Dutchman | Clay

Clay is a twenty-year-old black man, or, according to Baraka, a Negro man. The distinction is that a Negro, according to the playwright' s nominative system, is one who compromises his own identity in order to maintain a peaceful relationship with his white oppressors. Clay is a typical bourgeois black male, so predictably bourgeois that Lula is able to tell his life history by the evidence of his dress (a too-narrow suit coat), his demeanor (decorous, tentative), and his style of speech (middle class, intellectual, full of pretensions).

Clay is at first attracted to the sexy,...

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