Dutchman 627by Lula—she was determining what Clay said and
when he said it. Clay, as a young African-American
man, doesn’t have a strong individual voice—not
one that society is willing to listen to, at least. Clay
ultimately has to make a choice as to whether to
remain a faceless member of society or to step up
and claim his individuality in the face of majority
oppression. He attempts to choose the latter, which
leads to his death. Clay’s cruel fate seems to be a
bleak harbinger for the ability of individuals to be
heard and to be able to express themselves. Society
is against him, as shown by the willingness of the
other subway passengers to help Lula throw Clay’s
body off the train. No one stands up for themselves,
or for Clay. They move en masse, with no regard for
the individual victim.
Of course, the irony in the play is that Clay
has to speak for the entire community of African
Americans in his dealings with Lula. He cannot ever
achieve a truly individual personality—whether he
is acting the part for Lula, or speaking up for Bessie
Smith and black artists, Clay is a collective represen-
tation. Whether for good or ill, Clay must stand up
with a collective, rather than an individual, message.
This is a double-edged sword; there is unity in the
collective identity, but no individual strength within
the racist society, a situation borne out when Lula
sets her sights on the next young African-American
man in the subway car. The men are helpless against
Lula, who exercises the power of life and death over
them; society ends up winning, but at least one indi-
vidual puts up a fight.
Sharyn Emery
race in Dutchman
Like the arrival of the rumbling subway car in
which it is set, racial violence is inevitable in LeRoi
Jones’s (now known as Amiri Baraka) play Dutch-
man. As Clay and Lula spar, flirt, talk, and dance,
their interplay slides from a sexualized male-female
dynamic to one grounded in white-black racial
conflict. The work is, most simply, a play about race.
Clay struggles to maintain several racialized guises
against the barbs hurled by the temptress Lula. At
the start, Clay is somewhat naïve about the role race
plays (and will play) in his interactions with the
apple-eating white woman, but as the play advances
and he dons various guises, Clay becomes more hip
to the game, more aware of his “true” race, and of
the true black man at his core. Unfortunately, that
awareness comes at a price, and Clay pays for his
earlier naiveté with his life.
When he first steps onto the subway car he is a
Booker T. Washington-type intellectual, buttoned
up and focused on the future. Lula reads these quali-
ties in him right away, stereotyping his neat clothes
and polite demeanor, and proclaiming him dull
and familiar—a young college man on his way to a
party. Clay falls for this reading, confirming Lula’s
attempts to “read” his racial identity. She chides him
for looking foolish and “inauthentic,” skinny and
pasty-faced. By challenging his racial “authenticity,”
Lula is able draw Clay into her game. She eventually
bores of this racial persona, and expertly maneuvers
Clay into his next guise, by playing to his desires for
sex as well as his desire to be seen as an authentic
black man.
At Lula’s prompting, Clay becomes a sexual-
ized black “buck” figure, tempting the white woman
while being tempted by her. This is reflected in the
rapid back-and-forth Lula traps Clay into, as she
virtually scripts him into desiring her—thus creat-
ing the image of the sex-crazed Negro hunting the
white woman. She demands that he invite her to
the party he’s attending, and imaginatively playacts
their entrance into that event. She entices Clay
with the phony script of their date, then turns the
tables when Clay expresses genuine interest—she
claims to be too wild for him and forces him to
prove that he can handle her. This forces Clay into
playing the “wild buck,” a highly destructive, yet
long-standing racial stereotype. The very thought
of a black man with a white woman is at the core
of America’s lynching history, and the image of the
sexually aggressive black man will come back at the
end of the play, when Lula uses it to her murderous
advantage.
Lula eventually works herself into a frenzy,
baiting Clay with harsher language until he has to
physically restrain her and silence her insults. Thus,
Clay ends the play as a proud African American,
rejecting Lula outright and taking a political stance
for black culture and against white supremacy. He
(re)claims the blues, sex, and poetry for black culture,