Stanza 3 Summary

Lines 9-12

I saw the whole of Baltimore
  From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
  That's all that I remember.

• After this horrendous incident, instead of telling us his feelings, the speaker leaves us with an empty space—there's a real void between the poem's final two stanzas. 
• Does the little boy cry? Pick a fight? Get off the bus? Stay silent? We'll never know what happened.
• But what we do know is what the speaker tells us in this final quatrain: he really got to see the whole city (he "saw the whole of Baltimore") for a nice chunk of time ("from May until December"). 
• But all this being said, all he remembers of that city is this one incident, when he was the victim of hate speech—when a little kid called him "n*****." 
• Half a year of his life has been subsumed by this moment of racism—that's how powerful the word "n*****" is. We don't even know the background of the Baltimorean boy—is he ignorant? Is he being purposefully vile? Who knows? What we do know is that his intentions don't really matter: the word stings our speaker no matter what the sentiment behind them is. 
• It's a real coming-of-age moment for our speaker. The incident of "Incident" causes our speaker to realize that he's different, and, among some people (well, unfortunately, a lot of people), hated for his difference. This moment marks the beginning of the speaker's recognition of himself as a black person in a society dominated by white people. 
• And before we finish up, we just want to think about the form of the poem a bit. As we've already discussed, it's written in a ballad meter (and has an appropriate ABCB rhyme scheme). The ballad meter has a sing-song-y, lighthearted feel to it, which matches with the content of the poem at the beginning.
• But by the end of the poem, boy is there a conflict between form and content. We have a lighthearted ballad form and some seriously heavy-duty issues. 
• And that, we think, is the point: you can be a sweet, gleeful kid, riding along, minding your own business on the bus, and then BAM: the ignorance of others has the power to intrude on your day, and define (in a horrible way) a big ol' chunk of your life.
• The poem makes us feel this clash in our bones. The poem is only 12 lines long, but boy does it take us on a ride. And boy, does it make us feel for that eight-year-old boy who experiences hate, and who is consumed by it. Countee Cullen sure did know how to shock his readers into moments of empathy, recognition, and anger. (And we're pretty sure that's why we're still reading this poem almost 100 years after it was written.)