Incident

In “Incident,” Countee Cullen relies on diction, juxtaposition, and irony to represent the impact of racism on a Black child’s identity formation. The poem is a narrative in which the overall movement is from innocence to knowledge and from joy to pain.

In the first stanza, the speaker sets the tone through diction: “Heart-filled, head-filled with glee” (Line 2) captures the exuberance of the child, whose emotions and intellect are stimulated, overwhelmed even, by the novel yet joyful sights of a city. The child is free—riding through the city from a perch where they can see everything despite their small size. Cullen relies on ballad meter (see: Literary Devices), which lends the lines a skipping rhythm that makes sense for the voice of a child. When the child-speaker encounters the little boy, the staring child is just one more object of curiosity that allows the child-speaker to see what a “Baltimorean” (Line 3) looks like. The child-speaker and the little boy have parity: They are just two children looking at each other with no hint of racial conflict.