What Her Silence Carries . . .
During Women’s History Month, we often celebrate resilience. We honor women who endured and overcame, but resilience alone does not fully account for what was required of us.
I’ve often heard it said, “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” but the older I get, the more I question whose truth is allowed to be told and how often the real expectation is to be quiet and keep the peace.
In many Southern families, some things were never explained outright; they were simply understood. A certain look across the table, a pause before answering a question, or even the telling of a story that stopped just short of the part everyone knew was the hardest to say. We learned quickly how to read these spaces; the silence became its own language.
For a long time, I thought silence meant absence that something important had not been done, withheld, or forgotten. Life has taught me that silence carries something heavier than words could manage.
Protection.
Not every generation has the luxury of speaking plainly about what it survived.
In Gullah Geechee families, memory often traveled indirectly. Things were not always shared through detailed explanations or careful timelines, but there were always gestures, warnings, and prayers spoken almost automatically in certain situations. I’ve seen how knowledge moves the way the tide moves through the marsh in low, hushed tones, steady and persistent. What one generation endured, the next absorbed in other ways.
The elders in my family rarely narrated their pain. They didn’t catalogue it or offer long reflections about how hard things had been. What we could bear witness to instead was their endurance. The women in my family always showed up for church, worked jobs outside the home, watched over each other’s children, and carried silence as a badge of honor. There was an expectation that they knew how to carry silence on behalf of others …to hold what was done to them, what was said to them, what they witnessed and to do so without disrupting the order of things around them.
This pattern has been reinforced by families, communities, institutions, and at times by both men and women who believed that keeping the peace required keeping quiet. By some unspoken rule, we learned that it was more virtuous to toe the line in hopes of not making things worse.
For generations, women have been asked to measure their words against the comfort of others. Many did because they understood the cost of speaking without protection. They learned to discern, and so I learned early on to do the same.
We are living in a moment that encourages constant speech, immediate reaction, public declaration, and unfiltered expression. And yet, at the same time, there remains an undercurrent that still expects women to manage disruption carefully, to speak in ways that do not unsettle too much, to carry what is heavy without shifting its weight onto others.
During Women’s History Month, we often celebrate resilience. We honor women who endured and overcame, but resilience alone does not fully account for what was required of us. Many women practiced discernment under pressure, they knew when to hold a thing and when it had to be said.
I think about that when I consider the generations before me. What they did not say may have been as deliberate as what they chose to pass on. They offered what they believed the next generation needed to move forward - strength, faith, skill, and an understanding that tomorrow was worth preparing for.
We inherited the quiet parts along with everything else, but inheritance is not instruction. Our task is not to repeat silence automatically; it is to understand it, to recognize when silence is still serving its original purpose, protecting, preserving, steadying and when it is no longer protection, but pressure.
The longer I live, the more I see that history does not only travel through speech … it travels through posture, habits, what we allow, and even what we refuse.
Silence, when used wisely, can carry a remarkable amount of truth, but wisdom also requires knowing when truth must be spoken.
I think that has always been the work. It still is.
What silence did you inherit and what will you choose to do with it?
This piece examines the tension between truth and silence especially for women shaped by Southern and Gullah Geechee traditions. It reflects on how silence has not always meant absence, but protection, a learned practice passed down through generations who understood the cost of speaking without safety.
At a time when constant expression is encouraged, the essay asks a harder question: when does silence still serve us, and when does it become a burden we were never meant to carry?
You don’t need to watch the screen.
Just listen.