December 21, 2023 • 30 mins
In his journey toward self-discovery, Shane must reconstruct his past by cobbling together memories of his kidnapping, upbringing, and the enormous swell of questions which once defined his identity.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
I was three when I was kidnapped. Any age, the
day must have been a Saturday or a Sunday, because
when my grandmother and I stepped from the fabric store,
we were shocked at how dark the day had become.
So it must have been midday. Me not in school,
unless it was the summer day. Usually, whenever we shopped
for fabric store things. Whenever my grandmother shopped for fabric
(00:29):
store things, we went to a Michael's and a strip
mall down Highway one eighty three, just far enough for
the strip mall to seem alien impossible to get home
if I were ever left there. But on this day
we had gone to a fabric store I had never
seen before. It's name a blank stucco edifice. To me, now,
am I misremembering it?
Speaker 3 (00:53):
That's Sean McCrae, award winning poet, an author of the
recent book Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, a memoir
of a kidnapping. Shane's is a story about Yes being
kidnapped by his white grandparents to keep him away from
his black father, But at its heart, it's about the
attempt to recover memory to put together the many blank
(01:15):
or missing pieces that were kept from him to assemble
a life and a whole complete self. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
(01:37):
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I suppose I could start with ground Rock, Texas, which
is where I lived from the age of almost four
until the age of ten or eleven. I lived in
a three bedroom house that was made of brick, and
the bricks were painted a very light yellow. The neighborhood
that I lived in was a suburban neighborhood, but far
(02:08):
away from anything that one might call a city center.
It was like a kind of stripmolish area, too far
away to walk to or anything like that. But that
was the closest to a kind of urban center near
where I lived, and so there was just a bunch
of houses across the street from me. There was the
(02:28):
elementary school that I ended up going to. I think
that sidewalks are now there, but when I lived there,
there weren't any sidewalks. There was a creek that I
felt sort of separated the part of the neighborhood in
which I lived from the rest of the neighborhood, or
the rest of the neighborhood beyond. This creek was a
lot larger than the part in which I lived, and
(02:50):
the creek, as far as I know, doesn't exist anymore.
I saw my old neighborhood about ten years ago, and
where the creek was, it seemed like it had all
been covered with cement, and so there's still a channel,
I guess for water. But when I lived there, there
was a creek with sort of these natural little rock
(03:10):
islands in it, and a lot of catfish and snakes,
poisonous snakes. You could kind of see the elementary school
from my house. Behind the elementary school was I don't
really know the history of this space, but it was.
It looked kind of like a ruin of a very
small settlement. There were a few houses in this kind
(03:36):
of large warehousey space, and it was really very very strange.
You accessed it by kind of going through a little
kind of foresty area, a large patch of which somehow
was bamboo. And on the other side of this bamboo
area were a few ruined houses. It looked as if
they had been torn up like a storm had gone
(03:57):
through them, but there were still remnant things that would
indicate that people had lived there, like bits of furniture
things like that, but they must have been abandoned or
whatever it was it happened to them some years before
my family moved into that area.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Did that exert a pull on you at all? You know,
that sort of abandoned area.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Visiting that space is one of the few relatively clear
memories that I have of my childhood. But now when
I think about it, it sounds like a sort of
impossible space, like how could it have been real? How
could I have ever gone there? Even though I feel
really confident that I went there, I also doubt the
possibility of it even existing. But it did exert a
(04:39):
pull on me. I like to explore a lot when
I was a small.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Child and tell me who you lived in the yellow.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
House with my maternal grandparents, my grandmother, who was my
mother's biological mother, and my grandfather, who had adopted my
mother when my mother was I believe, thirteen years old.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
So Shane is living with his grandparents. He refers to
them as mom and Dad, even though on some level
he's aware that they are his grandparents, and when his
mom a young woman who had him at just eighteen
years old, comes to visit. He calls her by her
first name, Denise.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
When my mother came to visit me, I don't think
there's any way for me to know whether she felt
like my mother, because I wouldn't know what it feels like.
She's the only model that I would have, and so
particularly as a child, I guess maybe in some ways,
not just because the person that I called referred to
as my mother was my grandmother, but I was aware
that my mother was my mother, and so in a
(05:43):
kind of abstract way, I felt a very strong connection
to her insofar as she was my mother and I
was aware of it. I lived with her up until
I was about four. I guess most of the time.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
You describe at one point sitting by the window, you know,
when you knew she was going to be coming, And
it struck me the way that you described that that
there was a kind of combination of excitement and a
kind of longing. Sure, so what was the story that
you grew up being told by your maternal grandparents about
(06:17):
your father and about why you were living with them
away from your family.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
So my grandparents told me that the reason that I
didn't live with my father, well, really, the reason I
didn't see him, didn't really know him, was that he
didn't want me, and also that even if I were
interested in seeing him, it kind of didn't matter, because
they told me that he lived in Brazil and he
(06:48):
had a whole new family, other children now, and that
he just wouldn't be interested in seeing me anyway. And
they told me that I had started to live with
them when I was eighteen months old, and that they
had essentially taken me in as a favor, a favor
(07:09):
to my mother because she felt like she couldn't take
care of me, and since my father was out of
the picture, whatever his opinions about whether he could take
care of me, those were irrelevant. The general sense that
I was supposed to have was that my father's family
were sort of disreputable criminal. Even my grandparents had told
me the story that one of my relatives on my
(07:31):
father's side had one year when I was very little,
I guess it must have been one year old, had
stolen all of my Christmas presents. And I think that
that I think they told me that story just to
sort of reinforce the idea that I shouldn't even want
to have anything to do with my father's side of
the family, and I was better off not knowing them.
