Maya Angelou

by Lupton, Mary;

  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:

  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

  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.

  Plot Development and Character Development

  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.

  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

  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 eig
ht 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.