And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!
The Negro Renaissance, besides losing its shame over its folk
culture, developed a fresh interest in its African heritage. One
of the many expressions of this was made by Countee Cullen:
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
The Renaissance also included an outcropping of Negro novelists.
There had been Negro novelists before, and the best known of them
were Charles W. Chestnut and, to some extent, Paul Laurence
Dunbar. Chestnut's novels included "The Conjure Woman" and
"The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line", whereas
Dunbar, who wrote mainly poetry, was best known for his novel
"The Sport of the Gods". Chestnut's writing, though moving away
from the plantation romanticism which had glorified slavery,
developed a more realistic flavor, and it emphasized intergroup
relations based on the color line rather than developing the interior
lives of its characters.
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