Countee Cullen was a black American poet born in New York City in 1903. He obtained his secondary education at the De Witt Clinton High School in New York. He entered New York University in 1922. Although he began writing poetry early in life, it was in college when his poems began to be published. Later on, his poetry started appearing in Harpers’, the Century Magazine, and Poetry. He won a number of awards for his poem “Ballad of the Brown Girl.” (Academy of American Poets, n.d.)
In 1923, he graduated from the New York University and published his first book of poetry, “Color.” He went on to Harvard University, where he obtained his Master’s degree. His second volume of verse, “Copper Sun,” came out in 1927. His works are in the tradition of Keats and Shelley, resistant to the techniques of modernism. An imaginative lyric poet, Cullen touched on the lines of other colored people like himself and used the popular black themes of his period to some extent. One poem representative of his writing style appears below. In a very brief, simple, and direct manner, it describes the impact made by a particular incident made on the mind and heart of a young Negro child. We shall now venture to examine the incident, which is one of derision and its subsequent effects on the child.
“Incident” is a very simple and concise poem, consisting of three stanzas – quatrains utilizing the abcb rhyme scheme. The beat or rhythm is iambic quadrameter, alternating with iambic trimester. “Incident” presents a character (no longer a child) relating an experience of his to a silent listener, whereupon the poem takes on the nature of a brief dramatic monologue, as the speaker unwittingly reveals some aspect of himself.
At first reading, we hear the speaker relate a seemingly minor incident that happened to him in early childhood – eight years, to be exact. He went on a sightseeing trip to Baltimore and, like the child he was, appeared happy and excited over the prospect, for most probably he had never been there before. During the ride, he espied a white boy staring at him. The black child’s reaction was to smile but to his consternation and dismay. The other child stuck out his tongue and called him “Nigger”.
The black child, now grown up, confesses that during the eight months he was visiting in Baltimore, he remembers nothing except that incident – which occurred to him en route to Baltimore; and presumably would carry with him to his grave.
The unfortunate incident was probably the black child’s initial introduction to the racial discrimination of his time. The white child’s act was most certainly unexpected, unprovoked, and undeserved. The black child extended a smile, a warm and friendly overture only to receive an insult in return. The insult could be an example of what the bible refers to as a “stone thrown in return for bread.”
Perhaps we should not put the blame entirely on the white boy. He did not know any better. His behavior could have been learned or imitated from an elder who was a racist himself.
It is also possible that during Cullen’s time, the population of Baltimore was predominantly white and that this was the first time for the native white child to behold a black person. At any rate, we give credit to the black child’s parents for training him to be polite to strangers. We cannot say the same for the ones who reared the white boy.
Cullen’s short poem is not without symbolism. The white boy’s sneering treatment of the black child may represent White America’s turning down of what Richard Wright, another black writer, calls “the fluid love of a great people (the colored race).
What does Cullen really mean by the last two lines of his poem, “Of all the things that happened there, that’s all I remember.” There is much to admire in Baltimore – the Chesapeake Bay, its harbor and shoreline dotted with ships, steamships, even Chinese junks, buildings, and sites of historical significance (the Washington Memorial, for one), cathedrals, museums, art galleries, and universities. Why could the Negro chilled have forgotten what he saw? Mainly because he was hurt at the onset, realizing that he was black and ungainly in the sight of whites, in a place which he thought he belonged to, and this prejudice of his race would remain with him for all time.
It does not take much to make a colored man like Cullen happy. Cullen’s dream is embodied in the words of Bigger, one of Richard Wright’s characters in the novel, Native Sons. It is summed up as follows:
“It was when Bigger read the newspapers and magazines, went to the movies or walked the streets with the crowds, that he felt what he wanted: To merge himself with others and be a part of this world, to lose himself in it so he could find himself, to be allowed a chance to live like others, even though he was black.” (Wright, 1940)
Work Cited
- Academy of American Poets, Countee Cullen, Web.
- Wright, R.,Native Son. New York: Harper Collins, 1993