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.