(07:54):
I should also say that, I mean, you know, as
a small child, my sense of how biology worked was
regard to parents and children really vague. But I was
aware of my father's blackness, and I was aware that
my father's blackness had something to do with my own identity,
something very significant.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
And did you have a sense that that was an
issue for your grandparents.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah, my grandparents were very clear about not liking not
white people to various degrees. My grandfather was a self
identified Republican, my grandmother was a self identified Democrat. But
they could agree that not white people were not good.
That was what they wanted to communicate in various ways.
My grandmother was more subtle than my grandfather was.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
But that was a point of agreement for them. Yes,
all the years that Shane lives with his grandparents, he
always sleeps with his lights on. Something's going on internally,
something that doesn't feel quite right. Always know, don't we
when something's amiss, even though we can't quite identify it.
(09:05):
One day in school where Shane has skipped a grade,
so He's five or six years old and already in
second grade. He draws a swastika on a white T
shirt with a black magic marker. Shane has seen swastikas
in books about World War Two in his grandparents' house,
where they admire as a Nazi military effort, so he
has no idea he's doing something that people will find troubling,
(09:28):
and the principal sends him home.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
My grandmother in particular, felt that that was an abusive
authority to send me home for drawing swastikas all over
my shirt, which it hadn't occurred to me because I
didn't know anything about the history at all. It hadn't
occurred to me that that was a sort of offensive
thing to do. Had no idea. When I was in
elementary school, when I was asked about my father, I
(09:53):
would just say that I didn't have one. I felt
really strongly actually, like I just didn't Whereas by the
time I got to middle school, I started asserting that
I hated him. I didn't know him, obviously, but nonetheless,
if I were asked about him, that's what I would say.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
And Shane, where was the hate coming from?
Speaker 2 (10:15):
That? He was not interested in me? And so I
hated him for that, or at least thought I it.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Meanwhile, there's other hateful behavior within the wall of Shane's grandparents' home.
His grandfather is violent toward him, and when Denise comes
to visit, she sometimes asks if he wants to come
live with her instead.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Whenever my mother would ask me whether I wanted to
live with her, it was very uncomfortable because I was
aware that she was my mother and that I was
supposed to feel a particular way, and you know, I
did love her. I didn't want to hurt her feelings,
but I was also I also sort of thought of
my grandmother as my mother, and I didn't want to
leave my grandparents. And I've often wondered, you know, why
(10:58):
did I want to stay so desperately with these abusive people.
And it wasn't until recently that I was sort of able,
finally able to make sense of it, thinking about you know, well,
along with so many other things, this is almost certainly
a consequence of being kidnapped. That I didn't want any
(11:21):
sort of major change in my living arrangement. That my
anxiety about that, even though I couldn't articulate it, was
incredibly high. I was very, very anxious and also always
feeling always worried that I was going to be forced
from the particular living arrangement that I had, and so
(11:43):
it was always extremely stressful. I think I understand why
my mother wanted me to be aware that I could
live with her if I wanted to, but it was
always an extremely stressful interaction to me.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
But during these exchanges with his mom, she never tells
him that she too had been beaten by her father
when she was younger, which makes it even more striking
that she also never asks Shane whether his grandfather is
also abusing him.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
It's something that I guess to some extent I still
kind of can't really understand unless I told in my
mind that she was very desperate to please my grandfather.
There's only so much I can read in her own motives.
But I think it partly has to do with he
adopted her when she was thirteen, but he had been
living with her for by that time, like eight years
(12:37):
or something, and he had told her from the beginning
that if she was quote unquote good, he would adopt
her when she was thirteen, and so he kind of
loading her with worry about living up to some sort
of idea of goodness so that she could have a father,
because you know, my grandmother had kidn up my mother
from my mother's father when my mother was too had
(12:58):
just taken my mother and not told him where they
were going, and my mother didn't see him again until
she was about sixty when she found him. And so
I think that there was a lot of desire for
a father and a lot of worry that she would
be rejected by her father. And so I think that
when she allowed my grandparents to take me, she couldn't
(13:23):
allow herself to believe that it wouldn't be a safe
place for me for a couple of reasons that were
sort of reinforcing each other, because she maybe felt that
she couldn't take care of me herself, but she also
felt like, as I said, she really wanted to please
my grandfather.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
We'll be right back. At age thirteen, Shane does ultimately
(14:09):
move in with his mother. In his adolescence, he's beginning
to stand up to his grandfather, and as a result,
their relationship has become even more violent, so much so
that Shane's memories of the beatings have receded into parts
of his mind. He still cannot fully access These memories
are blocked in ways that both cost and protect him.
(14:31):
He does remember, however, in broad hazy strokes moving in
with his mom.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Being at my mother's house is sort of like an island,
Like it's a visible island where I can see days
and I can see place, and I can see arriving,
you know, but it's surrounded by blackness, like there's no
before and there's no after. I know what it was like,
you know, like physically, but I don't have any memory
(14:58):
of the time leading up to being with my mother.
