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   linda-allen Teacher
   High School - 10th Grade

   Maya's first love was not a boy from the neighborhood, and she could never even hope for him to return that love. Her first love was William Shakespeare. She explains her love in chapter 2:

   During those years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love...it was Shakespeare who said, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." It was a state of mind with which I found myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn't matter to anyone any more. 
    

   Having been moved seven times in her young life, she needed some sense of stability, and she found that in reading. The library becomes her refuge where she can escape her world for the world of fantasy. As a child, she often quotes from the books she has read.

   Sources:

   http://www.enotes.com/know-why/maya-johnson

   http://www.enotes.com/know-why/overview

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   Posted by linda-allen on Wednesday June 11, 2008 at 7:48 AM