[December 2002 journal entry]
I spoke recently with a Presbyterian Church (USA) pastor/friend about Countee Cullen’s poem The Incident –
The Incident
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 (1903-46) was raised in New York City by his grandmother and then by F. A. Cullen, the pastor of the largest African-American Methodist Church in the city. Cullen was raised in privilege re both culture and education (including New York University and Harvard). Cullen sought recognition for his poetry beyond his being considered a leading African-American poet. He turned down numerous professorships at the peak of his reputation in the 1920s. He subsequently taught in the New York City public schools.
My pastor/friend was preparing to facilitate a discussion of the poem with his congregation. I encouraged him to imagine the church experiences the three characters in the poem might have had – i.e., (1) the child harshly labeled, (2) the ‘Baltimorean’ child, and (3) a child sitting near enough to have observed and overheard this incident. What is ‘the gospel’ in each child’s church? I suggested that the word ‘religion’ should be approached as one of those words for which a dictionary lists several meanings in a descending order. I would make the nuances Bonhoeffer gave ‘religion’ and the nuances I have added to his in these journal entries the first/common meanings in the list of meanings.