Part I: Children of Silence

them is broken into three parts, each with its own central theme. "Children of Silence" is about a world in which the characters are surrounded by those who are silent, by those who are fixed in their lifestyles and are only looking for a way to stay the way they are. People who "were anonymous, backward, exasperating" in their silence.

The "Children" of the so-called silence were just learning to live, just now figuring out what was what in the world, greedy for attention and yearning in their curiousity. They moved along with the others, yet were different from them. Sometimes conforming to their ways, sometimes disguising themselves as one of them, but more often then not, they were loud in their difference, proud in their obscurity. They "saw them all with their frozen faces, her mother and father, her sister, her brother, her grandmother, her aunt... the faces of all the world- frozen hard into expressions of cunning and anger". In the view of the frozen faces around them, they "crept in silence among them and waited for the day when everything would be orderly and neat... beyond their ability to hurt". They adapted to the fixed, rigid feel of the lives around them, making themselves believe that if they too settled down into frozen lives, they would be happy. The children are unaware, at this time, of the consequences of living life in an enforced routine. They slowly adjust themselves to the way of the world, only to find that it is cruel, unfair, and most of all, all about money. They start to understand life's rules, and try to get from under its thumb. Loretta and her constsnt moving from place to place, Jules in his need to leave his family behind and make money, Maureen moving past what others expected of her and into her rebellious period as a prostitute, her obsession with money: the feel of it, the thought of it, hoarding it all away for future use.

They make new friends: Loretta's new husband, Jule's women, Maureen's "men". They do things diffrently from before, distance themselves from what they know, letting themselves forget the people who not only love them but rely on them as well. The children get past the silence of their pasts, loud in their independence. Louder and crazier in their antics, they become. Louder and louder still, if only to get beyond the frozen faces of those that surround them.