[Tener refutes the widely-held belief that the title of Baraka 's play "Dutchman, " refers to the legend of the Flying Dutchman.]

Although the critical material on LeRoi Jones' dramatic works has been steadily accumulating, one of his best plays has not received the varied attention it deserves. "Dutchman" has intrigued a few critics like Harold Clurman, Hugh Nelson, Susan Sontag, Sister Mary John Carol Blitgen, and John Ferguson. Each has sought to interpret the complex events leading to Clay's murder. For Blitgen, Nelson, and Ferguson the title refers to the legend of the Flying Dutchman. The most comprehensive treatment of this point of view is provided by Professor Nelson [in "LeRoi Jones' 'Dutchman': A Brief Ride on a Doomed Ship," Education Theatre Journal, March, 1968]. His thesis is that Jones had converted the legend to a modern myth in order to reveal the "symbolic relationship of Clay and Lula."

Professor Nelson draws parallels equating the subway car of the play with the legendary sailing ship and its doomed crew. The most important, yet awkward, parallel equates Lula with the cursed Captain. The problem in this parallel is caused by the necessity to explain the reversal of sexual roles. According to the Wagnerian version of the legend, the curse on the Captain can be removed only if he is released by the love of a pure woman. Lula, in her surrogate role, therefore, has to find the love of a pure man. As Nelson points out, Lula cannot be released by Clay's love. She can only use him. Professor Nelson concludes, then, that the legend is "an indication of the doomed fatality of the situation and of the characters who live through it." For Nelson the mythical pattern of the play involves the heroine's quest for redemption (Lula needs to be taken as a human being not as a sex machine), the discovery of the proper object of her quest (Clay), her apparent failure through betrayal (Clay cannot respond properly to her), the violent denouement (the quarrel), and the last minute union of the lovers in death.

A closer analysis of the play suggests that other views are possible without the necessity of the subsitute sex scheme to make the old legend apply. Indeed the play needs to be examined as part of that body of literature that treats the duel of the sexes. Its immediate dramatic ancestors are Strindberg's Miss Julie, Ionesco's The Lesson, and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Against this back-ground the legend of the Flying Dutchman appears too barren a myth to explain the ambiguities in the play.

The title of the play suggests a possible interpretation that has heretofore been ignored. No definite article precedes the title. The play is called "Dutchman," not "The Dutchman." The implication of this omission is that Jones had no specific individual or legend at hand. Instead, it is more likely that what he intended is the theatrical term meaning a strip of cloth used to hid the crack between the seams of flats, or, in a more general sense, a contrivance used to hide a defect of some kind.

From this perspective the play acquires a meaning different from what Professor Nelson has suggested. The theme of the play is anchored to the defects in character and in personality of a black man and a white woman and to the devices which they use to hide those defects. Both Lula and Clay have lost their identities as human beings and use role playing to hide their loss and subsequent alienation from meaningful relationships between man and woman. Inasmuch as Clay is black, the play also reflects the historical relationships between blacks and whites on an abstract, highly generalized level. In this sense the subway (on which the action develops) is similar to the underground railroad of slave days that carried slaves north to their freedom and to their new identities. The subway is obviously a train and it is underground. It takes Clay and Lula somewhere, perhaps to freedom. But that freedom is defined differently for them. The train takes Clay to his death; it frees him from his self-imposed dependence on the devices of clothing and white middle class values. It takes Lula to other victims. She can find herself only in the repetitive killing of others. As Harold Clurman pointed out in his review of "The Toilet" and "The Slave," Lula is the "concise and piercing dramatic image for the killer our society generates through its metallic emptiness" [The Naked Image, 1966].

Lula has as her heritage both the Lilith and the Eve patterns. She is female and equal to man; she is the temptress and needs to determine man's reactions to her. Her first role or device to hide her emptiness is to be the aggressive seductress searching for a man. Once she has discovered him, she defines the situation between them in sexual and political terms. She maniupultes Clay's reactions by telling him lies and deducing part of his life style from the stereotyped pattern his clothing suggests he has become accommodated to. Her second strategy is to pretend to be the white liberal intellectual who sees the world in terms of labels. Not being able to accept meaningful relationships, she tells lies to create illusions and to give meaning to the situations which she helps develop. She turns relationships into games, especially the sexual feelings between men and women. With her hand on Clay's knee she says that he is going to a party and that she is a poetess.

But she is also a creative puppet master. Conceiving a dramatic event, she develops the dialogue, creates the situations, and then, because she has substituted knowledge of the stereotype for knowledge of the real Clay, wants him to act and even become the character she has created falsely. She is an author in search of a character who is necessary to her creative abilities. As a consequence of this quality in her role playing, her relationship to Clay tends to be ritualistic and depends on sexual and political attitudes, on the game of a false white liberality, and on her desire to substitute her illusions of life for what she senses is already dead.

Although she plays other roles to hide what she is, the early incidents in the play have presented her defect. She is one of the living dead. Like Clay, she is the product of her racial past. Embedded in her are the desires of the white master who wants to exploit the sexual resources of the black slave, who wants to shape the image of the black man according to his white vision. By that act of manipulation, the master loses his identity. The relationship between a master and his slave is frequently characterized by the tendency of the master to lose his human identity in treating his slave and to exploit the slave through habit. In the end he cannot relate to the slave like one human being to another. He responds to what he senses is a thing, a piece of property. In this sense Lula cannot love.

Having lost her identity, literally having no valid historical roots which enable her to relate to Clay, she becomes bored. In the next instant she turns sharply on Clay, rejects him, then shifts to him the burden of their incipient sexual involvement. She accuses him of trying to get fresh with her. In the historical context of racial America, her actions are equivalent to jamming the black into a dangerous, ambiguous position which many whites would interpret as damaging the honor of a white woman. In the past some whites would have lynched a black man caught in such an act. Clay's response to her actions cannot be divorced from the historical consequences. He has become a type which she knows well.

She pretends also to be the new white liberal who appeared on the American scene in the 1960's. She knows how blacks should act and what it means to be black. In this mask she attacks his stereotyped clothing and reveals her digust with him because he has not resisted the pressures of white society. Believing that she knows what his identity should be and how he should find himself, she tells him what he is not while ignoring what he might wish to be. Hers is here again the role of the racist killer. She sneers at his lack of tradition; she ridicules his acceptance of white middle class values. But like Clay, she too has lost her historical antecedents which gave her life meaning. As an actress of dead roles, she symbolizes the white attitudes which Jones has come to attack so often in his plays.