de it clear that his bitter hostility was
aimed at injustice and inhumanity and not at American ideals when he
wrote:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be
An ever-living seed,
Its dream
Lies deep in the heart of me.

Besides articulating the Negro's emotional reaction to prejudice and
discrimination, the Negro Renaissance depicted other aspects of the
Afro-American culture. The flavor of its religious life was captured best
by James Weldon Johnson in his volume "God's Trombones: Negro Sermons in
Verse", which he published in 1927. Instead of resorting to the standard
technique of using stereotyped dialect to capture the flavor, Johnson
used powerful, poetic imagery to express its essence. In "The Creation"
Johnson depicted a Negro minister preaching on the opening verses of
Genesis:

And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely--
I'll make me a world.

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. Negro fiction came into its own in 1923 with Jean Toomer's
publication "Cane", and, in 1924, with Jessie Redman Fauset's "The