I just suddenly remember being there, but I feel like
I remember a long stretch of being there and then
I leave and I don't remember again.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
I mean, that's such an interesting image, and I wondered,
I mean, do you think that you felt, briefly while
you were there, a certain kind of safety that you
hadn't felt before, Like did you feel safer?
Speaker 2 (15:22):
I guess I must have felt safer at my mother's house,
but I don't know that I recall a feeling of safety.
I recall a degree of anxiety, a lot of worry.
It was just different from my grandparents' house, was I think,
in some ways really different there, But I was only
there for a few months. But in a lot of ways,
(15:43):
I guess actually my life was different, and I think
I was different.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Of course, Denise's life is different during this time too.
She's never had a child under her roof. She's never
really had this experience of being a mother. It's a
struggle for her, and it turns out she isn't of
taking care of Shane. She tells him that he'll have
to go back to live with his grandparents, but before
he goes, she tells him something else. The truth about
(16:09):
what happened when he was three years old, when he
was kidnapped.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
So before I left my mother to return to my
grandparents was when my mother told me that my grandparents
had taken me from my father without telling my father
where they were taking me. Up until this point, it
was my understanding that my father just wasn't interested in
me at all, and so learning this was a shock.
(16:37):
But because my grandparents had so effectively raised me to
have no interest in my father, and because I didn't
have any kind of memory of my time with him,
and because I didn't have any understanding even of the timeline,
you know, I didn't know that I was almost four
years old when my grandparents took me up. I was
(16:58):
eighteen months old. And because I assume, because there's such
a huge conflict between reality and the story my memory
of it also, I mean, because I think the kidnapping
itself is such a traumatic event, the memory is just
it's all gone. I mean, I did know that at
this point, I had already decided that I didn't hate
my father, but I didn't know what to do with that,
(17:19):
you know, because I didn't have any contact with him still,
and so hating him or not hating him in a
sense is sort of it's not exactly irrelevant, but it's
not what is its practical effect. I don't think that
I stopped hating him for any particular reason. I think
it was just getting a little bit older. I mean,
I wasn't, you know, still a child, but maybe sort
of beginning to think for myself a little bit helped
(17:42):
me to get beyond the point where I felt like
hating my father was sort of necessary.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Chane's grandparents are in California at this point, and he
does end up moving back in with them. He has
nowhere else to go. The throes of so much instability
Shane's early teenage years are defined by depression and flux.
When he's fourteen, his grandmother decides to leave his grandfather,
so she and Shane moved back to Salem, Oregon, back
(18:13):
where it all began. During this time, Shane becomes increasingly
curious about his father. He now has the information his
mother told him, as well as his father's name Stanley
or perhaps it's stan Lee. What he doesn't note is
where this man is. The stories about Brazil suddenly don't
(18:33):
sit right. Shane begins to wonder if perhaps his father
is right here in Salem.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
I was with some friends and we were skating in
an apartment complex and have been skating for some time,
and for whatever reason, at that moment, I felt like
I should look at my father. I want to know
if he's still here. So I, with my friends knocked
on a stranger's door. This would have been, I guess,
(19:04):
probably nineteen ninety two, and it's a somewhat unusual thing
to do. It's a weird thing to do now maybe,
but in nineteen ninety two it wasn't completely bizarre, you know,
because there weren't cell phones, et cetera. And so I
knocked on a stranger's door and asked if I could
use her phone book. She said yes, so I, you know,
(19:25):
open up the white pages. I slipped around until I
got to the MS and I saw an S. McCrae,
and then I closed the book and that was sort
of it. I didn't write down his number or anything,
but from that moment I was aware that there was
at least somebody who could be my father, because same initial,
same last name, you know, SA. It's not a huge city,
(19:47):
so that there was somebody who could have been him
in the town. I don't think that I sat around
with that information for very long before I tried to
get in touch with him. I think it might have
only been a few days. As I remember it, I
called his number. This was at my house where I
live with my grandmother. I called my father's number and
(20:09):
my stepmother, Candace answered. Obviously at the time, I didn't
know who she was, and I asked if he was there,
and I didn't know his name exactly, you know, and
so I asked if stan Lee was there, but I
said it stan Lee McCrae. I said it in a
way that I hoped would cover the possibilities that either
(20:29):
his name was Stanley or stan middle name Lee, and
I tried to say any way they would do both,
And so I recall my stepmother, Candace, saying hold on
a minute, and putting the phone down and getting my
father and talking with him. My father has a different
memory of it, that he wasn't at home at the time,
(20:51):
and that so that we talked later. I still feel
like my version of it is what happened, but you know,
I have to at least acknowledge that he remembers it differently.
And that was it. He came to see me that
night and then drove me around Salem, introducing me to relatives.
The McRae family is a pretty big and well known
(21:12):
family in Salem, and so I knew who the mccrays were,
which is I guess part of the reason that I
thought he would might very well still be around. And
so he kind of drove me around, introducing me to them.
And it was a sort of bewildering time. I learned
during the time that I was a kind of spectral
presence in their lives and had been my whole life.
