Incident, By Countee Cullen

The tone in these lines are often humorous and at the same time genuinely loving. In short, the tone of this poem is as complex as the subject with which it so memorably

Cullen is hopeful to get to a place where people of different races will be able to look at others without prejudice and discrimination. However, the poem “Incident” is of a less positive tone. She expresses her experience in a shocked manner, saying, a boy stuck his “tongue out and, called, [her] ‘Nigger’,” (Cullen 8). She was so shocked that “From May until December; .../… of all the things that happened... /… that’s all [she could remember” in Baltimore (Cullen 10-12). At the young age that she was at, it is surprising and upsetting to her to be discriminated against for no reason.

This poem tells the story of two boys, David and Bobbie, and how one day changed their lives forever. The poem opens with the two boys on a summer job in the mountains near the Banff-Lake Louise area.¹ Almost everyday David and Bobbie would climb the mountains surrounding the camp they were staying at. The first afternoon of September, David and Bobbie try to climb the overhang that they’ve been seeing all summer long named “the Finger”. About an hour into the climb, Bobbie got distracted and lost his footing on the rock and called out to David for help. David grabbed Bobbie’s arm to help him get steady, but before he could say anything, David’s foothold crumbled and he fell down. Bobbie then climbed the 50 feet down to the ledge on which David fell. David was alive but in poor condition saying that he can’t move or feel any pain. David then said that

American history is fraught with racism. Its evolution is depicted in literature through the ages, from journal entries of colonial slavery to novels about modern-day race relations. Countee Cullen was a black poet alive during the Harlem Renaissance whose poems “Tableau” and “Incident” portray racism as it was in the early 20th century. Through the use of figurative language and tone, Cullen develops in each poem themes about the effects of small actions.

During the time this poem was written, racism and prejudice towards African Americans was prevalent and habituated to whites. From the first stanza alone, the tone is already set as uncharitable and

Citizen’s opening poem sets the tone for reflection. She writes “when you are alone and too tired even to turn on any devices, you let yourself linger a past stacked among your pillows,” – a self-awareness of the events that will arise in the rest of the text (Rankine 5). Throughout the text, the subject in each testimony manifests a sense of consciousness towards invisibility of his or her body. In an example of microaggression, the black woman details an incident in a which a white girl cheats off her test and takes the initiative in “thanking [the woman] for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person” (Rankine 5). She erases the blackness of the woman to justify her actions, a common endeavor in white America’s exploitation of the black body. This endeavor is evident of the way white institutions have cheated African Americans of their

After the ellipses, there is a shift back to the poetic “I”. The speaker states that while starring into the sockets of the victim’s skull, he becomes “frozen” with the “pity for the life that was gone”. This transitional sentence separates the scene of the already occurred murder from the present material world. The material world revives around the speaker in the next sentence of the poem. In this massive sentence, Wright dramatically personifies the nature in order to transform the cruel historical scene into the current time. However, the significant transformation of the poetic “I” to the “thing” starts when “the ground gripped” the poet’s feet. From that line, the personified ground captures the speaker, and from the observer of already happened images of the lynching, he revives as a participant in the present scene. In this scene, when the dry bones “melting themselves” into the poet’s bones, he becomes the victim of the lynching. The last minutes of the victim’s life are graphically presented in the third stanza of the poem. The first person’s perspective is a very powerful element, which Wright uses in order to put any reader into the African Americans unlawful suffering from the terror lynching. Furthermore, it is obvious that in the Richard

Throughout the poem Incident by Countee Cullen, the author uses the change of tone to reflect the ideas and purpose of the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout the poem, the tone changes from the young child being thrilled about arriving to a heartbreaking memory. In the poem, cullen writes “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,” (lines 1-6). In this part of the poem, the child had just recently arrived in Baltimore and is more than excited to be in a different place other than in the plantations. He’s very optimistic about meeting someone whom he thought would be his friend. The tone explains how during the Harlem

Cullen uses auditory imagery to draw his readers in to hear what he hears. The meaning of this poem is to take the reader on a journey of what the negro felt about

Unfortunately for Randall Kennedy this limerick held no connotation that he wished to acknowledge, as he recites his Mother’s words, he finds himself in war with a word, a word that for every African-American is at the core of inflicted pain; Nigger. Kennedy narrates his Mother’s experience during the era of the Jim Crow segregation,

The Harlem Renaissance allowed for the expression of many African American artists such as Countee Cullen to illustrate the indifference of blacks and whites through poetry. Cullen wrote Tableau as well as Incident, which share a tone of power. The racial interaction between a black and white boy in the two poems both contradict and have similarities. Developing their separate themes comes with the comparison of the two races and how they treat one another. Countee Cullen uses figurative language and tone to formulate the themes of the two works of literacy.

In 1932 through 1934 our nation was captivated by the notorious dynamic duo Bonnie and Clyde. I choose Bonnie and Clyde because even though they committed many crimes, Bonnie and Clyde were still two people who fell in love and I wanted to make that clear in my poem. The tone used in the poem is loving. There was no humor device used in my poem either because I wanted this poem to be a more of a serious love poem. Altogether, the only challenge I experienced when writing this poem was coming up with words that that flowed in a rhyme, I love to write stories but I am not one that can write a poem.

Gloria Naylor talks about her first time experiences with the word “nigger” and how her family and her deal with the word. She was in her math class and her teacher was giving back their math exams. A little boy sits in front of her and she score a higher grade than the little boy. The little boy snatched the paper out of her hand and spit out that word “nigger”; she couldn’t be more puzzled. Naylor didn’t know what the word was. It seems to her that it was her first time hearing that word in her presence, but the truth is that she has heard this word many times before. Every word has several meanings its not just the meaning that was given by the person who came up with the word.

Cullen utilizes imagery throughout the poem, to illuminate the racism African Americans endured and impact racism carries. The speaker in the poem is an eight year old in Baltimore. In the first stanza, Cullen describes the child as “heart-filled, head-filled with glee.” This image portrays the speaker as innocent and joyful. Then the speaker notices a boy staring at him, the speaker believes there’s little difference between them, that the kid “was no whit bigger.” The speaker gets a rude awakening after the boy “poked out his tongue.” A seemingly playful meaningless gesture is met with the boy calling the speaker “N****r.” Cullen contrasts these two experiences because it depicts how racism comes out of nowhere and effects those you wouldn’t expect. The last stanza, the speaker “saw the whole Baltimore. The image of seeing is not just visual, but a metaphor for the loss of innocence where the speaker now is exposed to the hate. Cullen masterfully uses imagery so that readers understand the incredible impact that words have, especially when used for hate.

     This article was hard for me to decipher. In the first paragraph it talks about calling some one a “Nigger”. To me the word nigger is degrading. I don’t like to use this word because I am no better than you. Therefore, you are no better than me.