Mother to Son

Literary Devices

Mother to SonSymbols

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Literary Devices Mother to SonSymbols

Crystal Stair

Twice in the poem the speaker insists that her life “ain’t been no crystal stair” (lines 2 and 20). The image of a crystal staircase offers a powerful symbol for the kind of wealth and class privilege to which the speaker has never had access. As a working-class Black woman, the speaker has never known anything as pristine as a staircase made of purest crystal. On the contrary, she explains how the staircase that she’s been climbing has always been strewn with various hazards. The image of the “crystal stair” stands in clear contrast to the staircase described in these lines, which is made of worn and poorly maintained wood. Although the crystal stair stands as an ideal to which the speaker might aspire, it’s also something she dismisses with more than a hint of disdain. She’s lived and endured long enough to know that her struggle isn’t likely to end. And in any case, she’s rightly proud of her capacity to persist in the face of obstructions.

Hazards

In lines 3–7, the speaker describes numerous hazards she’s had to navigate on the metaphorical staircase of her life:

It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.

Taken together, the tacks, splinters, and broken boards mentioned here symbolize the obstacles and dangers the speaker has faced in her experience as a working-class Black woman. As Black feminism teaches us, class, race, and gender are not separate aspects of identity. Rather, they “intersect” in ways that have an accumulating effect on everyday experience. The poem’s speaker faces challenges that are linked to each of these three aspects of her identity. As a member of the working class, she has limited access to wealth, property, and upward social mobility. As a Black person, she must contend with racist discrimination. And as a woman, she faces sexist discrimination. When considered in aggregate, these challenges intersect and often exacerbate each other. Thus, to endure as a working-class Black woman in America requires the capacity to maneuver around the many “tacks,” “splinters,” and “boards torn up” that inevitably obstruct the way forward.