A Song Flung Up to Heaven

The culmination of a unique achievement in modern American literature: the six volumes of autobiography that began more than thirty years ago with the appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven opens as Maya Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work with Malcolm X. But first she has to journey to California to be reunited with her mother and brother. No sooner does she arrive there than she learns that Malcolm X has been assassinated.

Devastated, she tries to put her life back together, working on the stage in local theaters and even conducting a door-to-door survey in Watts. Then Watts explodes in violence, a riot she describes firsthand.

Subsequently, on a trip to New York, she meets Martin Luther King, Jr., who asks her to become his coordinator in the North, and she visits black churches all over America to help support King’s Poor People’s March.

But once again tragedy strikes. King is assassinated, and this time Angelou completely withdraws from the world, unable to deal with this horrible event. Finally, James Baldwin forces her out of isolation and insists that she accompany him to a dinner party—where the idea for writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is born. In fact, A Song Flung Up to Heavenends as Maya Angelou begins to write the first sentences of Caged Bird.

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A Song Flung Up to Heaven

The culmination of a unique achievement in modern American literature: the six volumes of autobiography that began more than thirty years ago with the appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven opens as Maya Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work with Malcolm X. But first she has to journey to California to be reunited with her mother and brother. No sooner does she arrive there than she learns that Malcolm X has been assassinated.

Devastated, she tries to put her life back together, working on the stage in local theaters and even conducting a door-to-door survey in Watts. Then Watts explodes in violence, a riot she describes firsthand.

Subsequently, on a trip to New York, she meets Martin Luther King, Jr., who asks her to become his coordinator in the North, and she visits black churches all over America to help support King’s Poor People’s March.

But once again tragedy strikes. King is assassinated, and this time Angelou completely withdraws from the world, unable to deal with this horrible event. Finally, James Baldwin forces her out of isolation and insists that she accompany him to a dinner party—where the idea for writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is born. In fact, A Song Flung Up to Heavenends as Maya Angelou begins to write the first sentences of Caged Bird.

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A Song Flung Up to Heaven

A Song Flung Up to Heaven

by Maya Angelou
A Song Flung Up to Heaven

A Song Flung Up to Heaven

by Maya Angelou

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Overview

The culmination of a unique achievement in modern American literature: the six volumes of autobiography that began more than thirty years ago with the appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven opens as Maya Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work with Malcolm X. But first she has to journey to California to be reunited with her mother and brother. No sooner does she arrive there than she learns that Malcolm X has been assassinated.

Devastated, she tries to put her life back together, working on the stage in local theaters and even conducting a door-to-door survey in Watts. Then Watts explodes in violence, a riot she describes firsthand.

Subsequently, on a trip to New York, she meets Martin Luther King, Jr., who asks her to become his coordinator in the North, and she visits black churches all over America to help support King’s Poor People’s March.

But once again tragedy strikes. King is assassinated, and this time Angelou completely withdraws from the world, unable to deal with this horrible event. Finally, James Baldwin forces her out of isolation and insists that she accompany him to a dinner party—where the idea for writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is born. In fact, A Song Flung Up to Heavenends as Maya Angelou begins to write the first sentences of Caged Bird.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780553382037
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 04/01/2003
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 224
Sales rank: 167,479
Product dimensions: 5.65(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.57(d)
Age Range: 14 - 18 Years

About the Author

About The Author

Maya Angelou was raised in Stamps, Arkansas. In addition to her bestselling autobiographies, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Heart of a Woman, she wrote numerous volumes of poetry, among them Phenomenal Woman, And Still I Rise, On the Pulse of Morning, and Mother. Maya Angelou died in 2014.

Hometown:

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Date of Birth:

April 4, 1928

Place of Birth:

St. Louis, Missouri

Education:

High school in Atlanta and San Francisco

Read an Excerpt

One

The old ark's a-movering a-movering a-movering the old ark's a-movering and I'm going home.
Nineteenth-century American spiritual

The old ark was a Pan Am jet and I was returning to the United States. The airplane had originated in Johannesburg and stopped in Accra, Ghana, to pick up passengers.

