![]() ![]() ![]() Against the fairy godmother fantasy, she reveals that in reality she is a "too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil." As she internalizes her blackness, she equates it with ugliness, a self-image that clouds her childhood. ![]() The scenario, heavily laced with rhythm, dialect, alliteration, and exacting imagery, reveals two of the author's strengths - her natural gift for language and her insistence on an upbeat, gentle self-deprecation, easily flowing from the humor sparked by incongruity and wit. The opening lines introduce a crucial theme - the Maya character's movie-star dream of being so blond-haired and blue-eyed that she amazes onlookers. Unable to contain her urine on the church porch, she wets her clothes then, sure that she will be punished for misbehavior, laughingly embraces her sense of freedom. Rising out of childhood's bitter memories of a too-long cut-down lavender Easter dress made from "a white woman's once-was-purple throwaway," Marguerite "Maya" Johnson, the central intelligence, or key voice, well into adulthood, recalls in a flashback her fantasy of being suddenly transformed into a white girl and her intense need to be excused from church services. ![]()
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