A Song Flung Up to Heaven
Maya Angelou
 A Song Flung Up to Heaven, which takes place between 1965 and 1968, picks up where Angelou's previous book, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, ends, with Angelou's airplane trip from Accra, Ghana, where she has spent the previous four years, back to the United States. Her nineteen-year old son Guy has become an adult and is attending college in Ghana, and she is leaving a controlling relationship—her "romantic other", whom she described as "a powerful West African man who had swept into my life with the urgency of a Southern hurricane". She had also been invited to return to the US by Malcolm X, whom she had become friends with during his visit to Accra, to help her create the Organization of African Unity. She postpones meeting with Malcolm X for a month and visits her mother and brother in San Francisco. He is assassinated two days later. Devastated and grief-stricken, she moves to Hawaii to be near her brother and to resume her nightclub act. She realizes, after seeing Della Reese perform, that she lacks the desire, commitment, and talent be a singer, so she returns to her writing career, but this time in Los Angeles instead of in New York City like earlier in her life. To earn extra money, Angelou becomes a market researcher in Watts and gets to know the neighborhood and its people. She witnesses the 1965 Watts Riots, even though it could mean getting arrested, which to her disappointment, does not occur. At one point, Angelou's lover from Ghana, whom she calls "the African", arrives in Los Angeles to take her back to Accra, but Angelou enlists the aid of her mother and brother, and they come to her rescue once again, diverting the African first to Mexico and then back to Ghana. Guy, during a visit to his grandmother in San Francisco, gets into another car accident and his neck is broken again. His maturity is striking to his mother, and she leaves him in the care of his grandmother. Angelou returns to New York, where she dedicates herself to her writing and renews many of the friendships made there in the past. She also describes her personal and professional relationships with Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Beah Richards, and Frank Silvera. Martin Luther King, Jr. asks her travel around the country promoting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She agrees, but "postpones again", and he is assassinated on her 40th birthday. Again devastated, she isolates herself until invited to a dinner party also attended by her friend James Baldwin and cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy. Judy Feiffer, inspired by her tales about her childhood, contacts editor Robert Loomis, who challenges Angelou to write her autobiography as literature. She accepts his challenge, and Song ends with Angelou at "the threshold of her literary career", writing the opening lines to her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: "What are you looking at me for. I didn't come to stay".