Black Women and the Slick Side of the Mountain

This morning, while walking with one of my sole sisters, we found ourselves discussing the world we’re living in right now, its weight, its contradictions, its expectations, and its constant demands on our spirits. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, a song rose up in me: “I’m comin’ up on the rough side of the mountain…”

But as soon as I said it, something in me paused. I took the words back.

Because the truth is, as a Black woman in America, I don’t think we climbed the rough side of the mountain. That would have at least given us something to hold on to, ridges, jagged rocks, uneven places where your foot could anchor for even a second.

No… we climbed the slick side.

When the Mountain Has No Grip

The rough side is challenging, but it gives you something to brace yourself against. The slick side?
That’s a whole different mountain.

The slick side is smooth. Polished. Unforgiving. No obvious places to rest, to grab, to breathe.

You climb it with grit, with faith, with ingenuity that nobody taught you, because you had to figure it out while dangling from the edge. Every inch forward is a miracle. Every step defies gravity and history. Every moment is a negotiation between strength, prayer, and exhaustion.

That’s the side many of us were handed.

And yet… we climbed anyway.

Climbing Without a Blueprint

Think about what Black women have endured across generations:

• Raising families in systems designed to break them.
• Creating joy in the face of injustice.
• Holding communities together with bare hands and brilliance.
• Navigating workplaces where our excellence is expected but rarely protected.
• Carrying the emotional labor of everyone around us.
• Building careers, businesses, degrees, ministries, and movements with little more than conviction and community.

We climbed with babies on our hips.
We climbed with our mamas’ prayers in our pockets.
We climbed with people saying we weren’t meant to make it, and we climbed anyway.

The Divots We Leave Behind

And here is the real revelation that came to me on that walk:

Black women didn’t just climb the slick side of the mountain.
We created the rough side.

Every struggle we endured…
every barrier we broke…
every door we pushed open…
every ceiling we cracked, even when the pieces fell on us…

…left a mark in that mountain.

A divot.
A foothold.
A place for the next sister to grab onto.

Our climb, though exhausting, lonely, and often unseen, created texture for future generations. The rough side that others get to climb? It’s not the original terrain. It’s what we carved out with our persistence.

We turned a mountain designed to be unclimbable into one that could be ascended.

For the Women Behind Us

Our daughters, our nieces, our mentees, our students, so many climb with a little more ease, not because the mountain has changed, but because we changed the mountain.

They have:

• language we didn’t have
• rights we didn’t have
• opportunities we didn’t have
• representation we didn’t see
• confidence we had to grow in private
• and a path made possible by women who refused to stop climbing

We made the smooth side rough.
We left something behind on purpose.

A Tribute to Black Women Who Climb

So to every Black woman reading this:

You are not weak.
You are not behind.
You are not late.
You are doing the kind of climbing that doesn’t come with applause, instructions, or safety rails.

And still, you move.
You rise.
You press forward.

Your climb is holy work.
Your resilience is generational medicine.
Your life is shaping the mountain in ways you may never fully see.

And one day, someone will look up and say:

“Because she climbed, I can climb.”

Thank you, CB, for the conversation that drove this piece.