Effie Lee Newsome was a figure of the Harlem Renaissance who mostly wrote children's poem and parables about being young and black in the 1920s. She contributed to The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and had a clear influence on her fellow poets.

(The Dew-drier) It is a custom in some parts of Africa for travelers into the jungles to send before them in the early morning little African boys called "Dew-driers" to brush with their bodies the dew from the high grasses—and be, perchance, the first to meet the leopard's or hyena's challenge—and so open the road. "Human Brooms," Dan Crawford calls them. Brother to the firefly— For as the firefly lights the night So lights he the morning— Bathed in the dank dews as he goes forth Through heavy menace and mystery Of half-waking tropic dawns, Behold a little black boy, a naked black boy, Swee