Maya Angelou (33 page)

After Guy finally recovers, Angelou observes him “sitting up like a golden prince and being served like a king in my mother's house” (121). This romanticized glimpse of Guy recapitulates the conclusion of
Traveling Shoes
, when she had envisioned her son as a young lord of Africa. Assured that Guy will continue to be treated royally by Vivian Baxter, Angelou decides to leave San Francisco for the more challenging opportunities of New York City, although mother and son are to meet once again in Manhattan, where they exchange angry words over Maya's rudeness to a white female guest (183–84).

For at least half of
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
the narrator shifts her focus to characters she encounters while living in New York, the two most
important being her friend Dolly McPherson (1929–2011) and an unidentified lover known only as the “African.” We learn from Dr. McPherson's obituary that before joining the English Department at Wake Forest University she had been a senior administrator at the Institute of International Education, in charge of programs for Asia and Africa. The African falsely describes her to Maya as “a very powerful old woman. She is an official at the Institute of International Education” (
Song
, 101). He is dissembling for sexual advantages. In 1968 Dolly McPherson was neither “old” nor “powerful.” She was a thirty-nine year old administrator for the IIE, a not-for-profit service and educational organization founded in 1919. Dolly's two major functions as a character in
Song
are, first, to help expose the deceitful intentions of a shared Ghanaian lover, and second, to emphasize the theme of female bonding.

Critics have tried to identify Angelou's elusive lover. Some have guessed him to be Gus Make, the husband so prominent in
The Heart of a Woman
. However, she divorced Make in the same volume, which makes this identification seem unlikely. He could also have been Mr. Sheikhali, a handsome Muslim businessman who took Maya dancing and then to his apartment. Sheikhali bought her a refrigerator, which she refused. She also refused his marriage proposal because he already had another wife and eight children (
Traveling Shoes
, 94). Critic Wanda Coleman regrets that the “intriguing” African in
Song
is “undeveloped” (
Salon
2002, 3). My own guess is that the unnamed African is not “undeveloped” but deliberately disguised in order to avoid some rather nasty political repercussions from Ghana, Angelou's adopted African nation.

In an essay published in
The Middle-Atlantic Writers Association Review
I speculated that the African lover was Nana Nketsia IV, the tribal chief or king of the Ahanta people and the first African vice chancellor of the University of Ghana (Lupton 2003, 1–6). In
Traveling Shoes
Angelou is chauffeured, at “the Nana's” request, to his
Ahenenfie
or dwelling, where she meets his children and is introduced to the poet Kwesi Brew, Nana Nketsia's constant companion. (In
Song
the African announces his intention to visit Kwesi and Molly Brew in Mexico City, 108–09).
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
makes it clear that Maya's reactions to Nana Nketsia are mixed. He is strong, dark, and attractive, but he is also self-righteous and boisterous, characteristics that she ascribes to her African lover in the sixth autobiography. They would quarrel frequently. When Angelou is at the airport, “the Nana” arrives ceremoniously in his official automobile to see her off. They appear to have been lovers.

In
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
there are a number of clues that further establish his identity. She recalls that she and the unnamed African had tried
unsuccessfully to establish a lasting relationship in Ghana. “He was astonishingly handsome, and his upbringing as a young royal gave him an assurance that I had found irresistible” (94). She claims that they weren't married but ‘had done a little homemade ritual in the presence of a few friends” (Song, 103). Although he had been brought up as a “royal” (or future chief), she, an independent American woman, refused to worship him as he had wanted. On his way to teach at one of America's “important universities,” the “African” unexpectedly telephones Angelou from Ghana and asks her to throw a party for him and his diplomats. She reacts with sarcasm to his booming voice (159). Yet when he appears at her door, she is overcome: “He was as beautiful as ever and as black as ever. His skin shone as if it had been polished, and his teeth were as white as long-grained rice” (163).