(21:34):
Folks had talked about me. I want to say that
it felt like in some ways being a ghost, like
I was inhabiting an idea of myself that had come
before me. But of course I don't know what it's
like to be a ghost. But that's how I would
That's how I would describe it, that I was walking
around in the place of a previous version of myself
and it was just very self dislocating and also well,
(22:01):
maybe renewing, maybe affirming. It was a strange, a strange day.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Shane imagines a parallel life, a life in which he
hadn't been kidnapped, in which he would have grown up
in Salem and been one of them, a craze and
part of this big family. And then all these years later,
he's a late teenager and something has been restored, but
in something being restored, what's been taken away is thrown
(22:31):
into even starker relief.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I don't want to describe it in a way that's
too melodramatic, but you can never really, at least I
can never, I think, really be healed if one conceives
of healing, as you know, having a sense of wholeness
in relations to in relation to the family that I
didn't grow up with, and in relation to the self.
(22:57):
I could have been. I am instead, very very aware
of all of these lives that might be my actual
life and that might be, you know, have something to
do with my biological information, et cetera. And I'm aware
that I can't know any of them for sure. I
(23:17):
don't really know who I am, and I can't really
know who I am, And partly that's the result of
an effort on the part of my grandparents to ensure
that I couldn't know. Partly that's because they had their
own secrets that they were trying to hide from me
and my mother, like my grandmother being married five times.
I remember having a conversation with my mother some time
after my grandmother died where my grandmother had somehow raised
(23:41):
me with an awareness. Really when I was a teenager,
I started to get the awareness of how many times
she had been married, and I had a number that
was one more than the number that my mother had.
And it turned out my number was also not all
of them, so that neither of us had the complete picture,
but our own pictures. Our pictures were different from each other's.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
You're right that your father says to you in one
of your early conversations that part of why he was
still in Salem. Was because he always wanted you to
be able to find him. It was sort of the opposite,
if such a.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Thing can be.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
It was a kind of one hundred and eighty degrees
from the story that you had been fed by your
grandparents who kidnapped you. You describe him as someone very
kind and very much not angry, and it seems like
he was described in a very different way to you,
presented as a very different kind of person.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
Yeah, my father is one of the calmest people that
I know and doesn't seem to hold any grudges, certainly
doesn't seem to hold any grudges in any way having
to do with being kidnapped.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
I think that it was something that he had to
kind of live with and work through for real long
time before we reconnected, before I found him. My understanding
of it is he was really thoughtful about it, sort
of from the beginning. Beyond the sort of visceral, very
intense feelings that he and any parent would have, he
also was very I was thinking about it and being
(25:18):
aware of that. One of the reasons that he didn't
leave Salem is he wanted me to be able to
find him. I mean that means a lot to me,
and it meant a lot to me at the time.
One of the things, maybe the chief thing beyond not
having a real memory of my childhood and not really
having a childhood in my memory, is that I don't
(25:40):
have with regard to my parents. I think I have
a really difficult time accessing or sort of experiencing my feelings,
you know. And it feels like, ironically, I suppose my
relationship with my feelings feel like one of the reasons
(26:01):
that I have such difficulty accessing my feelings is I'm
trying to protect myself from something. It's the same mechanism
that you know results in me having blocked so many memories.
It's a sort of it's the same kind of desire
to protect myself. So when I think about being told,
you know, that he hadn't left because he was hoping
I could find him, of course that fills me with emotion.
(26:26):
But it fills me with emotion in the way that
like if you're watching a glass being filled with a liquid,
I am aware, I can see it. I can see
the being filled with emotion happening, as opposed to I
am in the glass, or I am the glass you know,
there's something about, you know, the inability to be the glass,
(26:47):
you know, to just have to watch it happening that
I feel as an impoverishment. I would like to be
able to experience those emotions in a more immediate way.
But I also feel in a sort of abstract, vague
(27:08):
way that I wouldn't know, I wouldn't be able to
handle them, I wouldn't know what to do with them.
And so even though I in my late forties, I'm
still at this stage with relate which regard to all
this information at which I have barely begun to sort
(27:28):
of incorporate it into my life, to sort of figure
out how to have some control over it or have
some healthiness in relation to it. I was going to
say to heal, but I think that's not right. I
don't think that's the right word. I think there are
ways in which I'm lucky that I got so good
at blocking out memories, about blocking out sort of painful things.
(27:49):
Insofar as if I'm going to have this big, enormous
mess in the middle of my life, it's good that
I can live without it dominating every moment of my life.
On the other hand, I am aware that it would
probably be a good thing to someday get to the
other side of it, but I don't know how. So
(28:10):
when I think about things like that, things like what
my father said, it's very emotional, But I'm also aware
of how emotional it is in a way that sort
of interferes with the full experience of the thing.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
I think, yeah, that makes perfect sense, And yet at
the same time, you have been able to create and
build a family and have a happy relationship with a
partner and three kids. That strikes me as an extraordinary thing,
Like maybe all of this is compartmentalized, but the love
(28:40):
isn't compartmentalized.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Here's Shane reading one last passage from Pulling the Chariot
of the Sun.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
My father is picking up the phone. Then his voice Hello,
I hadn't heard for thirteen years. Immediately like no other
person's voice, an accent. I couldn't place music from somewhere
I didn't know anymore, wavering in each syllable, even a
simple word like hello, loosened by music, made difficult to understand.
