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As I watched, the raccoon ambled off and into the woods with his hind end up in the air and wobbling back and forth.

After another minute the deer raised his head. I don’t know how, but he seemed to sense that I was there. He looked toward me and just stood. For a minute it almost felt as if our eyes were seeing into each other. He didn’t make a sound or twitch a muscle for the longest time. Then all of a sudden he bounded away and was gone.

I sat down on one of the big rocks and started thinking. This was my first birthday without my family. Maybe Katie was right in what she said about me growing up. Of course, no one grows up on one day more than any other. Just because this day was August twenty-third didn’t mean I would do more growing than I had yesterday. But birthdays help you look at yourself every year and kinda take stock of where you’ve come from.

More important, I reckon, they give you a chance to ask yourself where you’re going.

So many changes had come in my life in the last few months—both bad and good, I reckon—that I couldn’t help getting confused every now and then about just who I was … who I was supposed to be. Just a few months ago I’d been a black slave girl worried about getting sold or whipped or bedded down by some boy a few years older than me. All of a sudden my whole family was dead, I wasn’t a slave anymore, and I was living with a white girl, trying to pretend we were running a white man’s plantation.

That’s a lot of changes in a big hurry!

But deep down inside, was I still the same person? I felt the same in some ways … but different in others.

Who was I anyway? What did the words Mary Ann Jukes really mean? If sometime after I was dead and gone, somebody heard that name, what would they think? What kind of person would they say Mayme Jukes had been?

For the first time in my life, I had to try to figure out who I was apart from my parents and my brothers and sisters, apart from Master McSimmons, even apart from Katie … who was I just for myself? I guess Katie and I had to think about that more than most folks. I figure it’s something everybody’s gotta face sometime in their life—who they are. But me and Katie got put in a situation where we had to think about it sooner than most. I don’t know if Katie was thinking of such things yet. But then I was a little older, so I figured I oughta be thinking about them sooner.

Then it occurred to me that maybe when you’re trying to figure out who you are and what your life means, it’s not enough to ask it just for yourself. There was one person who would always be with you no matter what happened. Even if everybody else in the world deserted you, or even died, He’d still be with you.

That person was God.

So maybe when a body was trying to figure out who they were and what their life meant, He was the one to ask to help figure it out.

“God,” I said quietly. “What is going to become of me? What kind of person do you want me to be? Who do you want me to be down inside?”

I drew in a deep breath in the quiet morning and kept staring into the stream as it gurgled and trickled past me.

Then the thought came to me, and I don’t know if it was an answer to the question I had just asked or not. But what came into my mind were the words, I want you to be my daughter. That’s the kind of person I want you to be. And I want to share your life with you.

I remembered hearing some of the excitable colored preachers talking about the voice of the Lord calling out from heaven. Whenever I heard them talk that way it always made me a little afraid. I thought it would be like thunder or lightning or something.

But if God had just spoken to me as I sat there in the woods, it wasn’t anything like that. It had been soft and still, the kind of voice I probably wouldn’t have heard unless I was being real quiet myself. It reminded me of the early morning when I felt God telling me to stay at Rosewood.

And it felt good inside.

A SPECIAL BIRTHDAY

32

WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE HOUSE,