I boarded, wearing traditional West African dress, and sensed myself immediately, and for the first time in years, out of place. A presentiment of unease enveloped me before I could find my seat at the rear of the plane. For the first few minutes I busied myself arranging bags, souvenirs, presents. When I finally settled into my narrow seat, I looked around and became at once aware of the source of my discomfort. I was among more white people than I had seen in four years. During that period I had not once thought of not seeing white people; there were European, Canadian and white American faculty at the university where I worked. Roger and Jean Genoud, who were Swiss United Nations personnel, had become my close friends and in fact helped me to raise—or better, corral—my teenage son. So my upset did not come from seeing the white complexion, but rather, from seeing so much of it at one time.

For the next seven hours, I considered the life I was leaving and the circumstances to which I was returning. I thought of the difference between the faces I had just embraced in farewell and those on the plane who looked at me and other blacks who also boarded in Accra with distaste, if not outright disgust. I thought of my rambunctious nineteen-year-old son, whom I was leaving with a family of Ghanaian friends. I also left him under the watchful eye and, I hoped, tender care of God, who seemed to be the only force capable of controlling him.

My thoughts included the political climate I was leaving. It was a known fact that antigovernment forces were aligning themselves at that very moment to bring down the regime of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's controversial, much adored but also much hated president. The atmosphere was thick with accusations, threats, fear, guilt, greed and capriciousness. Yet at least all the visible participants in that crowded ambience were black, in contrast to the population in the environment to which I was returning. I knew that the air in the United States was no less turbulent than that in Ghana. If my mail and the world newspapers were to be believed, the country was clamoring with riots and pandemonium. The cry of "burn, baby, burn" was loud in the land, and black people had gone from the earlier mode of "sit-in" to "set fire," and from "march-in" to "break-in."

Malcolm X, on his last visit to Accra, had announced a desire to create a foundation he called the Organization of African-American Unity. His proposal included taking the plight of the African-Americans to the United Nations and asking the world council to intercede on the part of beleaguered blacks. The idea was so stimulating to the community of African-American residents that I persuaded myself I should return to the States to help establish the organization. Alice Windom and Vickie Garvin, Sylvia Boone and Julian Mayfield, African-Americans who lived and worked in Ghana, were also immediate supporters. When I informed them that I had started making plans to go back to America to work with Malcolm, they—my friends, buddies, pals—began to treat me as if I had suddenly become special. They didn't speak quite so loudly around me, they didn't clap my back when laughing; nor were they as quick to point out my flaws. My stature had definitely increased.

We all read Malcolm's last letter to me.

Dear Maya,
I was shocked and surprised when your letter arrived but I was also pleased because I only had to wait two months for this one whereas previously I had to wait almost a year. You see I haven't lost my wit. (smile)

Your analysis of our people's tendency to talk over the head of the masses in a language that is too far above and beyond them is certainly true. You can communicate because you have plenty of (soul) and you always keep your feet firmly rooted on the ground.

I am enclosing some articles that will give you somewhat of an idea of my daily experiences here and you will then be better able to understand why it sometimes takes me a long time to write. I was most pleased to learn that you might be hitting in this direction this year. You are a beautiful writer and a beautiful woman. You know that I will always do my utmost to be helpful to you in any way possible so don't hesitate.

Signed
Your brother Malcolm

I looked around the plane at the South African faces and thought of Vus Make, my latest husband, from whom I had separated. He and members of the Pan-African Congress and Oliver Tambo, second in command of the African National Congress, really believed they would be able to change the hearts and thereby the actions of the apartheid-loving Boers. In the early sixties I called them Nation Dreamers. When I thought of Robert Sobukwe, leader of the Pan-African Congress who had languished for years in prison, and Nelson Mandela, who had recently been arrested, I was sure that they would spend their lives sealed away from the world. I had thought that, despite their passion and the rightness of their cause, the two men would become footnotes on the pages of history.

