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By DARNELL LEE MOORE with Diane Lee Chism, The Feminist Wire
So, boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps.
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
-Langston Hughes
(a segment from “Mother to Son”)
Hughes’ celebrated poem, “Mother to Son,” was one of the first literary works that I was required to memorize in grade school. During each reading, I would imagine my own soft-spoken Black mother, Diane Lee Chism (nee Moore), offering up revelatory words of advice about survival in poetic voice. I needed her words as a young, peculiar black boy growing up in Camden, New Jersey. I wanted badly to know that the violence often afflicted upon her at the hands of men would not break her spirit and terrorize her mind. I wondered how she managed to care for me and my younger sisters. I wondered how she cared so well, after having given birth to me at the age of 16. And, here I am many years later in a dialogue with my own mother similarly positioned, like the son in Langston’s poem, as listener.
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