The most spirited episode in
Song
is an extended prank that originates in the New York City apartment of Rosa Guy, where Maya Angelou and Dolly McPherson meet for the first time. They eventually discover that “the African,” who had been having an affair with both women at the same time, had described each of them as elderly and unattractive. They are stunned to realize that they had “been had by the same man, in more ways than one” (128). Deciding that they would teach him a lesson, the two women arrange a confrontation.

The revenge plot, which reads more like the script for a stage play than a segment from an autobiography, culminates in Maya's apartment. Accompanied by an entourage of people dressed in rich robes and speaking different languages, “the African” takes center stage in the conversation. Angelou interrupts, asking her guest to compare the fidelity of the African male to the European male. At a pre-arranged time Dolly arrives on the scene and touches his shoulder. Exposed and personally humiliated, he gets ready to leave, but not before he privately warns Maya that she is “in danger,” that she has ‘become someone else in New York. Someone I don't know” (168).

I sent two copies of my published essay to Dolly A. McPherson, whom I had met on several occasions and whose book on Angelou,
Order Out of Chaos
, I had reviewed favorably. Dolly had befriended me in the past by helping to arrange my interview with Angelou and by sending me an invaluable video of the 1963 Inaugural reading. I asked her what she thought of my speculations, but I never received an answer. Since the two principals are now deceased, it is unlikely that the truth of “the African's” identity will ever be known.

Another central character is Rosa Guy (1922–2012), who was born in Trinidad but who came with her family to New York when she was a child. A successful novelist, playwright, and author of children's books, she and
Angelou had developed a close friendship through their commitment to the Harlem Writers Guild. Rosa Guy figures prominently in
Song
. She offers to share her apartment with Maya in New York; she makes it possible for Maya and Dolly McPherson to meet; she is with Maya in California when Bailey informs her of her son's car accident; she appears at the conclusion of the final autobiography, when she, Dolly, and Maya laugh, drink, and dine with Vivian Baxter in Stockton, California. Thinking affectionately about these four black women—Rosa, Dolly, Maya, and her mother—leads the author to contemplate on the nature of female bonding. She cites Vivian Baxter's observation that “black women are so special. Few men of any color and even fewer white women can deal with how fabulous we are” (208). Angelou then writes the first line of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

She also explores her friendships with men: her brother; her mystery lover; her patron; her political allies; her fellow writers. But the most beloved and lovable male character in
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
is James (Jimmy) Baldwin (1924–1987). Angelou knew him in the 1960s after her return to Ghana. Baldwin was a recognized civil rights activist and the author of a controversial novel about homosexuality,
Giovanni's Room
(1956). In a particularly touching scene he takes Maya to meet his mother, Berdis Baldwin, a “little lady with an extremely soft voice” (145). Maya and Jimmy generally agree on political and literary matters, but Maya objects to the way in which Black Nationalist leader Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) had attacked Baldwin's homosexuality in the 1968 prison memoir,
Soul on Ice
. Maya urges her friend to refuse to go to California to support Cleaver's work for the Black Panthers, a black political organization that Cleaver had helped to organize. Although Angelou approved of the Panthers, who were well respected in the black community, she thought that Cleaver was “an opportunist and a batterer” (148). While he never participates in the action of
Song
, Eldridge Cleaver seems to lurk in the background, creating division between Jimmy and Maya.

Still deeply involved in their argument about the Panthers, Baldwin takes Maya to a sleazy bar in Manhattan. When he disappears to make a phone call, Maya is approached by a huge guy named Buck, who insinuates that her companion is “one of those.” Jimmy returns, calling the intruder a “son of a bitch” (152). Buck backs away. That argument settled, they return to the question of Eldridge Cleaver. Baldwin tells Maya to “grow up,” for, regardless of her opinion, he is going to California. Like the confrontation scene among Angelou, Dolly, and “the African,” this episode involving Maya, Jimmy, and Buck seems staged, an interlude from a drama rather
than a slice from an autobiography. In each instance the action takes place in crowded quarters under mounting tension. Clearly, Angelou is using her emerging skills as a dramatist in creating these and other effective moments in
Song
.

