Heyward wrote the play "Brass Ankle", produced in 1931 in New York. The title refers to a Southern term for a person of mixed-race ancestry, and was long used in a pejorative way. The play addressed issues of mixed-race, featuring a couple in a small southern town who have grown up believing they were white and learning about some African-American ancestry. Reviewers treated his play favorably as a version of the "tragic mulatto" genre, but it was not a commercial success.