I have tried not to give Aunt Wilma much space in my memories, but she’s a hard one to forget. Though she lived and died a long time ago, she looms large in the stories passed down through my family, and I am too often reminded of what Flannery O’Connor wrote about the “Christ-haunted” South, about ignorance and cruelty wrapped in the thin veneer of religion. I was just a child when Aunt Wilma would show up at our house with Mary Frank, as Mama was setting the supper table. I was old enough, though, to wonder what my uncle had ever seen in her. She couldn’t have been more than fifty then, but everything about her seemed ancient. Her black high-collared dresses covered her arms and legs. She pinned her hair up in an old woman’s bun. In the face that I can see yet, she has high cheekbones and dark, piercing eyes, but I couldn’t imagine the old-fashioned woman was ever what you would call pretty. She was a foreboding figure. So was her adult daughter. Aunt Wilma was a preacher. An
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