Maya Angelou and James Baldwin continued to remain close friends. She credits Baldwin with having been partly responsible for getting her in touch with Robert Loomis, her future editor at Random House (
Song
, 206). Baldwin did a blurb when
Caged Bird
was published.

Setting indicates those locations where specific events take place.
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
ended in Ghana amid great fanfare at the Accra airport in 1964, as Angelou got ready to depart for America. The opening scene of
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
takes place on a Pan Am airplane originating in Johannesburg, South Africa, which had stopped in Accra to pick up passengers traveling to New York City. Angelou, usually so vivid in describing her settings, has only one basic observation to make: the passengers are white. Wearing “traditional West African dress,” she confesses to a “presentiment of unease” (1). As she moves to her seat at the back of the plane, she realizes that her discomfort stems from being “among more white people than I had seen in four years” (1). Of course, she admits to herself, she had worked with many white members of the faculty at the University of Ghana. “So my upset did not come from seeing the white complexion, but rather, from seeing so much of it at one time” (2).

For the first eight pages Angelou sits in the rear of the packed plane, thinking about her errant son, so “rambunctious” that only God seemed able to control him; thinking about the Ghanaian expatriates; recalling her obstinate African lover; remembering President Kwame Nkrumah; thinking about her “latest husband” and other members of the Pan-African Congress—Oliver Tambo, Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela.

Anticipating her return to an America caught in racial tension, she silently reaffirms her commitment to Malcolm X, going so far as to reprint in its entirety a letter he had once written to her (
Song
, 4–5). This now-famous letter and several copies are available in a folder at the Maya Angelou Archives, the New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The two-page letter shows that although Angelou had quoted it accurately, she had changed the original date of composition (January 15, 1965) so that she could cite it more dramatically on the 1964 plane ride from Accra to New York City.

The reader sits in the cramped and uncomfortable space with her. Perhaps the reader is white. Perhaps the reader feels a “distaste, if not downright disgust” (2) for the blacks he or she had seen at the airport. Perhaps not. Perhaps Angelou is mistaken in her judgment. But like the author, the reader is feeling the constraint of the setting and wishes that the ride were over.

Other settings, more open and generous, reveal the narrator engaged in conversation rather than in addressing an imagined reader. After Malcolm X is assassinated, Bailey takes Maya to Jack's Tavern, a bar that Vivian also frequented. Brother and sister are “inside,” mourning the fallen leader but staying away from the action. In the bar scene with James Baldwin one can almost smell the smoke and the stench of urine in the background as they argue over expansive issues such as political allegiance and homosexual identity. In her small New York apartment, so packed with dignitaries, one senses her African lover's confinement, his feeling of being trapped. Dolly's and Maya's exposure of their two-timing lover is dramatically heightened because the space is so limited. This huge and powerful male is literally encircled so that he cannot move. The cramped quarters intensify the dramatic underpinnings of the action.

Angelou introduces the theme of
home
in the opening citation of the nineteenth-century spiritual. Like Noah, she had been struggling for a place to land, a place called “home” which she had hoped to find in Ghana. With Guy no longer needing her and with her Ghanaian relationships strained, she decides to return home to America to work for Malcolm X. But home is a nebulous destination for the child who hadn't come to stay. As she wrote so passionately in
Letter to My Daughter
(2008): “I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe” (6).

A second theme,
rising
, dominates the final pages of
Song
. The author sits at her mother's kitchen table, pen and yellow legal pad in hand, jotting down phrases for the book she plans to write. “I thought if I wrote a book, I would have to examine the quality in the human spirit that continues to rise despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (210). The allusion to
Hamlet
puts her in good company; Shakespeare, one of her favorite writers when she was a child, foretells Angelou's reconstruction of her youngest self. The verb
rise
, which appears four times in the concluding paragraphs, indicates that, like Noah, she and her people are “headed for higher ground.” They will “(r)ise and be prepared to move on and ever on”
(210). The repetition of the word
rise
reiterates the title and the theme of one of her most popular poems, “And Still I Rise” (1978), published more than two decades before
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
.