Black writers--through novels, plays, poetry, and essays--described how blacks made use of any available asset or talent to outsmart, out-think, endure, or merely contend with their white oppressors. Some of the survival mechanisms that became standard were (1) religion, (2) ignorance as wit, (3) alcohol, and (4) drugs. Early black poets, such as Jupiter Hammon and Phyllis Wheatley, suggested that bondage in America was preferable to heathen freedom in Africa, but after slavery, blacks began to question the power of a god that would have let them suffer so. The writings of Fenton Johnson, Margaret Walker, James Baldwin, and Ben Caldwell have indicated that God has become less of a crutch, and two works from the Harlem Renaissance Era (by Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes) reveal that blacks were becoming skeptical of the white man's religion. In "American Negro Folktales," Richard Dorson categorizes the stories told by blacks who played ignorant to outsmart the whites. Margaret Walker and Richard Wright, among others, have chronicled blacks' use of alcohol as a means of forgetting who, what, or where they were, but the trend has shifted to escape through drugs (Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" and Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land"). Slavery, inequality, and maltreatment have led blacks to resort to any release possible and writers to record these temporary escapes. (AEW)