(29:17):
Though I knew he had said hello, though I had
heard only music, and I asked him his name.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Family secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(29:53):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
I was three when I was kidnapped. Any age, the
day must have been a Saturday or a Sunday, because
when my grandmother and I stepped from the fabric store,
we were shocked at how dark the day had become.
So it must have been midday. Me not in school,
unless it was the summer day. Usually, whenever we shopped
for fabric store things. Whenever my grandmother shopped for fabric
(00:29):
store things, we went to a Michael's and a strip
mall down Highway one eighty three, just far enough for
the strip mall to seem alien impossible to get home
if I were ever left there. But on this day
we had gone to a fabric store I had never
seen before. It's name a blank stucco edifice. To me, now,
am I misremembering it?
Speaker 3 (00:53):
That's Sean McCrae, award winning poet, an author of the
recent book Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, a memoir
of a kidnapping. Shane's is a story about Yes being
kidnapped by his white grandparents to keep him away from
his black father, But at its heart, it's about the
attempt to recover memory to put together the many blank
(01:15):
or missing pieces that were kept from him to assemble
a life and a whole complete self. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
(01:37):
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I suppose I could start with ground Rock, Texas, which
is where I lived from the age of almost four
until the age of ten or eleven. I lived in
a three bedroom house that was made of brick, and
the bricks were painted a very light yellow. The neighborhood
that I lived in was a suburban neighborhood, but far
(02:08):
away from anything that one might call a city center.
It was like a kind of stripmolish area, too far
away to walk to or anything like that. But that
was the closest to a kind of urban center near
where I lived, and so there was just a bunch
of houses across the street from me. There was the
(02:28):
elementary school that I ended up going to. I think
that sidewalks are now there, but when I lived there,
there weren't any sidewalks. There was a creek that I
felt sort of separated the part of the neighborhood in
which I lived from the rest of the neighborhood, or
the rest of the neighborhood beyond. This creek was a
lot larger than the part in which I lived, and
(02:50):
the creek, as far as I know, doesn't exist anymore.
I saw my old neighborhood about ten years ago, and
where the creek was, it seemed like it had all
been covered with cement, and so there's still a channel,
I guess for water. But when I lived there, there
was a creek with sort of these natural little rock
(03:10):
islands in it, and a lot of catfish and snakes,
poisonous snakes. You could kind of see the elementary school
from my house. Behind the elementary school was I don't
really know the history of this space, but it was.
It looked kind of like a ruin of a very
small settlement. There were a few houses in this kind
(03:36):
of large warehousey space, and it was really very very strange.
You accessed it by kind of going through a little
kind of foresty area, a large patch of which somehow
was bamboo. And on the other side of this bamboo
area were a few ruined houses. It looked as if
they had been torn up like a storm had gone
(03:57):
through them, but there were still remnant things that would
indicate that people had lived there, like bits of furniture
things like that, but they must have been abandoned or
whatever it was it happened to them some years before
my family moved into that area.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Did that exert a pull on you at all? You know,
that sort of abandoned area.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Visiting that space is one of the few relatively clear
memories that I have of my childhood. But now when
I think about it, it sounds like a sort of
impossible space, like how could it have been real? How
could I have ever gone there? Even though I feel
really confident that I went there, I also doubt the
possibility of it even existing. But it did exert a
(04:39):
pull on me. I like to explore a lot when
I was a small.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Child and tell me who you lived in the yellow.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
House with my maternal grandparents, my grandmother, who was my
mother's biological mother, and my grandfather, who had adopted my
mother when my mother was I believe, thirteen years old.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
So Shane is living with his grandparents. He refers to
them as mom and Dad, even though on some level
he's aware that they are his grandparents, and when his
mom a young woman who had him at just eighteen
years old, comes to visit. He calls her by her
first name, Denise.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
When my mother came to visit me, I don't think
there's any way for me to know whether she felt
like my mother, because I wouldn't know what it feels like.
She's the only model that I would have, and so
particularly as a child, I guess maybe in some ways,
not just because the person that I called referred to
as my mother was my grandmother, but I was aware
that my mother was my mother, and so in a
(05:43):
kind of abstract way, I felt a very strong connection
to her insofar as she was my mother and I
was aware of it. I lived with her up until
I was about four. I guess most of the time.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
You describe at one point sitting by the window, you know,
when you knew she was going to be coming, And
it struck me the way that you described that that
there was a kind of combination of excitement and a
kind of longing. Sure, so what was the story that
you grew up being told by your maternal grandparents about
(06:17):
your father and about why you were living with them
away from your family.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
So my grandparents told me that the reason that I
didn't live with my father, well, really, the reason I
didn't see him, didn't really know him, was that he
didn't want me, and also that even if I were
interested in seeing him, it kind of didn't matter, because
they told me that he lived in Brazil and he
(06:48):
had a whole new family, other children now, and that
he just wouldn't be interested in seeing me anyway. And
they told me that I had started to live with
them when I was eighteen months old, and that they
had essentially taken me in as a favor, a favor
(07:09):
to my mother because she felt like she couldn't take
care of me, and since my father was out of
the picture, whatever his opinions about whether he could take
care of me, those were irrelevant. The general sense that
I was supposed to have was that my father's family
were sort of disreputable criminal. Even my grandparents had told
me the story that one of my relatives on my
(07:31):
father's side had one year when I was very little,
I guess it must have been one year old, had
stolen all of my Christmas presents. And I think that
that I think they told me that story just to
sort of reinforce the idea that I shouldn't even want
to have anything to do with my father's side of
the family, and I was better off not knowing them.
