The Birth of a ‘New Negro’ Woman Playwright: Zora Neale Hurston, the Howard Connection, and Spears as Liaison Double

Abstract

Spears (1925) is credited as Zora Neale Hurston’s first dramatic work. It was written during her attendance at Howard University and first published in the 1925 December issue of X-Ray, the magazine of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority at Howard University, when she was just beginning her career as a professional writer in New York. Not only having significance for providing the momentum with which Hurston made her first step toward a career as a dramatist and consequently being the author’s debut play, Spears accounts for a much bigger context that I call the ‘Howard Connection,’ which includes the six-year long period (1919-1924) of Hurston’s attendance at Howard University and her arrival in New York in 1925. The Howard Connection explains two types of contexts, diachronic and synchronic, respectively. First, it relays the playwright’s multiple temporal- geographical worlds, her childhood in Eatonville, her literary apprenticeship at Howard, and her professional authorship in New York. Secondly, it accounts for the multiple layers of relations surrounding the writing of Spears; the social needs for modern womanhood in the early 1920s as well as the ‘New Negro’ in the Harlem Renaissance era, the educational field’s response to the needs represented by the establishment of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority, and Hurston’s individual and social position as a ‘New Negro’ woman. Illuminating the historical encounter between the play and the context of the 1920s as well as the relation of the Howard Connection to Hurston’s career as a dramatist, this paper explores the significance of Spears, Hurston’s first dramatic outcome, as the indication for the emergence of a ‘New Negro’ woman playwright.