Incident by Countee Cullen

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.

1. What is the nature of the interaction between the two boys?
The Baltimorean, presumably a white boy, purposely insulted the speaker by sticking out his tongue and calling him a 'nigger' even after being smiled at. This is an act of racism and discrimination.


2. Why does the speaker remember nothing more than the incident, even though he stayed in Baltimore from "May until December"? 
The speaker was taken aback by the incident. The word 'nigger' is a very offensive word to African Americans and through the poem, we know that the speaker was truly offended as it was the only thing he remembered during his 7 month stay in Baltimore when he was eight.

3. In a paragraph compare your experience with prejudice with the persona in the poem.
I personally have not yet experienced any racial prejudice but my father once told me about his Kelantanese friend who experienced social class prejudice when he was looking to buy jewellery for his wife. Being a simple and humble man that he is, he only wore an old shirt and an old pair of jeans and spoke kelantanese to the goldsmith. The goldsmith (who was wearing an expensive chunky jewellery piece around his neck) told him to leave and that he shouldn't be wasting his time there. Little did he know, the man in old clothes who only spoke Kelantanese was a successful car dealer in Kelantan. The story ended with the expensive chunky jewellery piece around the Kelantanese car dealer's neck.