Maya Angelou (32 page)

A Song Flung Up to Heaven
is the end of the story—the end of the journey; the end of the line. The sixth book of the autobiographical series is the briefest. It begins in 1965 with Maya on a Pan Am jet flying from Ghana to New York City. On her arrival in New York she phones her friend El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X). Shabazz relays a dreadful experience in the Lincoln Tunnel, where, fearing that he was the target of a gunman, he had been rescued by a sympathetic white man. He asks Angelou to stay over, but she is anxious to return to California. As in past experiences, for instance, when John Killens had called her in Chicago to tell her that Guy was in danger (
Heart of a Woman
, 75), the narrative is conveyed through the useful device of a phone call.

There are other momentous phone calls in
Song
. Shortly after her arrival in San Francisco, in February 1965, Maya was visiting an aunt when she got a call from a friend telling her that Malcolm X had been assassinated. Three years later, on her fortieth birthday, April 4, 1968, she was cooking party food when her close friend Dolly McPherson telephoned with terrible news, so awful that she insisted on delivering it in person: Martin Luther King had been murdered in Memphis. When a lover known as the “African” telephoned from Ghana, asking Maya to give him and his entourage a party before he began a guest lectureship at Yale, she wrote: “His voice was so loud, he hardly needed a telephone” (159). A final phone call is from Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House, who asked her if she was interested in writing an autobiography.

Such phone calls transmit essential information and generate painful or pleasant reactions. Through this traditional way of providing details, the autobiographer is able to bring tension to a situation as he or she enlarges the perspective of the absent “I.” The use of phone messages and other devices—letters, personal recollections, thoughts—enables her to narrate events that occurred in America during her long tenure in West Africa. The phone call from Ghana to Manhattan reveals her dissatisfaction with her African lover. The call from Robert Loomis indicates a major shift in her prospects and announces her career as a writer.

In the sixth and final autobiography, home at last, she also offers her impressions of the race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965 and of the 1968 uprisings in Harlem following the death of Martin Luther King. A witness to the rebellion in the Watts section of Los Angeles during six hellish days in August 1965, Angelou narrates the political events in
Song
with the objectivity of a news reporter: “Three police vans were filled and driven away as I stood at the corner of 125th and Vermont. I headed back to my car with an equal mixture of disappointment and relief” (77). One notices the passivity of the narrator (“she
stood”
). The major verb is rendered in passive voice: (“police vans
were filled”
). Her general detachment as a narrator is inconsistent with the reality of Watts—with its raging fires and its looting, with curfews enforced by the National Guard, with thousands of black people being arrested and dragged through the streets.

Maya is only slightly more impassioned in describing the riots in Harlem following the assassination of Martin Luther King. She generalizes that in Watts there had been rage but in Harlem there was lamentation. As in the Watts episode, she is a reluctant observer, expressing shock when she sees a shirtless man leave a building with a conga drum, “shouting, not singing, unintelligible words” (190). Her distressing experience in Harlem leads to a lengthy discourse on “the death of a beloved” (192–93) in which she commemorates the widows of Martin Luther King and of John F. Kennedy. Overcome by depression, she goes to Dolly McPherson's apartment to recuperate. Jimmy Baldwin rescues her, taking her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy. The conversation is light. Maya tells stories about Stamps, Arkansas, indications that she may be contemplating a recollection of her childhood.

The bulk of
Song
is low-key. It concerns Angelou's continued contact with her mother, her brother, and her son: her friendship with novelists James Baldwin and Rosa Guy; her growing attachment to Dolly McPherson; her ambivalent relationship with an unnamed lover called simply the “African;” and her personal development as a poet. By the end of the sixth
volume she has made a full commitment to writing. The last line of
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
becomes the first line of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
. “What you looking at me for. I didn't come to stay.”

Although both the first and the last texts are conjoined, it is important to notice the huge time gap between them.
Caged Bird
was published in 1970, when its author was forty-two years old;
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
was published in 2002, when Angelou was seventy-four and writing about a forty-year-old woman. Thirty-two years had passed between the publication of the first and the sixth autobiographies, years in which the author had aged and her economic prospects had radically changed. As a serial autobiographer, Angelou was trying to re-create the mature adult who recorded her post-Ghanaian life in 2002 and, through recollection and memories, call up the same
persona
who had suffered from five years of muteness when she was a little girl. Angelou was gifted, not only with a remarkable memory but with the imagination to re-invent a very distant past.

Throughout
Maya Angelou: The Iconic Self
, structure has been defined as an arrangement of the story based on the motif of travel, featuring the movement from one geographical location to another. Maya Angelou's story began on a train with her brother, Bailey, to Stamps, Arkansas; it ends in Stockton, California, at her mother's house, as she prepares to return to New York City. Despite Angelou's travels throughout Europe and West Africa, hers is an American chronicle, the saga of a black woman born in the United States who grew out of poverty to become a writer.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven
is the final installment in Angelou's fictionalized life story. Its movement is limited. There are no dramatic train rides, no uncharted destinations. She depends on airplanes to transport her from Ghana to places in America—from New York to San Francisco to Hawaii to Los Angeles to Stockton and finally to the anticipated return to New York City, with its publishers, its writers, and its celebrities, so many of them her friends. The reviewer for
Publisher's Weekly
objected to the name-dropping in
Song
: “At times the name-dropping overwhelms (‘Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach had moved from Columbus Avenue to Central Park West ‘” (
PW
.com
). I see Angelou's observations not so much as name-dropping (she really did know those people) but as a sad comment on the general ennui of the sixth autobiography. After the initial return from Ghana, movement is less of an adventure from continent to continent as it is a shifting from one party or one bar or one apartment to another.