Now, with the new developments about to take place, I felt a little sympathy for the Boers, and congratulated myself and all African-Americans for our courage. The passion my people would exhibit under Malcolm's leadership was going to help us rid our country of racism once and for all. The Africans in South Africa often said they had been inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1958. Well, we were going to give them something new, something visionary, to look up to. After we had cleansed ourselves and our country of hate, they would be able to study our methods, take heart from our example and let freedom ring in their country as it would ring in ours.

Sweet dreams of the future blunted the sharp pain of leaving both my son and the other important man in my life. Given enough time, Guy would eventually grow up and be a fine man, but my romantic other could never fit into my world, nor I into his.

He was a powerful West African who had swept into my life with the urgency of a Southern hurricane. He uprooted my well-planted ideas and blew down all my firmly held beliefs about decorum.

I had been in love many times before I met him, but I had never surrendered myself to anyone. I had given my word and my body, but I had never given my soul. The African had the habit of being obeyed, and he insisted on having all of me. The pleasure I found with him made me unable, or at least unwilling, to refuse.

Within a month of conceding my authority over myself and my life to another, I realized the enormity of my mistake. If I wanted chicken, he said he wanted lamb, and I quickly agreed. If I wanted rice, he wanted yams, and I quickly agreed. He said that I was to go along with whatever he wanted, and I agreed. If I wanted to visit with my friends and he wanted to be alone but not without me, I agreed.

I began to feel the pinch of his close embrace the first time I wanted to sit up and read and he wanted to go to bed.

And, he added, I was needed.

I agreed.

But I thought, "Needed?" Needed like an extra blanket? Like air-conditioning? Like more pepper in the soup? I resented being thought of as a thing, but I had to admit that I allowed the situation myself and had no reason to be displeased with anyone save myself.

Each time I gave up my chicken for his lamb, I ate less. When I gave up a visit with friends to stay home with him, I enjoyed him less. And when I joined him, leaving my book abandoned on the desk, I found I had less appetite for the bedroom.

"You Americans can be bullheaded, stupid and crazy. Why would you kill President Kennedy?" He didn't hear me say, "I didn't kill the president."

My return to the United States came at the most opportune time. I could leave my son to his manly development hurdles; I would leave my great, all-consuming love to his obedient subjects; and I would return to work with Malcolm X on building the Organization of African-American Unity.

By the time we arrived in New York, I had discarded my vilification of the white racists on the plane and had even begun to feel a little more sorry for them.

I was saddened by their infantile, puerile minds. They could be assured that as soon as we American blacks got our country straight, the Xhosas, Zulus, Matabeles, Shonas and others in southern Africa would lead their whites from the gloom of ignorance into the dazzling light of understanding.

The sound in the airport was startling. The open air in Africa was often loud, with many languages being spoken at once, children crying, drums pounding—that had been noise, but at New York's Idlewild Airport, the din that aggressively penetrated the air, insisting on being heard, was clamor. There were shouts and orders, screams, implorings and demands, horns blaring and voices booming. I found a place beside a wall and leaned against it. I had been away from the cacophony for four years, but now I was home.

After I gathered my senses, I found a telephone booth.

I knew I was not ready for New York's strenuous energy, but I needed to explain that to my New York friends. I had written Rosa Guy, my supportive sister-friend, and she was expecting me. I also needed to call Abbey Lincoln, the jazz singer, and her husband, Max Roach, the jazz drummer, who had offered me a room in their Columbus Avenue apartment that I had refused. But most especially, I had to speak to Malcolm.

His telephone voice caught me off guard. I realized I had never spoken to him on the telephone.

"Maya, so you finally got here. How was the trip?" His voice was higher-pitched than I expected.

"Fine."

"You stay at the airport, I'll be there to pick you up. I'll leave right now."

I interrupted. "I'm going straight to San Francisco. My plane leaves soon."

"I thought you were coming to work with us in New York."

"I'll be back in a month . . ." I explained that I needed to be with my mother and my brother, Bailey, just to get used to being back in the United States.

Malcolm said, "I had to leave my car in the Holland Tunnel. Somebody was trying to get me. I jumped in a white man's car. He panicked. I told him who I was, and he said, 'Get down low, I'll get you out of this.' You believe that, Maya?"

I said yes, but I found it hard to do so. "I'll call you next week when I get my bearings."

