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The Value of Perseverance

Perhaps the most central theme in “Mother to Son” relates to the value of perseverance. The speaker spends the first two-thirds of the poem discussing the numerous challenges she’s faced in her life and emphasizing the persistence she’s demonstrated despite those challenges. This discussion plays out in relation to an extended metaphor of a staircase. If life is a staircase, then the speaker has never flagged in her efforts to climb it, even though hazards and obstacles abound. The speaker doesn’t go on about her ability to persevere just to toot her own horn. She speaks on this theme in order to inspire her son to find his own resources to endure in the face of life’s challenges. The speaker’s insistence on the value of perseverance becomes especially potent when we recognize that she is a Black woman raising a Black son. Although she doesn’t address racial inequity explicitly in her address, an important part of the poem’s subtext relates to the unique pressures placed on Black men in a racist society.

Racism as an Obstacle to Progress

The speaker of “Mother to Son” describes life as a strenuous climb up a staircase. Such a metaphor for living powerfully suggests the idea of progress. The very notion of upward mobility on the staircase of life implies movement toward higher social status and improved standards of living. In the speaker’s case, however, the staircase of life is strewn with hazards that have obstructed her upward mobility (lines 3–7):

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

The “tacks,” “splinters,” and “boards torn up” listed in this passage symbolize the various obstacles the speaker has faced as a working-class Black woman. Although both class and gender discrimination have no doubt impacted her negatively, it is racial discrimination that perhaps most profoundly hampers her progress up the staircase of life. Likewise, it is racism that will create barriers for her son and perhaps make him want to turn around and head back down the stairs. Even though the speaker has demonstrated perseverance in her own climb and encourages her son to do the same, racism is clearly a formidable obstacle to the progress of both.

The Primacy of Endurance over Hope

The speaker of “Mother to Son” privileges endurance over hope. This may initially seem like a surprising statement. After all, the speaker’s extended metaphor of the staircase of life implies an aspiration for progress and a better life. Aspirations of this kind are fundamentally linked to hope, which may be defined as “a feeling of expectation or desire for a certain thing to happen” (Oxford Languages). However, it’s important to note that the poem’s speaker never articulates a defined outcome that she hopes to achieve or have happen in the future. The point seems not to be about getting to the top of the staircase, but about survival. Hence why the speaker emphasizes her own endurance, and why she urges her son to persist in his own climb, even when the effort feels like too great an expenditure. This emphasis on endurance doesn’t exist to the exclusion of hope. Again, the metaphor of the staircase clearly implies some degree of hopefulness or aspiration. Even so, the speaker clearly privileges the need to endure—for without endurance, there can be no hope.

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