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.
-Countee Cullen
When we were studying poetry in middle school this is one of the poems we read. It really touched me from the first time I read it and has stuck with me since. I used to write poems I liked in this old falling apart notebook that my Grandma gave me, and this one was the first one in it. I read it many, many times. Just recently I came across it somewhere online.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it is short in length, its message is very strong. This young happy child is freespirited and excited to be travelling. It sees another child its age and thinks of it as just that - a child, someone who could be their friend. But the other child just sees race, and the one word they say is so strong that it completely traumatizes the first child and overides everything else that happens on their vacation. For a child to be a target of racism from another child disrupts the spirit of childhood, and removes innocence from both sides.