Excerpt from Pulling the Chariot of the Sun by Shane McCrae, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter 1

Before I saw it cascading across the fabric store parking lot, tumbling across the fabric store parking lot like a gif of two impossibly small gray birds fighting that has been copied and pasted a hundred thousand times, reeling through the air above the fabric store parking lot, the four hundred thousand wings overlapping, intertwining, each of the paired birds seeming to flap away from its opponent even as it attacks its opponent, I hadn't known rain could fall sideways. I was seven years old. Maybe I was nine years old—any age after my grandparents kidnapped me and took me to Texas. 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 a summer day. Usually whenever we shopped for fabric store things, whenever my grandmother shopped for fabric store things, we went to a Michaels in a strip mall down Highway 183 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, its name a blank stucco edifice to me now. Am I misremembering it?

MY GRANDMOTHER—MY MOTHER'S mother—was white, like my grandfather and my mother; my father was black. When I was a child, whiteness and blackness weren't facts about me—whiteness was a wheat field I stood in; blackness was a pit somewhere in that field, hidden by the somehow taller stalks growing from it, taller insofar as they grew from the fathomless bottom of the pit to match the height of the other stalks in the field, those growing from the near and solid earth. My grandparents and I lived in a yellow brick house, its color and composition indicative of a whimsy belonging to none of its inhabitants, though my grandfather repainted it occasionally, always yellow, and even if he hadn't known about the yellow brick road when we first arrived at the yellow brick house, his family had been poor when he was young—no movies, few books, if any books—eventually he must have repainted the bricks yellow with The Wizard of Oz in his head, a yellow brick house in Round Rock, a suburb of Austin. We lived in a house funnier than the person who made it funny was. Over the next few years, assuming I was seven the day I first saw rain fall sideways, over the next few years, our house was up for sale, and while our house wasn't selling, my grandmother would become an independent real estate agent and a real estate appraiser. At first she would work as a real estate agent for an agency with a brown and yellow corporate color scheme, then she would work for an agency with a red and white corporate color scheme, like the colors of the H-E-B grocery store sign, except the H-E-B sign was red with a ring of white between the red of the body of the sign and the sign's red border, but I imagined white at the edges of the sign, or deep inside the sign—I imagined white as the finishing touch to every colored thing. The first time she took me to the H-E-B, near enough to home that I could walk home if I were left there, but far enough away from home that I would give up on the way, after we had finished shopping, just after we had gotten into the Datsun, a 1981 desert-sand-colored Datsun 210 hatchback, to drive home, my grandmother told me H-E-B stood for Herbert E. Butts, and I thought that was hilarious, but the other day I read somewhere, or thought I read somewhere, that Herbert E. Butts did a significant amount of charitable work while he was alive. But was his name even Herbert E. Butts? Am I misremembering it?

The brown and yellow agency would become the red and white agency, and my grandmother would be swept up and carried by the change.

But she would never be rich, not on her own. But every once in a while she would try to get rich—like the time when, after we saw a story about the Cabbage Patch Kids craze on the news, I remember lingering shots of long, empty aisles where the dolls had been, me wondering whether the aisles were aisles in the local Toys "R" Us, she tracked down a lone Cabbage Patch Kid, a black boy doll named Fritz, then, using Fritz's tiny black body as a guide, she stitched her own dolls, white dolls, she called "Abbage Patch Kids," making copies of Fritz's birth certificate with the photocopier she had bought for her real estate business, but with both the C in "Cabbage" and the X in "Xavier," the name of the creator of Cabbage Patch Kids, whited out. She tried to sell the dolls at a garage sale we had a few weeks later, then again at a garage sale we had a few years later, then she gave up. Abbage Patch Kids by Avier.

Excerpted from Pulling the Chariot of the Sun by Shane McCrae. Copyright © 2023 by Shane McCrae. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.