The Peril of Remembering Nice Things - by Jeffrey Wade Gibbs (Paperback)

About the Book

In search of the truth behind his father being present at the lynching of a black man in small-town Georgia, Gibbs gives us a portrayal of what it means to be a white Southerner and how his life in Turkey echoes the horrors he has escaped.

Book Synopsis

Twenty-five years ago, at 5:00 am, Robert Gibbs left the old hotel in Starke, Florida, wandered down to the train tracks running through the middle of town, and sat on the west rail. He lit up a Winston, then turned a disdainful gaze into the light of the oncoming morning freight and braced for the killing blow. What drove the intelligent and handsome Southern charmer to suicide? In The Peril of Remembering Nice Things, his son, writer Jeffrey Wade Gibbs, explores the answer.

From his current life among Kurdish dissidents in Istanbul, Jeffrey Wade Gibbs returns to family memories of rural Florida, both tragic and bizarre. He describes the Robert Gibbs of his childhood and why, even as a boy, he understood his father was doomed. A demon haunted the older man, and its origin lay with his father's mother and arch-enemy, the manipulative woman they called Memaw. Gibbs explores her origin as well and discovers a childhood steeped in the brutal racism of South Georgia. She tells him of a horrific lynching in which her own father and brothers took part: a mile from her farm, a mob castrated a black man named John Henry Williams, then burned him alive. Did this violent act launch a cycle of generational trauma passed down like vengeful DNA? Black writer and fellow Floridian, James Weldon Johnson said, "The race question involves the saving of black America's body and white America's soul." As America struggles with its past in a culture war with battle lines marked at Confederate monuments and Critical Race Theory, The Peril of Remembering Nice Things traces the loss of those souls.

Review Quotes

"A stunning meditation on family, trauma, and memory that hums with the feel of the South and doesn't flinch in its portrayal of the terrors of the past that some would rather forget."

-Louise Callaghan, author of Father of Lions

"Beautiful, heart-wrenching, sometimes horrifying, and haunted from cover to cover."

-Hugh Sheehy, author of Design Flaw and The Invisibles

"Jeffrey Gibbs combines investigative journalism with storytelling to reveal his father's suicide and a region's hidden history, exposing the lasting effects of historic crimes. He courageously delves into hidden histories, from the American South to Japan and Turkey, offering insightful literary documentation."

-Jiyar Gol, BBC World Affairs Correspondent

"While searching for meaning in his father's life and suicide, and tying both to a broader history encompassing the American South, Turkey, and Japan, Gibbs marches unflinchingly up to his subjects, yielding light and a way forward for himself and his readers. Beautifully written despite the horrors Gibbs explores, The Peril of Remembering Nice Things is a powerfully honest and important book about family, community, and race."

-David Joiner, author of The Lotus Eaters, Kanazawa and The Heron Catchers