A Song Flung Up to Heaven – Maya Angelou (2002)

A Song Flung up to Heaven is the sixth volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiography. My reading buddies Liz and Meg were a little bit a head of me, though I think we will all be starting on book seven soon. This volume is one of the slimmer volumes in the set – but it is every bit as addictively readable as the others – and I finished it in a day.

“Believe people when they tell you who they are. They know themselves better than you.”

This volume starts where the previous one left off, with Maya’s return to America from Ghana where she has spent a couple of years. She has left her son Guy behind, at his insistence. It is time for another chapter.

It is 1965 and Maya is returning to an America in which the civil rights movement has exploded. After meeting him for the second time while in Ghana, Maya has decided to put her energies into working with Malcolm X’s organisation in New York. However, before going to New York, Maya travels to California to see her mother and brother – and while she is there Malcolm X is assassinated. Maya is absolutely devasted, but while Malcolm’s brutal death leaves her feeling traumatised and lost – it is the reactions of other black Americans that leaves her really bewildered. She had expected a huge outpouring of grief and rage – and there wasn’t one. For a little while she really doesn’t know what she is going to do. We see Maya lost and a bit more vulnerable in this volume, needing the support of her mother and in particular her brother Bailey to whom she often turns in times of difficulty.

She gets a job as a market researcher in Watts, California. In August of that year, the Watts riots took place – and Maya was a witness to the violence, looting and chaos that took over the suburb for five long days. She walks through the riots, prepared if necessary to get arrested – even though she has done nothing – yet she passes through unharmed and unnoticed.

“Nothing’s wrong with going to jail for something you believe in. Remember, jail was made for people. Not horses.”

It is after this that Maya begins to spend some time on her own writing. She is encouraged by no lesser person than James Baldwin. She is given financial support by a friend – who only wants to allow her to write. She works on some drama and later starts writing poetry quite seriously.

Martin Luther King Jnr’s poverty march campaign is due to get going, and Maya is contacted by someone who askes her to join the campaign, she will again be working for Martin Luther King Jnr – if she accepts. Maya does accept – but she says she won’t be able to join the campaign until after her birthday as she is planning a big party. The year is 1968 – and her birthday Maya explains is on the fourth of April. I must admit I gasped out loud here! I mean what were the chances? – especially after what happened with Malcolm X, when she had missed being with him by a sudden change of plans. Again Maya’s grief and bewilderment is palpable. This extract leapt out at me – I think most of us know exactly how this feels, though I felt Maya expressed it particularly well.

“Death of a beloved flattens and dulls everything. Mountains and skyscrapers and grand ideas are brought down to eye level or below. Great loves and large hates no longer cast such huge shadows or span so broad a distance. Connections do not adhere so closely, and important events lose some of their glow.”

James Baldwin was one of a number of friends who helped Maya rouse herself again from her own terrible despair after King’s death. She is sustained in part by her writing and the good relationships she has in the people around her. It seems she has often been very fortunate in her friends.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven is an extraordinary portrait of an important period in American civil rights, and for that reason perhaps it has become one of my favourite of the six volumes I have read so far, they are all fantastic though. This volume although only the sixth of seven seems to mark the end of her autobiography really, as the seventh volume, Mom & Me & Mom is really an examination of her relationship with her grandmother and mother, and I believe goes back over some of the ground already covered in these books. I will be reading that one soon, and I am looking forward to meeting up with Maya’s Arkansas grandmother again.

As we leave Maya Angelou at the end of this volume, she is starting to write the book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she is just a little over 40 years old, and will we know live to be more than eighty. It does seem a shame that she leaves us here – when we know so much more came after. I know there are other books available books of essays in particular – so I may need to explore some of those in the future.