Malcolm said, "Well, let me tell you about Betty and the girls." I immediately remembered the long nights in Ghana when our group sat and listened to him talk about the struggle, racism, political strategies and social unrest. Then he would speak of Betty. His voice would soften and take on a new melody. We would be told of her great intelligence, of her beauty, of her wit. How funny she was and how faithful. We would hear that she was an adoring mother and a brave and loving wife.

Malcolm said, "She is here now and making a wonderful dinner. You know she is pretty and pregnant. Pretty pregnant." He laughed at his own joke.

I said, "Please give her my regards. I must run for my plane. I'll call you next week."

"Do that. Safe trip."

Table of Contents

Reading Group Guide

Maya Angelou has shared much of her life story with us through candid, gracefully crafted autobiographies. In A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN, she recalls one of the most chilling chapters in American history, a period in the 1960s marked by the Watts riots and the assassination of the vocal civil rights leaders, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King. For Angelou, who had recently returned from a sojourn in Africa, these events carried a particularly personal impact; she had agreed to assist both men in their activism just weeks before their deaths. But these tumultuous months also, eventually, compelled her to capture on paper the memories we now know so well as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The conclusion to that powerful, resonant memoir, A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN is the continuing story of a copiously gifted writer finding her literary voice, while segments of the nation search for a healing message. A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN will stir contemplation and rejuvenation in all who read it.

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your reading of Maya Angelou’s A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN. We hope they will enrich your experience of this poignantly honest memoir.

A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN
Maya Angelou
ISBN 0-553-38203-9

1. Following an epigraph that refers to going home, Maya Angelou begins by describing her Pan Am flight from Ghana to the United States. What is the mood of this homecoming? How does Angelou seem to define “home?”

2. What does Angelou reveal about race and identity in her comparison of American racial tensions to the impending Ghanaian revolution?

3. The infrequent references to Angelou’s son, Guy, form a subtle parallel plot. How does his narrative reflect hers in this part of their lives?

4. Angelou focuses on three distinct American locales in A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN: California, Hawaii, and New York City. What does each of these settings impart to her life story?

5. In the last chapter, Angelou describes a social hierarchy in which all men, black and white, are perceived as superior to black women. How does Angelou respond to the various men in this book, ranging from the close bond she shares with her brother to the bitter job tryout with Norman Cousins?

6. Explore Angelou’s literary techniques. What is her tone when delivering particularly painful or startling information? How does her skill as a poet appear to influence her word choice throughout A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN?

7. Visible and prolific, Angelou is a bridge between two very different generations of African American women. What does she retain of her mother’s persona? What does Angelou appear to want the next generation to learn from her? Is pious Aunt Leah a timeless figure or an anachronism?

8. A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN raises many “what ifs”; Angelou herself imagines several hypothetical scenarios, such as the one in which she had stayed with Malcolm X in New York. Unfortunate timing and eerie coincidences beg one primary question in this memoir: how might Angelou’s path have differed had Malcolm X and Dr. King not been murdered?

9. What makes Angelou’s account of the Watts riot (chapter nine) especially enlightening? What logic does she vocalize amidst the chaos? What does the untitled poem she wrote at the kitchen table (page 74) convey that you would never have learned from news coverage of the event?

10. If this book is itself a song flung up to heaven, what is the nature of its message? Supplication? Praise? Confession? Lamentation? Why must it be flung, rather than simply sung?

11. When Dolly McPherson and Maya Angelou conspire to reveal their African lover’s hypocrisy, the two women end up feeling crestfallen. Does their reaction appear to be consequence of being female, or African American females in particular?

12. Against the backdrop of domestic revolution and international inhumanity, such as the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN depicts the author coping with the most mundane and universal aspects of life—finding work, cooking meals, navigating family crises. In what way do these everyday details mirror the larger issues brewing outside Angelou’s door?

13. Do you detect a shift in Angelou’s outlook from the time she arrives in the United States again to the visit with her mother in the book’s final pages?

14. In the last chapter, Angelou writes that she assumed composing a book would require her “to examine the quality in the human spirit that continues to rise despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” This has indeed been a recurring theme in her work; what do such examinations uncover in A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN?

