- Maya mopes around Stamps for about a year. Then Mrs. Bertha Flowers enters her life. Cue the choir of angels.
- Mrs. Flowers is perfect. She is genteel, beautiful, sophisticated, and sounds a bit like Mary Poppins. Basically, she is everything the rest of Stamps is not. Maya has a huge girl-crush on her.
- One day, Mrs. Flowers stops by the store to get some groceries and asks Maya to help her carry them.
- At her home, Mrs. Flowers gives Maya cookies and lemonade and the first of her "lessons in living" (15.47). She tells Maya that she must speak and tells her about the power of the human voice… deep.
- Basically, Mrs. Flowers gets Maya to speak again through literature and poetry.
- Because this is obviously too much happiness to have at once in her life, when she returns home, Momma beats Maya because of a misunderstanding about the phrase "by the way." Well, then.