mother to son : Theme

Race and Racism

The struggle that the mother in this poem describes is common to all people of every race and class, but Hughes narrows in on her identity by giving the speaker’s voice the dialect of a poor, undereducated African American. Readers who recognize this dialect and who have even a little knowledge about the struggle for racial equality in the United States will be able to associate the “staircase” metaphor and the setbacks that the speaker says she faced with the obstacles faced by American blacks, particularly in the early twentieth century, when the laws of the land permitted discriminatory practices. Particular clues that this is a southern black dialect include the contraction of “I is” (“I’se) meaning a mixture of “I am” and “I have”; the addition of the prefix “a-” to the word “climbin’” to indicate that the action is still going on; and the term of endearment “honey.” Independently, none of these stylistic traits would be enough to identify the speaker’s culture, but Hughes does such a thorough job of weaving a pattern together, that even a reader who is unfamiliar with the author’s racial background would get a sense of who the poem’s speaker is.

The difficulties faced by the mother in this poem are symbolized by tacks, splinters, bare floors, and dark hallways — all signs of poverty. In associating this particular black American speaker with these particular images, Hughes is able to hint at the injustice in the relationship between poverty and race. This mother certainly is not poor because she is lazy or weak-willed, since we can see her determination to work and succeed in almost every line. For a woman of such determination to be kept this poor indicates that hardship is not a moral issue, but is related to an external cause, such as the limits that are put on people because of their race.

Individual Vs. the Universe

The point that the mother is making in this poem is that life is a struggle and that her son would be mistaken to expect anything better than difficulty. She mentions symbols of her struggle that reflect her own life, apparently to show that she knows the subject from firsthand experience, thus assuring him that his own problems are not being unfairly apportioned to him and him alone. Because she has to explain this to her son as if it is news to him, we can assume that she was not the type of person to complain about her troubles while her son was growing up: he might easily have interpreted her quietness as a sign that she was comfortable with her life and, from this, assumed that her life indeed was a crystal stair. She addresses him in this poem in order to correct any mistaken assumption he may have that life should be free of problems just because hers has seemed to be so. In the implied fact that the mother has accepted her difficulties so quietly that her own son was unaware of them and has to have them explained to him, Hughes has raised a few philosophic issues about mankind’s relationship to the universe. The most obvious one is that of struggle. When the mother says “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” we can assume that the same would hold true for many, if not most, honest, hard-working people. The second lesson that is implied here is that we should bear suffering quietly and not draw attention to it. The mother in this poem does not tell her son this directly, but Hughes obviously intends for us to admire her and to learn from the fact that her life’s difficulty had been quietly accepted.

Identity

If the son being addressed in this poem hopes to deny that his situation will be different than the one that is described to him (as seems to be his mother’s point in describing her situation at all), it will not be easy: too much connects his own identity to his mother for him to think that life will be very different for him. Usually in human affairs the fates of two family members will turn out more alike than the fates of random strangers. Psychologists explain similarities in families with a range of theories that all touch upon the famed “nature/nurture” argument: that is, different opinions stress whether relatives have similar experiences because they are taught (or “nurtured”) to behave in similar ways or because their behaviors are determined by their genetic code (their “nature”). The use of an African-American dialect in this poem highlights the idea that the son should expect certain difficulties, because to some extent society treated all blacks the same. But the fact that it is his mother speaking tells him, and us, that the struggle ahead of him is not just a theory but is his fate.

A more complete identification between the speaker and the intended audience would exist if this poem were “Father to Son.” Hughes apparently wanted to make use of the inherent contrast caused by crossing the experienced party in the parent/child relationship with the traditionally “weaker” gender in the male/female relationship. Sons often feel protective of their mothers, but mothers are always more worldly. If the speaker of this poem had been the son’s father, he may not have needed to explain the difficulty of his life, because the son would have identified more completely with the older man and known about his life without being told. But our society creates so much distance between the two genders that this son apparently could not identify with his mother’s quiet determination, instead mistaking it for acceptance.