(07:54):
I should also say that, I mean, you know, as
a small child, my sense of how biology worked was
regard to parents and children really vague. But I was
aware of my father's blackness, and I was aware that
my father's blackness had something to do with my own identity,
something very significant.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
And did you have a sense that that was an
issue for your grandparents.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah, my grandparents were very clear about not liking not
white people to various degrees. My grandfather was a self
identified Republican, my grandmother was a self identified Democrat. But
they could agree that not white people were not good.
That was what they wanted to communicate in various ways.
My grandmother was more subtle than my grandfather was.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
But that was a point of agreement for them. Yes,
all the years that Shane lives with his grandparents, he
always sleeps with his lights on. Something's going on internally,
something that doesn't feel quite right. Always know, don't we
when something's amiss, even though we can't quite identify it.
(09:05):
One day in school where Shane has skipped a grade,
so He's five or six years old and already in
second grade. He draws a swastika on a white T
shirt with a black magic marker. Shane has seen swastikas
in books about World War Two in his grandparents' house,
where they admire as a Nazi military effort, so he
has no idea he's doing something that people will find troubling,
(09:28):
and the principal sends him home.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
My grandmother in particular, felt that that was an abusive
authority to send me home for drawing swastikas all over
my shirt, which it hadn't occurred to me because I
didn't know anything about the history at all. It hadn't
occurred to me that that was a sort of offensive
thing to do. Had no idea. When I was in
elementary school, when I was asked about my father, I
(09:53):
would just say that I didn't have one. I felt
really strongly actually, like I just didn't Whereas by the
time I got to middle school, I started asserting that
I hated him. I didn't know him, obviously, but nonetheless,
if I were asked about him, that's what I would say.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
And Shane, where was the hate coming from?
Speaker 2 (10:15):
That? He was not interested in me? And so I
hated him for that, or at least thought I it.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Meanwhile, there's other hateful behavior within the wall of Shane's grandparents' home.
His grandfather is violent toward him, and when Denise comes
to visit, she sometimes asks if he wants to come
live with her instead.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Whenever my mother would ask me whether I wanted to
live with her, it was very uncomfortable because I was
aware that she was my mother and that I was
supposed to feel a particular way, and you know, I
did love her. I didn't want to hurt her feelings,
but I was also I also sort of thought of
my grandmother as my mother, and I didn't want to
leave my grandparents. And I've often wondered, you know, why
(10:58):
did I want to stay so desperately with these abusive people.
And it wasn't until recently that I was sort of able,
finally able to make sense of it, thinking about you know, well,
along with so many other things, this is almost certainly
a consequence of being kidnapped. That I didn't want any
(11:21):
sort of major change in my living arrangement. That my
anxiety about that, even though I couldn't articulate it, was
incredibly high. I was very, very anxious and also always
feeling always worried that I was going to be forced
from the particular living arrangement that I had, and so
(11:43):
it was always extremely stressful. I think I understand why
my mother wanted me to be aware that I could
live with her if I wanted to, but it was
always an extremely stressful interaction to me.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
But during these exchanges with his mom, she never tells
him that she too had been beaten by her father
when she was younger, which makes it even more striking
that she also never asks Shane whether his grandfather is
also abusing him.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
It's something that I guess to some extent I still
kind of can't really understand unless I told in my
mind that she was very desperate to please my grandfather.
There's only so much I can read in her own motives.
But I think it partly has to do with he
adopted her when she was thirteen, but he had been
living with her for by that time, like eight years
(12:37):
or something, and he had told her from the beginning
that if she was quote unquote good, he would adopt
her when she was thirteen, and so he kind of
loading her with worry about living up to some sort
of idea of goodness so that she could have a father,
because you know, my grandmother had kidn up my mother
from my mother's father when my mother was too had
(12:58):
just taken my mother and not told him where they
were going, and my mother didn't see him again until
she was about sixty when she found him. And so
I think that there was a lot of desire for
a father and a lot of worry that she would
be rejected by her father. And so I think that
when she allowed my grandparents to take me, she couldn't
(13:23):
allow herself to believe that it wouldn't be a safe
place for me for a couple of reasons that were
sort of reinforcing each other, because she maybe felt that
she couldn't take care of me herself, but she also
felt like, as I said, she really wanted to please
my grandfather.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
We'll be right back. At age thirteen, Shane does ultimately
(14:09):
move in with his mother. In his adolescence, he's beginning
to stand up to his grandfather, and as a result,
their relationship has become even more violent, so much so
that Shane's memories of the beatings have receded into parts
of his mind. He still cannot fully access These memories
are blocked in ways that both cost and protect him.
(14:31):
He does remember, however, in broad hazy strokes moving in
with his mom.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Being at my mother's house is sort of like an island,
Like it's a visible island where I can see days
and I can see place, and I can see arriving,
you know, but it's surrounded by blackness, like there's no
before and there's no after. I know what it was like,
you know, like physically, but I don't have any memory
(14:58):
of the time leading up to being with my mother.
