ABSTRACT
Employing the metaphor of the crystal stair from Langston Hughes's poem "Mother to Son" this chapter examines the rhetorical nature of autobiography and its significance in black female slave narratives. It also contends that black female slave narratives both explore the genre of autobiography as a vehicle for shaping black women's identity and serve as a foundation for establishing black women's intellectual, rhetorical, epistemological, and ontological tradition in American autobiography. The role of black women in African American cultural life reveals the tenacity and ironclad resilience of a people denied common humanity and yet relentless in their search for self-definition. The world of African American autobiography reveals how black women negotiate, inform, and redefine the crystal stair of exclusion in a world bent on denying them equal status. Transforming the crystal stair implies the way in which black women employed rhetoric to shape their experience of oppression into a public discourse and redefine the prevailing ideologies of the period.
