Incident

In “Incident,” Countee Cullen relies on diction, juxtaposition, and irony to represent the impact of racism on a Black child’s identity formation. The poem is a narrative in which the overall movement is from innocence to knowledge and from joy to pain.

In the first stanza, the speaker sets the tone through diction: “Heart-filled, head-filled with glee” (Line 2) captures the exuberance of the child, whose emotions and intellect are stimulated, overwhelmed even, by the novel yet joyful sights of a city. The child is free—riding through the city from a perch where they can see everything despite their small size. Cullen relies on ballad meter (see: Literary Devices), which lends the lines a skipping rhythm that makes sense for the voice of a child. When the child-speaker encounters the little boy, the staring child is just one more object of curiosity that allows the child-speaker to see what a “Baltimorean” (Line 3) looks like. The child-speaker and the little boy have parity: They are just two children looking at each other with no hint of racial conflict.

In the second stanza, that sense of parity shifts, and Cullen relies on juxtaposition (contrast of dissimilar elements) to represent the dawning sense of the reality of racism. The staring boy is “no whit bigger” (Line 7) than the child-speaker. In the big city of Baltimore, the staring boy takes up no more and no less space than the child-speaker because the two children are equals, a point the speaker drives home by not mentioning the race of either child just yet. In fact, it is not until the last two lines of the second stanza that the races of these two children snap into focus with visual imagery of their lopsided responses to each other.

The child-speaker “smiled” (Line 7), an open, welcoming gesture meant to build community with the staring boy. When the boy sticks out his tongue at the child-speaker, it is an aggressive gesture that communicates disgust. That’s ordinary cruelty and rudeness, especially in response to a smile. The imagery of the smiling speaker and the disgusted boy creates a visual juxtaposition that shows how differently these two children experience the world and each other.

The skipping rhythm of the ballad meter carries the reader from the moment the child-speaker “smiled” (Line 7) to the racial slur at the end of Line 8. The poem keeps tripping along, despite the intrusion of this powerful, denigrating word that somehow still fits into the rhyme scheme. The juxtaposition between the regular, highly-structured form and the ugly content creates a tension that dramatizes the child’s effort to understand the power of that word and the outsized power it gives to the (presumably) white boy.

While the staring white child can be “a Baltimorean” (Line 3), the speaker “saw the whole of Baltimore / From May to December” (Lines 9-10) and still cannot bring themselves to say that they lived in Baltimore for seven months. The speaker’s encounter with the slur-slinging boy obliterates the city as a place of wonder and belonging for the Black child. This poem thus captures the first moment when the Black child understands that society doesn’t see the Black child as equal to others.

That realization is so alienating and traumatizing that the speaker forgets an entire city and block of their childhood to survive that knowledge: Pain and sadness exist there. The bleak final line of the poem—“That’s all that I remember” (Line 12)—is one in which the speaker counts just the first cost of racism in their life. The white boy who called the speaker a racial slur stole the child-speaker’s “glee” (Line 2)—their unfettered joy, which for most people only exists in childhood. This rite of passage was one that many hopeful Black migrants to cities experienced during this historical period and that many Black children continue to experience as public, social encounters rather than family become central to identity formation.

There are gaps the speaker doesn’t fill by the end of the poem. What actually happened during those months beyond more sightseeing is left unsaid. The speaker also presumably had more encounters with racism in the city and in the intervening time between the incident and the present moment of the poem. The speaker in the present makes no connection between that first revelation about racism and life since. Cullen’s refusal to use the incident as a vehicle for making a larger statement about race shows his reluctance to engage in overt protest against racism.

An incident is an event of note, but the word Cullen uses for the title seems a small one to capture the momentous nature of what happened to the speaker’s identity that day. Much like the ballad meter of the poem, the title of the poem is ironic, a container that allows the speaker to handle something important and toxic that they’d rather forget. By writing a poem on this topic and offering it to the unsuspecting reader with this generic title, Cullen helps the reader to understand that racism is an everyday horror that pops up when one least expects it.