I just suddenly remember being there, but I feel like
I remember a long stretch of being there and then
I leave and I don't remember again.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
I mean, that's such an interesting image, and I wondered,
I mean, do you think that you felt, briefly while
you were there, a certain kind of safety that you
hadn't felt before, Like did you feel safer?
Speaker 2 (15:22):
I guess I must have felt safer at my mother's house,
but I don't know that I recall a feeling of safety.
I recall a degree of anxiety, a lot of worry.
It was just different from my grandparents' house, was I think,
in some ways really different there, But I was only
there for a few months. But in a lot of ways,
(15:43):
I guess actually my life was different, and I think
I was different.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Of course, Denise's life is different during this time too.
She's never had a child under her roof. She's never
really had this experience of being a mother. It's a
struggle for her, and it turns out she isn't of
taking care of Shane. She tells him that he'll have
to go back to live with his grandparents, but before
he goes, she tells him something else. The truth about
(16:09):
what happened when he was three years old, when he
was kidnapped.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
So before I left my mother to return to my
grandparents was when my mother told me that my grandparents
had taken me from my father without telling my father
where they were taking me. Up until this point, it
was my understanding that my father just wasn't interested in
me at all, and so learning this was a shock.
(16:37):
But because my grandparents had so effectively raised me to
have no interest in my father, and because I didn't
have any kind of memory of my time with him,
and because I didn't have any understanding even of the timeline,
you know, I didn't know that I was almost four
years old when my grandparents took me up. I was
(16:58):
eighteen months old. And because I assume, because there's such
a huge conflict between reality and the story my memory
of it also, I mean, because I think the kidnapping
itself is such a traumatic event, the memory is just
it's all gone. I mean, I did know that at
this point, I had already decided that I didn't hate
my father, but I didn't know what to do with that,
(17:19):
you know, because I didn't have any contact with him still,
and so hating him or not hating him in a
sense is sort of it's not exactly irrelevant, but it's
not what is its practical effect. I don't think that
I stopped hating him for any particular reason. I think
it was just getting a little bit older. I mean,
I wasn't, you know, still a child, but maybe sort
of beginning to think for myself a little bit helped
(17:42):
me to get beyond the point where I felt like
hating my father was sort of necessary.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Chane's grandparents are in California at this point, and he
does end up moving back in with them. He has
nowhere else to go. The throes of so much instability
Shane's early teenage years are defined by depression and flux.
When he's fourteen, his grandmother decides to leave his grandfather,
so she and Shane moved back to Salem, Oregon, back
(18:13):
where it all began. During this time, Shane becomes increasingly
curious about his father. He now has the information his
mother told him, as well as his father's name Stanley
or perhaps it's stan Lee. What he doesn't note is
where this man is. The stories about Brazil suddenly don't
(18:33):
sit right. Shane begins to wonder if perhaps his father
is right here in Salem.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
I was with some friends and we were skating in
an apartment complex and have been skating for some time,
and for whatever reason, at that moment, I felt like
I should look at my father. I want to know
if he's still here. So I, with my friends knocked
on a stranger's door. This would have been, I guess,
(19:04):
probably nineteen ninety two, and it's a somewhat unusual thing
to do. It's a weird thing to do now maybe,
but in nineteen ninety two it wasn't completely bizarre, you know,
because there weren't cell phones, et cetera. And so I
knocked on a stranger's door and asked if I could
use her phone book. She said yes, so I, you know,
(19:25):
open up the white pages. I slipped around until I
got to the MS and I saw an S. McCrae,
and then I closed the book and that was sort
of it. I didn't write down his number or anything,
but from that moment I was aware that there was
at least somebody who could be my father, because same initial,
same last name, you know, SA. It's not a huge city,
(19:47):
so that there was somebody who could have been him
in the town. I don't think that I sat around
with that information for very long before I tried to
get in touch with him. I think it might have
only been a few days. As I remember it, I
called his number. This was at my house where I
live with my grandmother. I called my father's number and
(20:09):
my stepmother, Candace answered. Obviously at the time, I didn't
know who she was, and I asked if he was there,
and I didn't know his name exactly, you know, and
so I asked if stan Lee was there, but I
said it stan Lee McCrae. I said it in a
way that I hoped would cover the possibilities that either
(20:29):
his name was Stanley or stan middle name Lee, and
I tried to say any way they would do both,
And so I recall my stepmother, Candace, saying hold on
a minute, and putting the phone down and getting my
father and talking with him. My father has a different
memory of it, that he wasn't at home at the time,
(20:51):
and that so that we talked later. I still feel
like my version of it is what happened, but you know,
I have to at least acknowledge that he remembers it differently.
And that was it. He came to see me that
night and then drove me around Salem, introducing me to relatives.
The McRae family is a pretty big and well known
(21:12):
family in Salem, and so I knew who the mccrays were,
which is I guess part of the reason that I
thought he would might very well still be around. And
so he kind of drove me around, introducing me to them.
And it was a sort of bewildering time. I learned
during the time that I was a kind of spectral
presence in their lives and had been my whole life.
