"Incident" -Countee Cullen

One major element that drew me to this poem was the persona. The speaker is a black eight-year old, and I am white, but the childlike honesty of these words had a completely empathetic impact on me. In the first stanza, the speaker is "heart-filled, head-filled with glee," and when she smiles at a boy staring at her, "he poked out/ His tongue, and called me, "Nigger." This no-longer-PC slur found an interesting place in the language of this poem; in fact, this word is what really hit me hard. Clearly, it is a non-traditional word in the world of aesthetic poetry, but it is exactly what's necessary to drive the point home. Words do hurt us, but we can still turn that pain into something beautiful, as the speaker/ poet has done here. This is how I found myself in this piece. I am not black; however, I was once eight years old, and remember the impact that hateful words can have on a child and even adults. You can't forget direct degradations of your own "self," and we are forced to live with all of the insults. Still, we have to learn from these emotional scars, because they will create who we ultimately are.