Interviews

An Interview with Maya Angelou

Dr. Maya Angelou is widely regarded as one of the most inspiring authors of our time. Her multivolume autobiography, which began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), followed by Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), has taken readers from her girlhood home in Arkansas to Chicago, California, New York, Africa, and beyond. Through her writing, Dr. Angelou has revealed moments of personal crisis and political upheaval and commented eloquently on issues of ageism, gender, and violence.

Among her many honors are Pulitzer nominations for her poetry collections Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie and Still I Rise. She also wrote and read the inaugural poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," for President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993. The sixth volume of her autobiography, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, takes readers from Africa to the United States during the period of racial unrest in the 1960s and recalls her friendships with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and others. Dr. Angelou is a professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She spoke with Barnes & Noble Biography buyer Edward Ash-Milby from Miami Beach.

Q: Did you ever imagine that it would take six volumes to tell your story?

A: When I started I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I thought I was going to do the whole thing in that one book -- the whole of my life and beyond. But somehow I got caught up in trying to see the story of my life as a human story, as a life in the life. I thought to end that book on the birth of my son was a proper thing to do -- perfect, or as perfect as the nondivine can become. In a way, I started off writing a book for black girls because they had no Little Women and things like that. And then it was so difficult to write autobiography as literature. So as I continued to write, I thought I'd better expand the goals, so I included black boys. Then I had to expand it again, because suddenly I realized it was for everybody -- for white boys and white girls, because it's so difficult to grow up.

Q: What can an autobiography give to its readers?

A: If an autobiography is of any use, it should tell the truth. Facts can obscure the truth. You can tell the places where..., the people who..., the methods how..., the times when.... But to tell it so that the reader is there and says, "Yes, that's the truth -- I don't like it, but that's the truth." So I had to admit to having been a prostitute in the second book, Gather Together in My Name. I was married, and my husband said, "If that's true, people of every race who are intelligent and young may try to get out of the prison into which they were born -- the prison of poverty, ignorance, abuse. But there are no doorknobs. The doors are locked and there are no doorknobs. So if you write it, maybe it will help somebody." So I began to think that I would say, "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated." And how better to say that than to tell that part of my life story?

Q: Was any one book harder to write than the others?

A: This one, A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Look at what happened to Malcolm X, who was my friend and brother. Then, I had secretly hoped my marriage would re-cement. I had fallen so fond of my husband, and when he came to the States to catch me I was flattered, hopeful. And when that didn't work out, there was the Watts uprising. To come to New York and agree to go back with Reverend King and then he was killed on my birthday. And then my brother Bailey died. I've been working on this book for almost 38 years.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "Easy reading is damned hard writing." And to write it so well, or try to write it so simply that after the reader has put the book down, after she has gone on to make a cup of tea, after he's gone out to do some gardening, then the book and the stories come alive. That's the way I'd like to write. So this was the hardest book.

Q: The titles of your books are very lyrical. How do you come up with them?

A: Usually, I go to African-American poetry and praise songs, and sometimes sermons or just colloquial sayings. Caged Bird came from the poem "Sympathy," and so did A Song Flung Up to Heaven -- from the same verse by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The first verse is:

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals --
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting --
I know why the caged beats his wing!
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, --
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings --
I know why the caged bird sings!
Q: In the final chapter you observed, "I thought if I wrote a book I would have to examine the quality of the human spirit that continues to rise despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." Have you accomplished what you set out to do in your autobiographies?

A: Yes, I have accomplished much more than I ever set my sights to do, to achieve. I love the challenge of writing and being a writer. Everybody in the world who isn't a hermit or a recluse uses words in all the many languages, but those are words. So not everybody sings, not everybody dances, stops and admires a building. But everybody uses words. So the writer has to take these most common tools and, choosing a few nouns and pronouns and adverbs and verbs and adjectives and so forth, put them together and make a reader say, "That's a new way of looking at that." And that, my God, that's pretty wonderful, and at the same time, frightening. But that's what I am. I describe myself to myself as a writer. That's what I do.

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