"Will anybody know who I am?" That's the question that punctuates the first chapter of this complex, often profound gathering of memoirs and essays by a woman who has spent much of her adult life encouraging other people to find their own voices.

Lawrence-Wehmiller reveals an identity molded by her heritage as the child of illustrious parents who steeped her in the traditions of the Episcopal Church. She emerges in these stories with a bold, clear voice as an African American woman seeking to be herself in a society that still tolerates the pain and disgrace of racism.

Describing her trip as a teenager down to Washington, D.C. for a civil rights rally in the 1960's, Wehmiller writes: "It is a march I've been on as long as I can remember and I feel no crush in the crowd - only a oneness with people who know how to bring strength out of struggle, people marching home to ourselves."

She is a self-described sojourner, story-teller and dream-bearer, an educator who will go to the mat for the right of each child to live out her own birthright as a child of God.

Not a neatly chronological memoir, the book is bound together by spirituals, scripture passages, and the wonderful characters glimpsed and re-encountered throughout the chapters. There's Mississippi priest and grandfather Morgan and his retired teacher wife. We meet her father, sociologist Charles Lawrence, first African-American president of the House of Deputies and her equally gifted mother, the pioneering Dr. Margaret Lawrence. Sons, husband, patients and school children leap from the pages of this eclectic and often challenging book,

But most of all, it is Paula's voice we hear. Fierce, loving, learned, colloquial, she has found a way to draw us into the marvels of her own story, and to encourage us to claim the wonders of our own.