The Kidnapped Child Who Became a Poet
Shane McCrae is an award-winning poet best-known for works such as Mule and In the Language of My Captor. But as many of his readers may have already deduced, his acclaimed works have been inspired by the trauma he suffered as a child. Indeed, Shane was not only abducted as a tot, but he was then subjected to years of physical and mental abuse. And the perpetrators were two of his own grandparents!
For Sale
The drama began in 1979 when a three-year-old Shane was taken to his maternal grandfather and grandmother’s Salem home by his father, Stanley. The youngster had only been scheduled to spend the night there.
But when his dad returned to pick him up the following morning, he made a startling discovery. Not only had the house been stripped bare, there was also a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of it.
Birth certificate
So what had been the motivation behind Shane’s abduction by his own grandparents? Well, they, and their daughter Denise, were white. The tot’s father, however, was Black. And the pair didn’t want their grandson to grow up in a mixed-race family.
In fact, the couple were so prejudiced that they registered Shane as Caucasian on his birth certificate and made sure that his dad’s name was nowhere to be found, too.
The Baker name
Speaking to The New York Times decades later, Stanley revealed how this situation had occurred. Referring to a conversation he’d had with Denise just after Shane was born, he said, “I’m like, ‘When do I need to sign the birth certificate?’
And she was like, ‘Well, actually, I wanted to talk to you about that because my dad can’t have kids.’ And he was saying that if you let him put Shane in the Baker name, when he passes, everything he has will go to Shane.”
Family funeral
Stanley revealed that although he had been skeptical at first, he was also delighted that his son would be financially secure. Things only went sour when the pair split and Denise, unable to cope with the pressures of being a single mom, handed over custody to Stanley.
The latter recalled the last time he saw his son for 13 years had been when he dropped Shane off ahead of a family funeral, and how he had been left bereft by his sudden disappearance.