A Song Flung Up to Heaven
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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 Heaven ends as Maya Angelou begins to write the first sentences of Caged Bird.Book MagazineThe sixth volume of Angelou's autobiography recounts the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., leaders for whom the renowned poet and writer had separately pledged to work just weeks before they were murdered in 1965 and 1968, respectively. Both deaths make her quest for purpose as an African-American woman in the anxious 1960s ever more urgent. Using spare, straightforward prose, Angelou recalls her days as the single mother of a difficult teenage son and as a singer who evolves into a storyteller. Some of this material is recycled, most notably the childhood story that constitutes the core of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and some feels more like filler than compelling or essential narrative. But when Angelou bears firsthand witness to the Watts riots, when she offers vignettes of famous friends and when she speaks with heart about the plight of race relations, the story is engaging and informative. —Beth Kephart
