in the video, you know, The Cure, the band members, have - there have been a lot of different ones. And at this stage, at least for the video, the drummer was Black.

And I remember seeing that, and it just kind of blew my mind. Because I liked The Cure, and I was kind of a Black goth, but I didn't know any other Black goths, you know. Goth was then and still is a pretty white space, although it's less white now than it was. And seeing the video and seeing the Black drummer for The Cure, I was like, wait a minute. I think I - literally something like the phrase, you can do that? - like, occurred to me. I was amazed at that.

MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, my guest today is author and poet Shane McCrae. He's written a new book, "Pulling The Chariot Of The Sun: A Memoir Of A Kidnapping," which pieces together how McCrae's white grandparents kidnapped him from his Black father when he was 3 years old. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SOLANGE SONG, "WEARY")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today we're talking to Shane McCrae, poet and author of a new book called "Pulling The Chariot Of The Sun: A Memoir Of A Kidnapping."

Reading your book, what came to mind for me is really like the question of what it means to grow up as a Black person in America, because to some degree, it's a mass exercise in disassociation. Because, I mean, how else are you going to get through the day?

MCCRAE: Sure.

MOSLEY: So, I mean, like, not to be simplistic in this comparison, but you being stripped of your Blackness, being taught that it was the worst thing to be, in a way, is the story of the Black American.

MCCRAE: Sure. No, that - I think that that's true. And I wouldn't ever claim to be, you know, the representative story. But I think it - my story is a representative story. I think that as maybe peculiar as it might seem upon first encounter, I do think that it does have, as you say, a lot to do with, you know, simply being Black in America. It has a lot to do with, you know, the idea of double consciousness.

MOSLEY: Do you see yourself in your father now that you all have a relationship? And does he see himself in you?

MCCRAE: I mean, I can't speak for him, but I see myself in him, definitely. When we were reunited, it felt like - it seems like my mother felt this as a great relief because she said something along these lines, that she could now - she now felt free to talk about things with regard to, like, my mannerisms, et cetera, that she hadn't ever felt like she could talk about before - you know, that sometimes I would turn my head a certain way or say something or make a gesture, and she would - it would be exactly something that my father would do. And, you know, she couldn't talk about that.

And, you know, I do see - my father and I are both, in our own ways, I think, very reserved. And it's wonderful to see that in him, that I have it. But, of course, it also makes communication really difficult and weird because, you know, I think we're both, in our way - although he's, I think, more gregarious than I am - I think each of us, in a way, is introverted. And, you know, we hold certain things back because that's just how we're comfortable. And yeah, I - there had been - for a long time, I had been not certain where I got aspects of my personality from. And then when I met my father, I became aware of where they must have come from.

MOSLEY: Yeah. Am I correct in saying that he's read this book, right?

MCCRAE: Yes.

MOSLEY: What's been his response to it?

MCCRAE: I think it's complicated. He - you know, he wrote me a positive message about it. I think, as a book, he liked it. But I also think that it's probably painful for him to read. And I think - you know, I know that he learned some things about my childhood that he didn't know.

And, you know, his name is now on my birth certificate. And this is something that just happened a few weeks ago. And the catalyst for that was reading my book and realizing the sort of shenanigans that had gone on with regard to my birth certificate - not the name thing so much, but my grandparents, you know, indicating that I was white. And I think that that got him thinking that, you know, he needed to - he wanted to and needed to sort of change that birth certificate if he could.

MOSLEY: Yeah. Was that a moment for you, changing your birth certificate?

MCCRAE: In a way, yes. But - maybe this will sound complicated. You know, when I - a couple decades ago, I changed my last name so that it would be my father's last name. And...

MOSLEY: Because you didn't grow up with his last name, right? You grew up with your...

MCCRAE: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...Grandparents' last name. Yep.

MCCRAE: Right. And so, you know, when that happened, I also changed the birth certificate, you know, because it puts me - makes my last name his last name on the birth certificate. So when he made his change, it puts him on the birth certificate. But the emotions regarding the birth certificate - there's a way in which I'd kind of already gone through them. Because for me, the big acknowledgement was taking his last name. But I know that it has made - I think it has made him happy, and that makes me happy. But it's not - the very emotional moment was changing my name.

MOSLEY: Yeah. Did you ever have, like, a reckoning or anything with your grandparents?

MCCRAE: When I was a teenager, I was sort of, like, incandescent with anger toward my grandfather. And it was - seemed really vague, but it was really intense for some years. And I think because I hadn't really - I wasn't really super aware of having been kidnapped at the time, I couldn't really give a name to why I was so angry other than his abuse, which I didn't remember super well. But I think the kidnapping had a lot to do with it and the racism.

And at - maybe when I was 20, I sent him a letter saying that I forgave him. And I - you know, I didn't - I hadn't spoken to him since I was 15. I didn't speak to him then, but I sent him a, like, a physical letter. And my mother was still in contact with him. And she reported that he said he had no idea what I needed to forgive him for.

MOSLEY: Wow.

MCCRAE: And that's sort of the last indirect communication we had.

MOSLEY: I mean, you had to feel anger from that to hear him saying, I don't really know why he's upset.

MCCRAE: Yeah. And it's a kind of a paradox because the point was - I thought, I think that it would be good for my soul to forgive him. And so then he does this thing that's harmful and angering in response to it. And so if I've already kind of made this kind of commitment to forgiving him, do I have to get, like - do I get angry all over again? Or, like, what do I do with it? Yeah. It was - it wasn't great.

MOSLEY: Yeah. You're a father, right?

MCCRAE: Yes.

MOSLEY: What do you tell your children about your childhood?

