Countee Cullen Incident Paragraph

      In Incident, Countee Cullen describes his vacation to Baltimore as something that he could have greatly enjoyed, but can only remember one thing. The one event he remembers occuring is a boy about his whit, as he describes in the poem, who the reader can assume is white, because the other boy lashes out a racial slur at Countee. The poem makes good use of literary devices by rhyming throughout and allowing the reader to interpret many details in few sentences.
      The theme that Cullen elects to use is how racism is upsetting and harsh for a young child to have to deal with. He says that he was happy, head-filled with glee, but then
once another child called him that racial slur, his trip in its entirety is completely ruined. The poem is truly African-American because Cullen shares of the hardships blacks were forced to be oppressed by and how society looking down on him, particularly as a child, was something unbearable to him.