N
W O R D S . . .
In 1962 the poet, musician, and performer Maya Angelou claimed another piece of her identity by moving to Ghana, joining a community of "Revolutionist
Returnees" inspired by the promise of panAfricanism. All God's Children Need Walking Shoes
is her lyrical and acutely perceptive exploration of
what it means to be an African American on the
mother continent, where color no longer matters but
where American-ness keeps asserting itself in ways
both puzzling and heartbreaking. As it builds on the
personal narrative of I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings and Gather Together in My Name, this book
confirms Maya Angelou’s stature as one of the most
gifted autobiographers of our time.
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
For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs
and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian
Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size
belied her larger-than-life presence—a presence
absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When
her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously
sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother
away from their California home to live with
their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The
subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with
Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade
later, began a story that has never before been
told. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes
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