Straight Chatting from the Library: Jesse René Gibbs

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Jesse René Gibbs will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

READ THE GUEST BLOG

I experienced two kidnappings before I was even eight years old, and then had to go into hiding for several years as authorities searched for me. Whenever I share this with people, they always stop and say, "Wait, WHAT?" Their reaction made me realize just how unusual and shocking my story is. After enough people encouraged me to write a book about it, I finally took the plunge.

Writing the book was a challenging but ultimately cathartic experience for me. Not only did it allow me to sort through the facts and the fiction of my past, but it also became a way for me to offer hope and guidance to others who have experienced abuse. As I wrote, it became clear to me that my book could serve as a guidebook for surviving even the most horrific experiences.

Sharing my story with others was incredibly important to me. I wanted to offer a message of hope and support to those who may have gone through similar trauma. My book became a powerful tool for healing, not just for me but for others who have felt alone in their struggles.

I’ve always just been a writer and great storyteller. Between my mother being a charismatic narcissist who could make a tall tale from nothing and my grandfather being a great fisherman, I came by storytelling naturally. The challenge was how to make the story REAL while also being interesting and engaging. I wrote the book in third person because that’s how I love to read books, which adds another layer of challenge when writing a memoir.

Most of my inspiration came from my best friend, June. She knew I had a story that needed to be told and she hounded me for twenty-five years to write the darn thing. She went through piles of boxes full of paperwork to help get me organized and walked with me through all the joy and tears of writing a memoir. We had to do a ton of research to make this book happen; my mother’s version of events shaped my thought processes and were almost one hundred percent false.

The book is full of letters from my mother – both before and after I was born, excerpts from my grandmother’s journal, pieces from my own experiences and court documents. It was important that I had backing for the story that I wrote, it was important that it was true, that it was real.

If you’re thinking of writing a book, or even just want some good therapy, write your story. Get it down on paper. It deserves to be told. And it’s so healing.

READ THE BLURB

Echoing among the Blue Ridge Mountains were the cries of newborn babies that disappeared into the night. The screams of children nearly drowned out by the sound of crickets. A girl, hidden and waiting to be found, terrified, and confused. The fireflies sparkling in the woods, bringing light to darkled places.

The bulk of Jesse’s memories were of growing up in the farm country of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. The farm folks stayed pretty much outside of town, except for visits to the feed store causing random tractors to travel down Main Street. There were beatings and abuses, manipulation and terror carried out in spaces breathtaking in their beauty. There were twenty-seven Baptist churches, three non-denominational churches, and one Catholic Church.

There were annual Ku Klux Klan rallies on the street where they would walk right by all the black families who came out to watch and the white folks who came out for moral support—whether of the blacks or the whites, no one knew for sure. Black people did not marry white people in a civilized society, and so were rarely seen socializing. There was a young woman who was pregnant with a black man’s baby, so her parents disowned her. Jesse’s family was accused of killing the child and burying it on their property.

There was the Berkley House Bed and Breakfast toward the end of town, with gold plated silverware and hardwood floors, rumored to be the local sex worker house. There was a mansion up on a hill that overlooked the other humble houses in the town. In the local cemetery, there was “Will B. Jolly” carved into the graves used by bootleggers back in the twenties. Everyone had some form of thick southern drawl, though the length of the “aw” would extend the further south you went. There was a tiny baseball field and a tinier fire department. There was an old lady in the foothills that let the family raid her garden during the summer. And in exchange, Jesse’s family helped her husband bring in the hay for their animals every year.

There was a black snake in the attic—the door opened inside the closet next to Jesse’s bed. She would find his shed skins left behind in the summer months measuring close to seven feet in length. There was a creek with crawdads and a moss-covered bridge. There were mulberry and pecan trees that filled her and her siblings’ aching bellies as the weather turned.

There were hot summer days and freezing cold winters. There were dogs that were best friends, cats that kept her warm at night, and a cow that committed suicide. There was red clay instead of dirt, hayfields instead of grass, and a favorite swimming hole: Lenny’s Mill, the local grain mill on a glacier-fed creek where you could take a dip if you were brave enough to challenge the frigid waters.

Girl Hidden is the story of an unwanted child, born nonetheless and forced into servitude, desperate to protect her siblings and find her way out from under the vicious, manipulative abuses heaped on her by the one person who was supposed to love her unconditionally: her mother.

READ AN EXCERPT

Dolores woke with some mild cramps that July morning. She immediately attributed them to the new restaurant she’d tried the night before. The meat must not have agreed with her. She called in sick to work and lay on her bed for a few hours, attempting to read a paperback. She tried to fall asleep, but the cramps just kept getting worse.

It was only a few blocks from her apartment to the hospital, but it took nearly an hour. It was hard to walk sometimes. When she finally hobbled onto the base hospital she could hardly breathe. The nurses rushed her to the delivery room as time seemed to stand still. Every muscle in her body hurt. Pain, like she had never known streaked through her abdomen.

And, eventually, her first child was born. All alone in a hospital in Rota, Spain at the tender age of nineteen, Dolores gave birth to the first child that she had allowed herself to carry to full term. It was a girl.

MEET THE AUTHOR

My name is Jesse René Gibbs and I am the author of Girl Hidden. I am an artist, designer, dancer and survivor. I am a stepmother to four, Amma to four more and blessed beyond measure with the family that I chose.

This book is based on the true story of my life, gleaned from years of my mother’s writings, my grandmother’s journals and my own experiences. I did my best to showcase the depth of damage that growing up with a narcissistic parent can have on a person, and how hard it is to come to terms with the amount of gaslighting that comes with that life. My siblings all have their own stories of being played against each other, bullied and even emotionally tortured by our parents. We were trained to not trust our own intuition, raised in a life of poverty, a lack of privacy and the endlessly traumatizing purity culture.

I was hunted in my own home by the man my mother married and escaped at nineteen only to land in an intentional community in Chicago that did nearly as much damage. My best friend in the book is also real, and she did more to walk me through my trauma, and she is the main reason that these stories were finally published.

My new life in Seattle didn’t start until well into my thirties, and I’m still working on deconstructing my life up to that point. I wrote this book to organize my life in my own mind and to undo years of lies. I also wrote it because others need to know that they are not alone.

https://www.girlhidden.com/
https://www.instagram.com/girl_hidden_a_memoir
https://www.facebook.com/groups/girlhidden
https://www.tiktok.com/@girl_hidden

https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Hidden-Jesse-Ren%C3%A9-Gibbs/dp/0578988127/

a Rafflecopter giveaway