The title is a reference to the line "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair" in
Langston Hughes's poem "
Mother to Son".
Plot summary
No Crystal Stair is a coming-of-age story set in the
Little Burgundy district of
Montreal during the 1940s.
Widow Marion Willow works at two jobs to raise her three daughters properly. Fighting
racism and
sexism, Marion schools her girls in manners,
English poetry and the need for an
education; her elegant neighbour and rival (both women are in love with
railwayporter Edmund Thompson) teaches the children the ways of the street and their black cultural heritage.
Major themes
Two themes in the novel run through No Crystal Stair: passing as white and surviving as black. Sarsfield recounts a story about the desire to survive, all the while depicting the cosmopolitan Montreal of the 1940s, a city inhabited by
jazz musicians, socialites,
artists and
gangsters.
^Green, Kim (2018). "Contested "Places" and Conflicted Nexuses in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills and Mairuth Sarsfield's No Crystal Stair". Canadian Review of American Studies. 48 (2): 210–230.
doi:
10.3138/cras.2017.006.