MCCRAE: My youngest is the one who is sort of becoming aware. You know, I mean, they're in the home with - and the book is out, you know, and they're aware of all this stuff. I think it's painful for them. I think it makes them sad to think about. I don't keep any of it a secret. And my oldest child is well aware of all of it. But I think that, you know - the one that I'm seeing kind of deal with it all now is my youngest. And for them, it's not a happy thing.

MOSLEY: Yeah. Wow. Well, Shane McCrae, thank you so much for your book, for doing this for the benefit of us and for this wonderful conversation.

MCCRAE: Well, thank you for having me.

MOSLEY: Shane McCrae, poet and author of the new memoir "Pulling The Chariot Of The Sun: A Memoir Of A Kidnapping."

Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews Meshell Ndegeocello’s new album called "The Omnichord Real Book." This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF CLARK TERRY'S "IMPULSIVE")

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Over the course of a more-than-30-year career, Meshell Ndegeocello has combined soul, funk, pop, hip-hop and jazz to create a unique body of work. Her new album is called "The Omnichord Real Book," and rock critic Ken Tucker says it serves as a kind of summation of Ndegeocello’s lifetime of making music thus far.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GEORGIA AVE")

MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO: (Singing) Ain't ever had nothing to make me feel secure. Ain't ever had no thing to make mе feel for sure that I'm loved - love, lovе, love. Nobody knows no thing. Nobody knows for sure what is real or true - real, real, real.

KEN TUCKER, BYLINE: I've been shaken. I fear I've lost my way, sings Meshell Ndegeocello on that song, "Georgia Ave." It's music that illustrates doubt, insecurity, grief and a quiet terror of losing control of one's life. Meshell Ndegeocello’s new album, "The Omnichord Real Book," might have been unbearable if it spoke only of such things, and a lesser artist might change the subject quickly. Instead, Ndegeocello settles into these uncomfortable feelings and works through all the fears.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TOWERS")

NDEGEOCELLO: (Singing) Remember the day it all came crashing down. The whole world changed. Who can you trust now? Things fall apart. There's no foolproof plan. You can be born woman. You gotta die like a man. Things fall apart. We all want someone to blame. But when you're gone, you're gone to stay. We live a lie day after day, and it hurts.

TUCKER: Ndegeocello began her career in the Washington, D.C. area, playing go-go music, the syncopated funk offshoot, as a member of Rare Essence and other bands. In the 1990s, she was one of the first artists signed to Madonna's Maverick Records, where she released her debut album, "Plantation Lullabies." It's widely considered one of the first examples of the neo soul movement. In the same decade, she hit No. 3 on the Billboard pop charts with a duet with John Mellencamp, a cover of Van Morrison's "Wild Night," and later had a No. 1 dance chart hit with a cover of Bill Withers' "Who Is He (And What Is He To You)?" In 2016, her theater piece, "Can I Get A Witness? The Gospel Of James Baldwin" was performed in Manhattan. I list all of this to suggest that saying Ndegeocello has range is putting it mildly.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOOD GOOD")

NDEGEOCELLO: (Singing) Feeling so good, good. What you going to do with me? I know how to go. I know how to flow. What's that? Good, good. Who's that? Hey, hey. I know what you see. I know what you need. Drop that attitude. Get in that gratitude. Big butt. That's for you. Back it up. That's for you.

TUCKER: Another song here is called "Gatsby," as in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." And Ndegeocello sings in the voice of Jay Gatsby from beyond the grave, wishing Daisy Buchanan were still by his side. It's typical of the strength of Ndegeocello's imagination on this collection that she took up Fitzgerald's book and found in it an emotional drama that speaks to her own concerns that she spun out into a scenario that occurs after the novel ends.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GATSBY")

NDEGEOCELLO: (Singing) I built a castle out of dreams and pretty scenes. I woke up and it was missing. It wasn't real. It wasn't real. I loved a woman who turned out to be an ideal thing. I woke up and she was different. Oh, wow. It wasn't real. It wasn't real. I've been saying things I don't believe.

TUCKER: "The Omnichord Real Book" is Ndegeocello's first album for Blue Note Records, the legendary jazz label. And many of the song structures here certainly partake of the jazz freedom to stretch out and explore melodic variations. The Omnichord of the album title is a small keyboard that Ndegeocello plays here and there in addition to her usual bass playing. But this collection is as much informed by funk and R&B as it is jazz. Listen to "Clear Water," for example, with its echo of Sly And The Family Stone.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CLEAR WATER")

SANFORD BIGGERS: Don't be fooled by the myth of control. Be at peace within the chaos and constant rebirth of the creative mind. To be in the now of creation. To push past one's knowledge and understanding. Into the chaos. Push past the predictability and comfort. Into the unknown.

TUCKER: As this album proceeds, Ndegeocello begins to find peace and solace in music and in approaching the people in her life with a newfound sense of openness and gratitude. Now in her 50s, she's making inquisitive, thorny, unclassifiable music that feels like something different that's just beginning.

MOSLEY: Ken Tucker reviewed Meshell Ndegeocello's new album called "The Omnichord Real Book."

Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jennifer Senior joins us to talk about her new piece about the practice of institutionalizing intellectually disabled relatives. Join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and to get highlights from our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair.

(SOUNDBITE OF MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO SONG, "THE 5TH DIMENSION")

MOSLEY: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Ann Marie Baldonado, Therese Madden, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE 5TH DIMENSION")

NDEGEOCELLO: (Singing) Whirling through the atmosphere. Will you find the meaning? When you face the mighty nearer, want to look at what you see. Eyes of glass show fragile fear. You look around and shudder. Suffering in humble love. Don't leave me here. Where do we? Time disappearing.

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