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I write from the heart, from my emotional core. Which means, for me to tell a good story I must feel that story in nearly every way. Which is one of the reasons that Girl Hidden took twenty-five years to be released. It was exceptionally hard to dive into the emotions of the abuse that I endured just to tell my story.

I would start with a story that I wanted to add to the book. Start writing from my experience and my memories and get it all down on paper. I would rewrite, cry, write again and repeat. Then I would dive into the myriad of boxes that my grandmother collected over the years that were filled with documentation about my experiences: court documents, my mother’s letters, my grandmother’s journals. And often I would find that my version of the events had multiple layers and extended stories that I knew nothing about.

I would meet with my therapist to walk through the pain of rewriting my history in my own mind, talk with my wonderful bestie, June, and usually cry again. Then it was back to writing, rewriting, or adding to the story until it made sense on the page and matched both my experiences and the truth of the documentation.

For example, my mother gave birth to me while in the Navy, stationed in Rota, Spain. Which is already an interesting story, but finding out through my mother’s letters just how little she wanted a child and through the doctor’s notes that she was trying to starve me to death for the first three months of my life was devastating. She stated in her letters that I, a newborn baby, was overwhelming demanding and shouldn’t be able to “demand that I feed her on her timeline.” So, back to the drawing board with that chapter.

It was a challenge every step of the way, but through the writing process I began to find healing and closure. June held my hand and cried with me and helped me sort through all the research that needed to be done to make Girl Hidden a reality.

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.

Enjoy an Excerpt

He was standing with his hands over his face. His back was shaking. Jesse slowly walked in front of him and stood there, silently watching as the sobs wracked his body. She reached up and touched his arm, startling him for a moment. Tears filled her eyes. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly. She started weeping, her tears dripping onto his shirt. They held each other for a moment as the world seemed to stop turning around them.

Jesse pulled away from him and wiped her eyes. Robert looked down at her and stuttered a little as he tried to put words to his feelings.

She looked up into his eyes. “Poppa,” she said, stopping his attempts to speak. “I cannot be the grown-up for both of us. I’m not… I’m not strong enough!” Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks, washing away the last of the makeup that she had so meticulously applied earlier that day. “Please, Poppa.”

Jesse took a deep breath, pulled herself together, lifted her chin, and walked back into the room with the black-and-white tile floor. Robert stood in the hallway and watched her go. His stepdaughter would never depend on him again. His heart broke a little more, but he knew that there was nothing he could do about it. He forced himself to wipe his eyes again and walk back into the room.

About 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.

Buy the book at Amazon.

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