Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
The
impact of Harlem
Renaissance poet
Countee Cullen’s
poem
“Incident”
is immediate and
devastating. An
eight-year-old child,
visiting Baltimore for
the first time, is
suddenly subjected to
an incomprehensible
racial slur. Although
its cause and meaning
are a mystery to the
child, he fully feels
the hatred that a nasty
voice and jabbing
tongue express. The
rejection is especially
puzzling, coming from
someone better suited
for a playmate than an
enemy.
The poem’s
speaker, however, is
not the child, but an
adult who is
remembering something
that happened to him
when he was eight years
old. Cullen published
the poem in his debut
collection Color in 1925 when he was 22. Raised in Harlem, there isn’t any evidence that he spent time in Baltimore as a child, but even if wholly fictional the poem is so powerful that we feel that the incident actually happened to the poet.
Although Maryland was a
border state and part
of the Union in the
Civil War, it was still
formally segregated in
1925. If we do the math
re Cullen’s
biography,
“Incident”
would have occurred in
1911, the year in which
Baltimore became the
first U.S. city to pass
a residential
segregation law based
explicitly on race.
Ordinance 610 made it
illegal for Black
people to move onto
blocks that were
majority White, and
vice versa for White
people moving into
majority Black
neighborhoods. Cullen
and his adult speaker
would have been aware
of this.
There is much interplay
between the
adult’s and
child’s state of
mind in
“Incident.”
That word is not one
that an eight-year-old
would be likely to use.
It’s an
all-encompassing,
neutral label that
could apply to any
occurrence or event,
ranging from dropping a
family heirloom on the
floor by mistake or
dropping an atom bomb
on Hiroshima.
Considering how
devastating the slur
was to the child and
what we know about its
genesis, the ironic
understatement of
“Incident”
increases both the pain
and magnitude of the
child’s first
subjection to the
“N” word.
Cullen’s simple,
undecorated diction
allows his words to
radiate with emotion
and meaning. There are
only two adjectives in
his poem. The ironic
fondness of
“old”
Baltimore, feeding off
phrases like
“good old
boys” and
“good old
bureaucracy”
reminds us that racism
was in full force when
the incident took
place. Adding
“very” to
“small”
makes us feel just how
vulnerable our innocent
child was to
rejection.
Notice how careful
Cullen is to refrain
from going novelistic
on us by mentioning the
conveyance in which the
boys were
“riding.” A
trolley? A train? A
horse and buggy?
Whatever the vehicle
that presented
Baltimore to our young
visitor, it was the
phenomenon of riding itself that filled his heart and head with “glee.”
Were racism not in
play, I’d imagine
the vehicle most likely
to cause such rapture
to be a ride at an
amusement park, a
carousel perhaps, or a
roller coaster. There
was indeed a popular
amusement park in
Baltimore in 1911, but
it was off limits to
African Americans.
Electric Park, Maryland, Circa 1911
Cullen and his adult speaker would of course have been all too
aware of the segregated social structure of “old” Baltimore. The
child could have been riding on the public tram that served
everyone at the time, although African Americans were confined
to the “colored section” at the back of the vehicle. It’s possible
that the white boy could have been sitting in the last row of the
white section where, turning his head, he saw the black boy. He
would have been unhappy to find himself so close to someone his
parents always referred to with the “N” word.
All of that is for a novelist or short story writer to sort out. It
doesn’t matter where the “incident” occurred. Our poet is
interested in essence—in presenting two states of consciousness at
odds with each other.
Eight-year-old Countee Cullen’s body and spirit are experiencing
joy, wonder, exhilaration. Looking into the other boy’s eyes he
feels an intuitive connection:
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger
Both are children, exactly the same size. They are connected.
EQUAL.
Not that there aren’t differences between them. Our visiting child
has already applied a slightly comic label to the white boy:
I saw a Baltimorean / Keep looking straight at me.
His unvoiced label, however, is non-judgmental, friendly, benign.
They simply come from different places. Had the white boy been
“bigger” by a half foot or more, young Cullen might have been too
shy or too intimidated to respond to the stare coming
straight at
him like an arrow. That they are from different cities doesn’t
appear to be significant. He is a Baltimorean, but “no whit
bigger”:
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
A boy whose heart and mind are full of joy smiles at another boy,
unaware that the other heart and mind are full of hate. His joy is
suddenly shattered by an angry voice, full of contempt, delivering
a label that rejects him as a human being. The “N” word is
accompanied by a poked-out tongue,
straight
as an arrow, sharp
as a sword.
Coming from Harlem, young Cullen has never heard the word
before, has no idea what it means, although he knows he is being
judged unworthy of fellowship.
The child within our adult doesn’t yet understand what our
speaker does: that the other child did not come up with that
hurtful label. As Rodgers and Hammerstein will put it in a song
many years later:
Our child sees “the whole of Baltimore” from summer to winter but does not understand that the white boy’s hateful rejection of him is nurtured by the white community and the government it controls. Our adult speaker understands this, as do Cullen’s
readers.
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
Those closing lines elevate the devastating effects of racism.
There were hundreds of positive “incidents” contained in that
little three letter word “all” — picnics, fishing trips, birthday
parties, playing on the swings in the neighborhood park. The
child enjoyed them all, but that single traumatic “incident” that
happened just “once” is the only one that remains in his adult
memory.
The power of “Incident” could have been achieved only via
poetry. Whereas the unit of composition in prose is the word, in
poetry it’s the syllable. Cullen uses liquid
L
sounding syllables 13
times in his 12- line poem (
old, Baltimore, filled, filled,
Baltimorean, small, smiled, called, whole, Baltimore,
until, all, all
). His poem is about an attempt to diminish the
ebullient identity and spirit of a child.
L
sounds do not have the
feeling of a firm ending that consonants have, especially when
they occur in words like
all
, filled
, and whole
. Their urge to
expand suffuses Cullen’s poem with a subtle, almost musical
resistance to that brutal “
poked out tongue
” aimed straight
as
an arrow in its misguided attempt to thwart and repress.
****
AI’s portrait of Countee Cullen,
showing his first book, Colors.
First published in 1925, “Incident” homes in on a particular time,
place, and sociology. By keeping what happened in Baltimore
generic, by not over defining it with realistic details, Cullen builds
a universal metaphor for the mislabeling of other human beings
that is still plaguing America one hundred years later.
Today, no responsible adult would use or teach a child to use the
“N” word in Baltimore or any other United States city. Still,
inappropriate labels like “Nazi” and “Fascist” are increasingly
spoken with abandon. The violence such mislabeling causes
victims and the damage it does to society are still very much with
us.
There’s no better wake up call to end such divisive behavior than
reading and thinking about the disservice caused to those two
eight-year-olds in Countee Cullen’s tiny but horrendous
“Incident.”
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