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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.
Most of us Colored Folk remember the first time a white person ever called us a "nigger." Of course, it's not as if the word had never been uttered around us before. In fact it's most likely that someone dear to us, a close member of the family, called us niggers many times, but that was different. They could do that -- it did not mean the same thing, did not sound as mean and hurtful as when some unknown, hateful white person was doing it for the sole purpose of inflicting pain. It's not something you easily forget. Repress, maybe, but never really forget. I remember when it happened to me and to my sisters just like it was yesterday.
I remember how the incidents changed my perceptions of my friends and how their perceptions of my sisters and me were changed by the simple mean-spirited expression of that deadly word, "nigger."
Of all the incidents I recall, the one that rises to the top was the one that hurt my little sister, Jessie. But perhaps even more than Jessie's anguish, it was the witnessing of Mom's pain that I so sadly recall. Even as she tried to comfort us, it was the hurt in her eyes that betrayed her own suffering. I remember feeling that I had somehow failed to protect my sister. The incident made me feel so bad that I still remember it and feel the sorrow all these years later.
Though she is just a couple of years younger than I, she, like the other five of my sisters, is still my baby sister. Perhaps the responsibility of being the only boy in the family for so many years created a sense of responsibility in me for my sisters that I still carry with me today. I love them. I care deeply about them. As much as I can, I protect them. But on that Saint Valentine's Day in 1958 I failed to stop the hurt that someone had addressed to her on a Valentine's Day card, one of the dozens that had been exchanged in the classroom that day among the students at Our Lady of the Rosary School.
As a kid, I was supposed to keep them out of trouble, make sure they did not get hurt, or hurt each other, or me for that matter. Not an easy task, because they were, and remain still, very energetic, always into something. If I could have a penny for every time I did something to keep them out of trouble, I'd have a few dollars today. But on that day there really was nothing I could have done to prevent what happened. Someone sent Jessie a mean card. It said, "To Jessica Bradberry the darkie nigger." It was on one of those bright multicolored cards with a big heart saying "Be My Valentine" and he signed it.
Back in those days, Valentine's Day, like all of the other celebrations, was a big deal at school. We had spent days getting ready, decorating our classrooms for the big party where we would exchange cards, eat candy, play games and hear the Sisters' stories about St. Valentine. Sometimes all of the classes would get together in the school basement to watch a movie or put on a play or to sing. On that particular day, as I recall, we all partied together. The Italians, the Polish, the Yugoslavian students, all together, little Catholics having innocent fun, not at all aware of our differences.
As was usual, we took our cards and some candy home. Try as we might, we just could not eat it all at school. We traveled in little groups on the way home, dropping off classmates at their houses along the way, playing games, laughing and running just like everyone else. At the time, we did not know that we were any different from anyone else, but on that February 14, when we got home and read our cards, we realized that we were in fact, quite different. That's when we found the card.
Let me be clear -- we already knew we were black. We were then, and we remain today very proud of that fact. We share a long and proud African-Native American heritage on both my parents' sides of our family. I grew up with cousins as black as coal and white as snow. We were fed a healthy serving of our non-white ancestry. We celebrated our culture in every way we knew how to do it -- in dance and music and literature. Mom kept our heads full of stories about her childhood and the challenges she and her brothers and sisters faced as little black kids growing up in Auburn and Lockport, living on the fringes of society, often hungry, always poor, but proud and determined.
So the card did not serve as the revelation of our coloredness to us, it served as the revelation that someone we knew and went to school with seemed to hate my sister just because she was different, black. That was the problem.
W.E.B. DuBois refers to a similar incident in his 1903 "The Souls of Black Folk":
"In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards -- ten cents a package -- and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card -- refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others ..."
DuBois' incident resulted in the development of his self-consciousness as an African and as an American. He wrote, "One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
We got over it. The way Mom explained it, the boy who had sent Jessie the card was just ignorant, but not necessarily evil. She told us to be proud that we were her beautiful black children, that we were not niggers and that we should never ever use the word even among ourselves because the people who use the word were the problem, not the people it was aimed at. We were directed to pray for him and to ask God to forgive him. Mom went to the school and spoke the principal about it. That resulted in a meeting with my sister and Sister Mary Aquinas. Then the whole school was told that we had to try harder to get along with each other in spite of our differences. We tried.
That summer at camp in Angola, I selected the boy as my swimming buddy and I tried to drown him. Thank God I could not seem to hold him down before the lifeguard blew his whistle, requiring us to stand up together.
As Jay David wrote in his collection of essays on the subject in, "Growing Up Black":
"Probably the single most important event in the life of any African-American child is his recognition of his own coloredness, with all the implications of that fact. The realization can come as mild awareness that is taken in stride, or it can come as a rude shock that results in a trauma; but whatever the circumstances, a new understanding of the self influences the child's every thought and emotion from that day forth. Truly he sees the world through different eyes, from a different perspective, with somewhat less of the innocence of his earlier years."