(21:34):
Folks had talked about me. I want to say that
it felt like in some ways being a ghost, like
I was inhabiting an idea of myself that had come
before me. But of course I don't know what it's
like to be a ghost. But that's how I would
That's how I would describe it, that I was walking
around in the place of a previous version of myself
and it was just very self dislocating and also well,
(22:01):
maybe renewing, maybe affirming. It was a strange, a strange day.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Shane imagines a parallel life, a life in which he
hadn't been kidnapped, in which he would have grown up
in Salem and been one of them, a craze and
part of this big family. And then all these years later,
he's a late teenager and something has been restored, but
in something being restored, what's been taken away is thrown
(22:31):
into even starker relief.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I don't want to describe it in a way that's
too melodramatic, but you can never really, at least I
can never, I think, really be healed if one conceives
of healing, as you know, having a sense of wholeness
in relations to in relation to the family that I
didn't grow up with, and in relation to the self.
(22:57):
I could have been. I am instead, very very aware
of all of these lives that might be my actual
life and that might be, you know, have something to
do with my biological information, et cetera. And I'm aware
that I can't know any of them for sure. I
(23:17):
don't really know who I am, and I can't really
know who I am, And partly that's the result of
an effort on the part of my grandparents to ensure
that I couldn't know. Partly that's because they had their
own secrets that they were trying to hide from me
and my mother, like my grandmother being married five times.
I remember having a conversation with my mother some time
after my grandmother died where my grandmother had somehow raised
(23:41):
me with an awareness. Really when I was a teenager,
I started to get the awareness of how many times
she had been married, and I had a number that
was one more than the number that my mother had.
And it turned out my number was also not all
of them, so that neither of us had the complete picture,
but our own pictures. Our pictures were different from each other's.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
You're right that your father says to you in one
of your early conversations that part of why he was
still in Salem. Was because he always wanted you to
be able to find him. It was sort of the opposite,
if such a.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Thing can be.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
It was a kind of one hundred and eighty degrees
from the story that you had been fed by your
grandparents who kidnapped you. You describe him as someone very
kind and very much not angry, and it seems like
he was described in a very different way to you,
presented as a very different kind of person.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
Yeah, my father is one of the calmest people that
I know and doesn't seem to hold any grudges, certainly
doesn't seem to hold any grudges in any way having
to do with being kidnapped.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
I think that it was something that he had to
kind of live with and work through for real long
time before we reconnected, before I found him. My understanding
of it is he was really thoughtful about it, sort
of from the beginning. Beyond the sort of visceral, very
intense feelings that he and any parent would have, he
also was very I was thinking about it and being
(25:18):
aware of that. One of the reasons that he didn't
leave Salem is he wanted me to be able to
find him. I mean that means a lot to me,
and it meant a lot to me at the time.
One of the things, maybe the chief thing beyond not
having a real memory of my childhood and not really
having a childhood in my memory, is that I don't
(25:40):
have with regard to my parents. I think I have
a really difficult time accessing or sort of experiencing my feelings,
you know. And it feels like, ironically, I suppose my
relationship with my feelings feel like one of the reasons
(26:01):
that I have such difficulty accessing my feelings is I'm
trying to protect myself from something. It's the same mechanism
that you know results in me having blocked so many memories.
It's a sort of it's the same kind of desire
to protect myself. So when I think about being told,
you know, that he hadn't left because he was hoping
I could find him, of course that fills me with emotion.
(26:26):
But it fills me with emotion in the way that
like if you're watching a glass being filled with a liquid,
I am aware, I can see it. I can see
the being filled with emotion happening, as opposed to I
am in the glass, or I am the glass you know,
there's something about, you know, the inability to be the glass,
(26:47):
you know, to just have to watch it happening that
I feel as an impoverishment. I would like to be
able to experience those emotions in a more immediate way.
But I also feel in a sort of abstract, vague
(27:08):
way that I wouldn't know, I wouldn't be able to
handle them, I wouldn't know what to do with them.
And so even though I in my late forties, I'm
still at this stage with relate which regard to all
this information at which I have barely begun to sort
(27:28):
of incorporate it into my life, to sort of figure
out how to have some control over it or have
some healthiness in relation to it. I was going to
say to heal, but I think that's not right. I
don't think that's the right word. I think there are
ways in which I'm lucky that I got so good
at blocking out memories, about blocking out sort of painful things.
(27:49):
Insofar as if I'm going to have this big, enormous
mess in the middle of my life, it's good that
I can live without it dominating every moment of my life.
On the other hand, I am aware that it would
probably be a good thing to someday get to the
other side of it, but I don't know how. So
(28:10):
when I think about things like that, things like what
my father said, it's very emotional, But I'm also aware
of how emotional it is in a way that sort
of interferes with the full experience of the thing.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
I think, yeah, that makes perfect sense, And yet at
the same time, you have been able to create and
build a family and have a happy relationship with a
partner and three kids. That strikes me as an extraordinary thing,
Like maybe all of this is compartmentalized, but the love
(28:40):
isn't compartmentalized.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Here's Shane reading one last passage from Pulling the Chariot
of the Sun.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
My father is picking up the phone. Then his voice Hello,
I hadn't heard for thirteen years. Immediately like no other
person's voice, an accent. I couldn't place music from somewhere
I didn't know anymore, wavering in each syllable, even a
simple word like hello, loosened by music, made difficult to understand.
(29:17):
Though I knew he had said hello, though I had
heard only music, and I asked him his name.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Family secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(29:53):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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