Stanza 2 Summary

Lines 5-6

Now I was eight and very small,
   And he was no whit bigger, 

• In this new quatrain we get a little more info, and the speaker, by beginning with the word "now," seems to be in full-on storytelling mode. This poem is starting to sound a little like a fable or fairytale to us. (It did start with the word "once" after all.) 
• So, back to our story: line 5 tells us that the speaker, at the time of the incident on the bus, was just eight years old. And he was a little dude at that. We're picturing a skinny kid with chicken legs on that bus. 
• Then we find out that the other person in the poem—that "Baltimorean"—was also a kid, and that he was "no whit bigger."
• The word "whit," btw, means "the least bit." It's usually used in the negative, as in "no whit." So basically the speaker is saying that the Baltimorean was also a "very small" kid. 
• These two lines are telling us that we've got two little—and young—kids on our hands here. There's a real sense that this poem happens in the past; it has a retrospective tone to it. Our speaker may have been eight years old on the bus, but he's definitely older now.

Lines 7-8 

And so I smiled, but he poked out
   His tongue, and called me, "N*****." 

• Man. The poem was pretty chill until this point. The speaker has noticed the other little boy on the bus looking at him, so finally he decided to do a totally normal, kid-like thing: he smiles at him. 
• Does he get a smile in return? Nope. He gets a racial slur. The other kid rudely sticks out his tongue, and then he calls the speaker "n*****," which, as we are sure you know, is a racist and hateful term with a pretty revolting history in the USA. 
• It's at this moment of racial prejudice that we realize that the speaker of "Incident" is African American. Before this moment, he was just a kid on a bus—now, he's been marked as "other." His racial identity makes him different from the other boy who we can now infer is white. 
• It's a shocking moment—we sure as heck didn't see it coming the first time we read the poem. But upon reflection, we think that the poem kinda sorta anticipated this moment. 
• First, we are set up for the word "n*****" by the word "bigger" in line 6 (which is part of a rhyming pair of lines). 
• Second, there's a subtle hint of the Baltimorean's race. Cullen uses the word "whit," which, let's be honest, is not really a common word. What does "whit" look and sound like? You got it—"white." This is some really subtle linguistic foreshadowing. 
• So, before we move on, let's just take stock of what's gone on. We've got two little kids on a bus in Baltimore, one black and one white, and the white kid uses the most offensive word out there to address the black kid. 
• Are you feeling angry? Hurt? Betrayed? All these things? That's good, because we don't find out how the speaker feels. The word "n*****" is just hanging out there at the end of the line. It still shocks, even when you've read the poem before, because it's a word that—thankfully—we aren't very used to hearing these days. It's become commonplace to replace it with the phrase "n-word" when we speak about it So even seeing the word in print can be jarring. 
• Now you might be thinking to yourself, why aren't we using the phrase "the n-word"? Why are we at Shmoop using the word "n*****"? 
• We feel that it's important to talk about the poem in the terms it gives us—that, in a way, the poem is all about the use of the word "n*****." And so it's key that we use the word when discussing the actual poem, even though we'd never ever use it in our daily lives.