Incident by Countee Cullen

It is hard to talk about this poem, it made me really sad and I think it can make everybody sad. 

"Once riding in old Baltimore,   

   Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,   

I saw a Baltimorean

   Keep looking straight at me."

Here it describes the happiness of a little boy going on vacation and how glad he was of knowing some place new, but until he sees a person that lived there…

"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.'”

Now he is describing the Baltimorean that was a little kid like him and how was the first and maybe last time they met. When the author says he poked out his tongue, he is making allusion maybe to a snake and to emphasize how it hurt him when the Baltimorean called him Nigger…

"I saw the whole of Baltimore

   From May until December;

Of all the things that happened there

   That’s all that I remember."

In this last part of the poem is where I think that sometimes when you get hurt or insulted you can’t enjoy everything the same way because it is hard to forget a moment that hurts you. It is like a mark… or a bite of a snake that will stay always there with a little part of the venom.