One effective structural device in
Song
, as the earlier volumes, is Angelou's use of repetition. Although she emphasizes her close African connections in the final three autobiographies, the reader familiar with all six of the books will be impressed by the way she weaves in so many of the earlier events: her journey with Bailey to Stamps, Arkansas; her being raped by her mother's boyfriend; her struggles as a single mother; her role as the White Queen in Genet's
The Blacks
. By mentioning these and other key narrative moments in the series, she is able to connect the major dots, from beginning to end, a technique that helps
Song
to stand on its own as a separate volume yet remain very much related to the others.

To assure the continuity between the last and the first volumes, she provides both
Caged Bird
and
Song
with an epigram or short citation to introduce each of them.
Caged Bird
opens with a fragment from a childhood poem: “What you looking at me for? / I didn't come to stay.” This same fragment is repeated in the conclusion of the last autobiography, thus linking it inextricably to the first. The epigram at the beginning of
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
reiterates the concept of movement:

This epigram marks a notable revision of the original manuscript, which reads: “The year was 1964, and the old ark was a Pan Am jet which originated in Johannesburg and stopped in Accra, Ghana to pick up passengers” (“Maya Angelou Papers,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, folder # 4, January 10, 2001. The prosaic original version, although it invokes Noah's ark, lacks the force of the cited spiritual, whose themes affect the entire autobiographical series—song, movement, the journey, and going home. Although there are several variations to this gospel song, Angelou's seems personalized in stressing the idea of home-coming, of landing finally on solid ground.

Finally, the titles for both autobiographies are taken from the same poem, Paul Laurence Dunbar's “Sympathy” (1899). In the third stanza of Dunbar's famous lyric, the caged bird sends “a plea that upward to Heaven he flings—/ I know why the caged bird sings” (Norton 1997, 900). By the end of
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
Maya Angelou was gaining considerable
recognition for her poetry (she includes a poem about Watts in the autobiography, 69–70). Through her allusion to Dunbar and through printing her own poem, she is establishing herself as a poet and placing her work within the historic African American literary tradition.

Because there are so many characters and so minimal a plot in the concluding autobiography, I have combined these two categories instead of treating them separately. Plot gives way to characterization; movement subsides to stasis. Finally,
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
becomes a collection of portraits and clichés, entertaining but lacking in substance. It is significant that as her mother, Vivian Baxter, and her brother, Bailey Johnson, had been at the emotional core of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, so in
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
they are the first characters to be substantially developed. These familial connections are not accidental; they again reveal Angelou's clear intention to link the first book with the last, to have
Song
circle back to
Caged Bird
, to have the end become the beginning. This is not a new literary technique. Many Native American folk tales and many contemporary Native American novels are “cyclical in nature, moving the participant not from the beginning to the end but from the beginning back to the beginning” (Lupton 2004, 22). Irish writer James Joyce ended his famous novel
Finnegan's Wake
(1939) with a sentence fragment that compels the reader to return to the beginning to finish its meaning. Angelou achieves her own brand of circularity—partly through structural repetitions and partly through widening or altering the relationships among already familiar characters.

One will recall that in
Caged Bird
Vivian Baxter and her husband had abandoned responsibility for their daughter and son, sending them to Arkansas to live with their paternal grandmother. Maya's feelings for her mother are mixed; it was Vivian's boyfriend who raped Maya, but it was also Vivian who cared for Guy during his mother's many absences. Angelou's ambivalence toward her mother continues in
Song
. They have strong political differences. Vivian, who considers Malcolm X to be a “rabble-rouser” (14), urges her daughter to work for Martin Luther King Jr. Instead Bailey, sensing her alarm at their mother's attitude, signals Maya to keep quiet. She writes: “Although less than two years older than I and barely five feet four, my brother had been my counselor and protector for as long as I could remember” (14). Bailey takes her to Hawaii, where she stays in an aunt's house and gets a job singing in a nightclub. Her mother and her brother
frequently enter and leave the story, important persons in her life but, after the first few chapters, not the major players.

Nor does Maya's son, now nineteen years old, continue to be the center of his mother's attention. Left alone in Accra to finish his undergraduate degree at the University of Ghana, he remains a source for guilt: “Leaving Guy in Africa had become a hair shirt that I could not dislodge. I worried that his newly found and desperate hold on his mannishness might cause him to say or do something to irritate the Ghanaian authorities” (48). Distant from her son both emotionally and geographically, Angelou by necessity minimalizes Guy's role as a character.

When Guy returns to California, he experiences another near-fatal car accident. Similar to the situation in Ghana, he had been sitting in a parked car when he was hit by a runaway truck. Bailey comes from San Francisco to Los Angeles to inform Maya that Guy is in the hospital, in serious condition. Angelou philosophizes: “Surprise, whether good or bad, can have a profound effect on the body. Some people faint, some cry aloud. Bailey caught me as my knees buckled. He helped me back in the room to a chair” (118). Although in the two preceding autobiographies the narrator had eloquently described her reactions to Guy's car accident, in
Song
she relies on abstractions to convey her feelings of surprise, responsibility, and guilt. In a particularly wooden passage she writes: “When something goes wrong with offspring, inevitably the parent feels guilty. As if some stone that needed turning had been left unturned. In the case of a physical handicap, the mother feels that when her body was building the infant, it shirked its responsibility somewhere” (119–20). By disguising her feelings about her son's physical condition and by expressing herself in abstractions and clichés, she allows the reader to question the truth about the second car accident—or at least to wonder if repetition is an appropriate narrative device in this instance.