Online Texts for Craig White's Literature Courses

  • Not a critical or scholarly text but a reading text for a seminar

Countee Cullen

Incident

1925


Countee Cullen (1903-46)

 

                   Incident

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.