[In the following article, Reck examines archetypal symbolism in "Dutchman," and argues that Baraka's play pities the white world, leaving Lula stuck in it and setting Clay free through death.]

Most viewers and readers of LeRoi Jones' play "Dutchman" acknowledge its power and recognize the timeliness of the theme. No one has really shown, however, how the elements of myth which it contains make it, at least in a literary way, considerably more than a topical drama of American Racial strife. Newsweek magazine in its review gave token recognition to the quality of myth which raises "Dutchman" "above sociology" to something that is "perennial among men: the exploitation of one another for satisfaction of dreams and hungers"; but it did not analyze Jones' use of myth very specifically.

The stage action of "Dutchman" is simply this: a white girl encounters a black man on a New York subway. When he refuses to fit her erotic dream of the primitive black, she proceeds to taunt him with her sharp mind and her beautiful body until he drops his white disguise to become a Negro and deliver a tirade against the claim that whites can ever understand what being a Negro means. His attack ends in his own ruin, however, when she suddenly murders him.

Jones' early stage directions point toward his purpose to build his message on legend and mythology. He describes the setting as "the flying underbelly of the city" and notes that the subway is "heaped in modern myth." "Dutchman" is, in fact, worked around the most archetypal of all myths: the seduction of the male by the beautiful but deadly female, with particular inference to the myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The name of the Negro male, Clay, seems to suggest an Adam and an Everyman; and the white temptress, Lula, is not only a direct descendent of Lilith, Circe, and Delilah, but particularly of Eve. When she enters the subway car, Jones has her eating an apple, which she soon will offer to Clay ("You want this?"). Clay later muses that "eating apples is always the first step" and will even ask: "Hey, what was in those apples?"

As the fall of Adam may be sexual allegory, Clay's destruction is also sex-oriented. Lula's opening remark is ". … I'd turned around and saw you staring through the window in the vicinity of my ass and legs." She obscenely provokes his frenzy with: "Let's rub bellies on the train. The nasty. The nasty. Do the gritty grind, like your ol' raghead mammy. Grind till you lose your mind."

Yet the girl versus boy is only surface; it is only symbolic of white versus black. She refuses to let him be white by damaging his self-image with "God you're dull" and by accusing him of crawling "through the wire" and making tracks "to my side." When he is finally black, however, ("Kiss my black ass"), she kills him. The black man is first condemned when he emulates the white (he is destined to be only a poor imitation anyway). And if he is willing to be totally black, he gets death rather than ridicule. A form of survival if he submits to imitation; death when true to his own nature. With Lula as an Eve and with Clay as a kind of Everyman, Jones seems to be saying that the Negro is man in a natural and primitive and virtuous state: Adam, as it were, before the fall. He is tempted to corruption by white socialization, represented by Eve/Lula and the apples.

Yet it is the white world which Jones seems to finally pity. So the play's title implies, although no one has apparently recognized it. The title is obvious reference to the myth of the Flying Dutchman, condemned to sail the seven seas through eternity, denied the peace of a death. After Clay's murder, Lula moves to apparently repeat the pattern against another Negro male, a device that a number of critics have objected to as theatrical and contrived. Yet, the repetition is essential, since like the ancient Dutchman, she has been condemned by her own bigotry and frustration to act out this ritual through eternity, accompanied now by the hideous screaming of the twentieth-century subway.