A Song Flung Up To Heaven, Maya Angelou (2002)

I believe this is the last of her autobiographies.  She returns from Ghana to the U.S.  Guy stays behind to finish college.  I recommend the final chapter (thirty-three) as a treatise on how we should look at ourselves carefully.  That’s all I have.

By the way, this is the first of her books that is not damaged.

All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou (1986)

This is the 4th of 5 autobiographies Dr. Angelou wrote about her life.  I’ve enjoyed them all very much.  I have been appalled at the condition of each of these four books in my university library.  There are multiple copies of “I know why the caged bird sings” and every one of them is damaged.  I mentioned it to the librarians when I turned in the first two.  It made me so mad.

This book is about her time in West Africa—Ghana—to be exact.  Her son, Guy, finishes high school and starts college in this country where many African Americans have come to live, hoping for the freedom lacking in the United States.  In fact, W.E.B. Du Bois is in his nineties and living in Ghana during this time.  It is the 1960’s, and Du Bois had given up on the U.S. to make things right by former slaves.  Du Bois had given up on the U.S. apologizing or returning the plunder taken from generations of Africans during the Middle Passage.

What I did not know until I read this segment of Maya Angelou’s life is that Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois passed away during the night of the first march on Washington.  Expatriates in Ghana had gathered to conduct their own candlelight vigil and march at midnight on August 27th, knowing that the actual march would begin at 7am Washington DC time (p. 123).  Shortly after midnight the word was passed around that Dr. Du Bois had died (p. 124).

We marched and sang thinking of home and the thousands who were marching in Washington, D.C., and many of us held in our minds a picture of the dapper little man, sporting a vandyke beard, perfectly groomed who earned a Harvard doctorate before the end of the 1800s and who said in 1994, ‘The problem with the twentieth century will be the problem of the color line’.  (p. 125)

Maya meets Malcolm X soon afterward on his African pilgrimage, but Malcolm’s leaving is hard on her and her friends.  “Malcolm’s presence had elevated us, but with his departure, we were what we had been before:  a little group of black folks, looking for a home” (p. 146).