 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 . Two " calamitous events " frame the beginning and end of the book — the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King , Jr . 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 . 
