Incident

Countee Cullen

(For Eric Walrond)

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.

For the teacher

Content note: a child hears a racial slur. Read it first and decide how to set it up for your class.

Public domain in the United States (first published 1925).
From the Reading Room at curioclass.org/library/cullen-incident/. Free forever.