Friday, April 10th, 2026

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H. WordSmith Reads | Friday Feature

Langston Hughes and the Crystal Stair

Dear Friend of the Page,

Leaving Georgia for Wisconsin was not my choice.

When I arrived and was trying to settle in, I visited the library. A librarian gave me a collection of Langston Hughes’s poetry. I can’t recall the title, but I remember the poem.

I remember “Mother to Son.”

I have carried it with me ever since.

I named this piece “Crystal Stair” because that line has always stayed with me. Whenever I feel like giving up, I come back to this poem. It reminds me I’m not alone in the climb.

And just as important,

It reminds me how to move.

Hughes gives us more than words.

He gives us rhythm.

The kind that sounds like a voice in the kitchen.

The kind that carries like a sermon.

The kind that holds you steady when your own breath feels uneven.

“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”

For Black readers, especially Black women building lives in places that don’t always honor our wholeness, poems like this offer more than encouragement.

They steady.

They witness.

They keep time.

They reach across time and say: you are not the first, and you are not alone.

As a differently abled Black woman, I understand what it means to carry weight. I know what it’s like to move through a world that misreads your body, underestimates your spirit, and expects strength without thinking about the cost.

Hughes never asks us to pretend the climb is easy.

Instead, he delivers its cadence.

It’s a way to keep going—step by step, line by line, breath by breath.

The stair is not smooth.

The path is not easy.

But still, she keeps climbing.

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A Living Legacy

This year, Hughes’s voice reaches us again through Troubled Lands: Stories of Mexico and Cuba as Translated by Langston Hughes, edited by Ricardo Wilson II.

Almost a hundred years later, his words still reach us. They still cross borders and find their way into our hands.

That matters.

It reminds us that the work lasts beyond the moment.

It shows that what is left unfinished in one generation can take shape in another.

That, too, is a kind of rhythm.

A continuation.

It’s like one writer passing their breath to the next.

Passage to Sit With

📖 “Mother to Son” — Langston Hughes

Read it slowly.

Then read it aloud.

Listen for the moments when the poem leans forward.

Where it pauses.

Where it insists.

Let the rhythm show you something about endurance.

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Guiding Question

What are the words—or rhythms—you return to when the road feels longer than your strength?

Friday Reflection

Unanswered questions belong on the page too.

Accept the legacy that came before us.

With you on the climb,

Honey WordSmith

H. WordSmith Reads