John Stephens

Family Whispers

I can still remember as a child walking into my grandmother’s living room and hearing the thunder of silence as the adult’s whispered conversations came to an abrupt end whenever they were talking about my Aunt Juanita. I never met her, but I picked up pieces of information about her along the way, sometimes listening down the hall when the grownups would think I was asleep. It seems many families have dark secrets and it appears mine is no different. I would hear my grandmother console my aunt and tell her that Aunt Juanita was mentally ill and she did not mean the awful things she wrote in her letters. My aunt Sally, who was her younger sister, said it was more than that. She said Juanita was a normal little girl, but it all changed in the barn when she was around eleven. Aunt Sally said she became interested in spiritual things and began doing rituals from an old book she found in a house that had been abandoned a few miles from their cotton farm. Aunt Sally said one time Aunt Juanita set up circles of candles in the barn and invited her to participate in a conjuring, but Aunt Sally said she was frightened terribly and ran back to the house and told no one.