The Story Archive

Mother to Son

Langston Hughes · 1922 CE · Poem · Modern / American · Modernist

A mother tells her boy that life for her has been no crystal stair: it has had tacks in it, and splinters, and boards torn up, and places with no carpet on the floor, bare. She has been climbing on all the same, reaching landings, turning corners, going in the dark where there has been no light. Hughes was twenty when The Crisis printed it, and the staircase has been the standing figure for Black endurance ever since.

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