CARRIED IN THE BLOOD: A Gulf Coast Memoir

"You ain't big enough, boy." His father said it with a hand around his throat. He was twelve years old. He spent the next thirty years growing big enough - to work a rig beside the man, to bury him, and, in the end, to forgive him with his eyes wide open. James Gibson Jr. came up on the Texas Gulf Coast in a handful of good years he would spend most of his life fighting to remember: a father who showed up, a garden in the South Texas heat, oak trees an old man planted by hand. Then the work went out of the town, the family came apart, and the violence that had run through the men of his family for generations came for him too. Carried in the Blood is the story of what gets handed down a bloodline, and what one man refused to hand down again. It is for anyone who grew up carrying a pain they were never allowed to name - and proof that the line can stop with you.