Summary
The speaker recounts a story they tell every year. They describe something unsettling that they saw years ago as they peered out the window, between drawn shades. They witness men dressed in white, surrounding a cross and lighting it on fire. They darken the lights in their home and light lanterns.
Analysis
"Incident" is a poem about the residual trauma left after an act of hate. The speaker retells the story of the time their family watched members of the Ku Klux Klan burn a cross outside their home. They capture this scene in glimpses, giving the poem the atmosphere of a ghost story. The poem captures the way these images have lingered in the speaker's mind, despite the speaker's attempts to deny or minimize them.
In the first stanza, the speaker sets up the poem's structure. They say: "We tell the story every year— / how we peered from the windows, shades drawn—." This remark shows that the events told in the poem are related through a frame story. The second line immediately establishes the eerie mood. The depiction of the speaker "peering" out of the windows with its "shades drawn" serves to quickly show that they saw something they were afraid of. The next line downplays the significance of what occurred ("though nothing really happened") while the final line of the stanza implies it was something overtly disturbing ("the charred grass now green again."). The image of the "charred grass" makes it clear that this scene involved fire. While the speaker still notes that the grass is "now green again," again minimizing the reality of what transpired, that initial image still appears to be unforgettable.
In the next stanza, the speaker then repeats the line about peering out the window before stating that they were looking "at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree." The comparison of the cross to a Christmas tree creates dissonance, as it connotes celebration in a moment that feels anything but happy. They also note "the charred grass still green," using a slightly altered version of the line, "the charred grass now green again." This situates the reader in time, showing that this moment is taking place before the fire has happened, unlike the previous line, which was set after the fact. The combination of the detail about the "charred grass" as well as the inclusion of the cross gives the reader a fair amount of certainty that the speaker witnessed a cross burning. This impression is implied by their fearful tone and the presence of fire elsewhere in the text. Trethewey uses slightly changed repetitions like this one throughout the poem, subtly shifting the meaning of the line with the modification of one or two words. In the final line of the stanza, they saw that they took safety precautions: "we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps." This line makes it plain that they were frightened, as they were doing their best not to be noticed.
In the third stanza, the speaker again repeats a line from the stanza before, but adds a very important detail: "At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, / a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns." These men in white gowns are clearly members of the Ku Klux Klan, who were known for terrorizing Black communities at night by dressing in white robes and burning crosses. The speaker once again characterizes them unusually, describing them as "white as angels in their gowns." This is another strange juxtaposition, as it takes a deeply upsetting image and places it in the context of something sacred and graceful. This choice seems like another instance of trying to deny this moment its frightening impact. In the third line, the speaker repeats their comment about lighting hurricane lamps before describing "the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil." The use of the word "trembling" subtly conveys the terror they experienced in this moment, but does so by displacing this emotion onto the wick.
The poem is written in five stanzas, without a rhyme scheme or meter. It roughly follows the pantoum form, in which the second and fourth lines become the first and third lines of the next one. Trethewey makes notable and frequent use of repetition throughout the poem, recycling various lines. This choice shows how images are reused in each telling of this story, as well as how the speaker tries to suppress some of the terror of the memory itself. By moving particular words in later iterations of a line, Trethewey can build a fuller, more complex composite picture of a scene.
