My grandfather smoked cigars. In those days all grandfathers smoked something, and it was generally something legal.

My North Carolina grandfather smoked a pipe. Beside his chair stood a mail desk from his father's store, where the tiny post office dedicated to their family's community of farms had been located. My grandfather now owned an updated version of the same farm store. By the time I came along, the mail desk had migrated into the homeplace and was devoted entirely to old coins and my grandfather's pipes and tobaccos. Apple, cherry, vanilla. It was as good as the kitchen but without the dishes.

My Georgia grandfather smoked cigars. Even as a child I knew they were disgusting. But, oh, the boxes!

I have no actual memory of where my grandfather kept his cigar boxes but the lack of an actual memory has never compromised my ability to dig one up. I say this to forestall the inevitable e-mails from relatives disagreeing about everything I'm about to say and some things I will only think.

My grandfather kept the boxes on the top shelf of the front coat closet, but on Sunday afternoons he sometimes brought them down to child level. They were desperately heavy. Filled with buffalo nickels and Indian head pennies, these were veritable treasure chests. My favorite coins were the silver dollars displaying Lady Liberty, a cascade of stars adorning her head or arboring her elegant stance. These coins weighed enough to convince you of their worth.

Most amazing, though, was the ancient string of tiny, thin, silver coins, smaller than dimes, strung together with delicate frayed thread.

They lived in the mail desk drawer. The dates on the coins were 1790-something and 1800-something. I loved the gentle dents on the coins where centuries of earlier children had teethed. Children long gone, yet still present between my fingers. I could not grasp it, though I tried.

Boxes are by nature both enticing and scary, the perfect human temptation. Perhaps this is why we act as if boxes were to be avoided at all costs. We speak of not wanting to be put in a box and of thinking outside the box. And yet, give a young child a present and what do they play with? Exactly. An empty box defines possibility.

This past year at Hidden Voices, the nonprofit performance program I direct, we have been using cigar boxes for self-portraits. The current project, "Speaking Without Tongues," gives voice to women and girls who have survived violence in the home. Have survived pain at the hands of those who know them best and should care for them with the utmost intention. Violence and home are boxes you open carefully.

The single, most-quoted reason for a woman becoming homeless is family violence. Too often, home is not the stitched sampler but the needle piercing the fabric. Most women killed in a relationship are murdered after they leave.

Some lids stick and you must pry them open. Some are flung wide. These are women who claim to be "broken, useless, damaged beyond repair." They are Arab and Christian and Jewish and Hindu.

They are rural and urban, well-educated and not. They would not claim to be artists. Yet inside these cigar boxes are objects and words, photographs and images that testify to what lives beneath a tightly closed lid. Tiny army men have a shoot out among the wedding rings. A hair piece or spices or a broken mirror give you pause to consider. That which is not spoken is still heard.

There is a reason we try and keep the lid on things, from racial tensions to gender struggles. There is reason not to speak of the past and insist on looking forward. Once opened, these boxes are not easily closed. Every woman -- educator, artist, executive -- every woman has a friend, a mother, a child who has been abused. Once the lid is raised, memories fly out. The controlling husband; the molesting stepfather; the furious mother who never recovered from her own abuse.

We do not tell. We do not want to remember. And so the story continues, passed down through the generations like a well-worn coin. Violence is as real an inheritance as furniture or farms. Children cut their teeth on words and gestures intended to diminish and destroy.

They will know this as love. And for the rest of their lives they will search for that same place of comfort, whether or not it destroys them. Unless they speak. It is best for us all if they do, if we do, over and over, until the power of such words and gestures is gone. Until the lid can be left open and there is nothing left to fly out. Until the box is empty and possibility returns.

Lynden Harris is the director of Hidden Voices and the artistic director of ArtsCenter Stage. She can be reached at lharris@hiddenvoices.org.