Martha Southgate's evocative and moving essay documents the effect of silence in her parents' lives. Both intellectual, vibrant, and fighters for justice, her mother and father survived heartbreaking and harrowing circumstances in childhood. In considering their family histories and her own place within them, Southgate arrives at a complex, ambivalent conclusion about silence, which she sees both as a painful withholding and as a way for her parents—and perhaps for many others—to cope with their difficult pasts.