This post is part of a virtual book tour orgaized 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.
1. I love plants. Like, I LOVE plants. My office has at least thirty plants in it, and I have a huge flower garden and a small vegetable garden in my yard. Getting my hands in the dirt is how I ground myself (no pun intended) and it’s vitally important to my mental health.
2. I love to sing. When I lived at the inner-city commune in Chicago, I was in Grace and Glory, their gospel choir. I’m an alto, and even though I’m not a great singer, I had an incredible amount of fun. And I could dance better than most of the people in the choir, so they let me stay.
3. I love a good hobby. My hobbies change based on my mood and the time of day, but I’ve made jewelry, designed fairy crowns, poured resin, built miniatures, and collected rocks. I have a huge curio cabinet with bits of all of my random projects in it. My grandbabies love to stick their little noses to the glass and admire. When I was little, my auntie Mabel had a curio cabinet jam-packed with trinkets and dragons and sparklies and it was my favorite thing in her house. Passing down that tradition of magic is an incredible blessing in my life.
4. If I stand up too fast, I faint. Like a fainting goat, just down I go. I’ve always had this problem, but I didn’t find out until I was in my thirties that it’s a blood pressure disorder. Basically, I just have to not stub my toe (I’ve fainted because of the pain) or jump out of bed to go to the bathroom at night (yep, I’ve ended up on the floor for that one too) and I’m okay.
5. I know almost every word to every country song from the nineties. I was the only female DJ on four radio stations in my late teens, and one of them was a country music station. I lived for being on the radio and enjoyed every minute of airtime. My bestie loves it when I “introduce” the music on the car radio.
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
A siren howled outside the window down in the street, and she clutched the sacred book to her chest. A small-town girl in a big city, all alone… Man, did she feel lost. She opened the well-worn book to one of her favorite Psalms and reminded herself that God was still in control. Sometimes she wondered, in the quietest part of her heart, if He had dropped the ball.
She finished reading and asked God to watch over her family while she was away. She prayed especially for her siblings and named them off one by one as if God would forget them if she failed even once to remind Him. “Luke… Ezra… Noah… Judah… Faith… Louise…”
She turned off the light and lay there in the semi-dark. Her eyes adjusted and the streetlamps down below left weird shadows in the corners of the room. She tossed and turned for a bit. Twelve years of having little kids in bed with her made sleeping alone a strange feeling. She pushed and pulled and got some of the big pink comforter into a pile so that it felt like someone was next to her. She lay on her back and tried desperately to get her mind to turn off.
Eventually, exhaustion won the battle. Jesse slept.
About the Author:
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.
Website: https://www.girlhidden.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/girl_hidden_a_memoir
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/girlhidden
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@girl_hidden
Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Hidden-Jesse-Ren%C3%A9-Gibbs/dp/0578988127/
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ReplyDeleteThe book sounds very interesting. Love the cover.
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