She has been trained to remain silent with the opening words of the book, “You must not tell anyone.” Maxine’s mother initiates her into a long tradition of keeping things secret. As Maxine explains, keeping silence is not passive; it can involve willing oneself to forget something or someone. Because she does as she is told and keeps the silence about her aunt, she too shames her aunt and denies her the right to be remembered. She feels so complicit just for keeping the silence that she is afraid her aunt’s ghost wants to harm her: “My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her” (16). In the book’s final chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” we see just how much the code