Incident

The young white boy who calls the speaker a racial slur symbolizes the power of racism. The boy’s treatment of the speaker forces the speaker to confront the fact that they will never be welcome in the city due to racism. The encounter with the boy is thus the speaker’s first realization of how alienating it is to be in a society to which one can never fully belong. The staring boy also shows just how people enact racism. The staring boy never puts his hands on the speaker. Nevertheless, his staring, sticking out of his tongue, and speech all serve to “discipline” the young Black speaker for daring to stare at and smile at a white person on terms of equality.

Baltimore symbolizes both childhood wonder and the pain of racism. At the start of the poem, the speaker eagerly looks at the sights of Baltimore because doing so is a novel experience. Baltimore captures the speaker’s imagination and gives the speaker a sense of freedom, likely a reflection of the idealized notion that Black migrants to cities had as they moved from the rural South. The speaker’s sense of wonder ends when confronted with racism. Baltimore then becomes a city where the speaker forgets “all the things that happened there” (Line 11) except the encounter with the little boy.