Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays

Spears (1926)

spears (1926) Spears, a short two-act play, won an honorable mention in the first Opportunity literary contest organized by Charles S. Johnson in 1925, and was later published in X-Ray, the magazine of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority, in December 1926. It was never produced . The play is notable for the contrast it provides with Color Struck, in terms of its setting , themes, and rendering of dialogue. Setting the play in an imaginary African kingdom , Hurston exploits the then-faddish interest in “primitive” cultures and peoples that foreshadowed, to a certain degree, her eventual relationship with Charlotte Osgood Mason, a champion of primitivism who believed that American society could be rejuvenated through contact with African American (and African) culture. While Langston Hughes wrote wryly, in his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” of “the tom-tom of revolt” felt by blacks “against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” Hurston, seemingly without irony, sets her characters dancing to the tom-tom beat of “darkest Africa.” Obviously, Hurston’s representation of Africa comes out of her own imaginings rather than any lived experience, and the wild costumes and dances described in the play were certainly based in fantasy rather than the ethnographical approach that would characterize her later work (she did not begin her studies with Franz Boas until 1926). One wonders, then, how the play was awarded a prize in the Opportunity contest. Certainly it was not due to a paucity of submissions—Johnson received over seven hundred . The answer, perhaps, lies in the underlying message of the play: that loyalty to one’s community can overcome poverty and privation. Despite the stilted and stereotypically mannered “African” idioms employed by the characters, and the intrusion of exotic displays such as the rain dance at the end of act 1 and the battle scene in act 2, this message comes through clearly. Nevertheless, the play panders to the voyeuristic interests of the “Nordics,” as Hughes described them in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea, who came to Harlem nightclubs in the 1920s to watch blacks “like amusing animals in a zoo.” Both Meet the Mamma and Spears demonstrate Hurston’s willingness to cater to the popular; it was only after her exposure to Boas’s ideas and, more important , the fieldwork she undertook in the South in 1928–1929, that she found a different course as a writer. 51 030 spears (51-62) 4/9/08 11:14 AM Page 51 Spears A Play in Two Acts cast: Uledi, A Lualaba1 warrior Monanga Wa bibau Biki, King of Lualaba Zaidi,2 Daughter of Monanga Bombay, old Councilor to king Tipo Tipo, servant of king Waganga, medicine man Monoko Mwa Nkoi, Chief of [the] Wahehe Vent Vogel, his servant A Witch Woman of Lualaba 1st Warrior 2nd Warrior Wife of Bombay Women, Warriors on either side Monanga Wa bibau Biki is dressed in a lion’s skin with a circlet of vulture feathers about his head. Anklet of lion’s teeth about his ankle. Uledi and all of the warriors are bare to the waist except for a small skin below the loins that hangs down behind, except that Uledi wears a tuft of lion’s tail about his neck. Monoko Mwa Nkoi wears a leopard’s skin with the circle of claws suspended from his neck. Tipo [Tipo] and Vent Vogel wear loin cloths only. [Waganga] the medicine man and [the] Witch Woman are gorgeously dressed in bone jewelry with their bodies painted. Rings in noses and ears. Zaidi wears monkey-fur bands about wrists and several bone and copper wire bracelets on her arms. Some above elbow. She wears numerous necklaces , bands of ostrich about her ankles.A loin cloth of monkey-fur held in front by a miniature shield. A circlet of white ostrich about her head. Time: Present. Place: Africa. 52 030 spears (51-62) 4/9/08 11:14 AM Page 52 act 1 Setting: The courtyard before the temple of Monanga. In the background is the wattled walls of the house. There is one narrow door in each wall. The roof is flat. A tusk or two of ivory is on the roof with other trophies of the chase. A bunch or two of dried tobacco can be seen...