[Below, Tener claims that "The Toilet" explores the negative affects of white society on the maturing process of black boys.]

At the time mat Baraka was composing "The Toilet," most blacks did not have black heroes to emulate in shaping their psyches. They had primarily white mythic or historical or athletic or artistic models. But the feeling was abroad that the white culture was dying and that the dependency on white models could only destroy the black identity. James Baldwin had pointed out in The Fire Next Time that "white people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being." Much later Eldridge Cleaver emphasized in Soul on Ice that the white race had lost its heroes. Its youth had come to see that its historical white heroes such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were really arch-villains. Young whites began to "recoil in shame from the spectacle of cowboys and pioneers … galloping across a movie screen shooting down Indians like Coke bottles."

As Amiri Baraka himself suggested in "The Myth of a 'Negro Literature,'" most negro literature is mediocre because it imitates white literature and models, its creators not being able to maintain "their essential identities as Negroes." What was of most importance apparently to Baraka at the time of that essay (first given as an address in 1962) was to maintain a black identity among blacks without its being weakened through the imitation of white models and to make certain that black art reflects "the experiences of the human being, the emotional predicament of the man, as he exists, in the defined world of his being."

Does "The Toilet" offer the viewer the new black identity or does it reveal the black psyche dehumanized by its imitation of white models? It would seem in "The Toilet" that Baraka is trying to show how the black youths, except for Foots, act according to their inner vision of what is a man, an image affected by the white mythic heroes, and have, consequently, lost some of their dignity and worth as black boys. They have been corrupted by the white society. In addition it also seems possible that Baraka is intending to reflect the black experience under the eroding influence of the white middle class society which not only debases the black identity but also destroys the vitality of the white group. The only two positive characters in the play are Ray (the name Karolis uses for Foots, the gang leader) and Karolis. Both have some dignity as human beings and are involved emotionally with each other. Ray resists fighting Karolis; he returns after the gang members have left to share himself with Karolis. On the other hand Karolis is willing to fight Foots but loves Ray, as though he senses the split identity of the young gang leader. Of importance also is Baraka's strategic conception of Karolis, the only white in the play, as a homosexual. The characterization suggests perhaps the demoralization and confusion of standards for behavior within the white system.

The operating world of the gang is the urine stinking toilet in a high school with white and black students. It is a male world. Here, the image of a man, derived partly from heroes in the outer world, stigmatized by the stench of man's excremental functions and his sexual confusions, is incompletely expressed by the boys. That image is an epic one minus its heroism. It captures the heroic warrior from a classic past with its emphasis on physicality, but it is transmuted by the alchemy of the white dream into the picture of a fighter or athlete. It is reflected in the gang's emphasis on physical contact, in their tough talk, their games, their actions, their assumptions, and especially in their limitations.

The male relationships in their world are given in terms of physical contact. It is boy strength versus boy strength as muscle tests muscle. Love holds the door against Ora who thumps the door but does not get angry; Holmes and Love spar a few minutes with each other, then Hines joins in the action. In another instance Holmes and Ora square off, after Ora has already punched Holmes, "both laughing and faking professional demeanor." Love and Hines play an imaginary game of basketball. In all of these examples the physical involvement shifts its emotional strength, always threatening to move from fun to violence. Ora nudges Karolis with his foot or he pushes Karolis into Foots. In turn Foots pushes Karolis away. Except in the relationship with Karolis, the rules of the physical contact game do not allow the contact to turn into serious fighting. Their function apparently is to allow the gang members to express in an acceptable but restricted manner their contradictory impulses to be both dominant and dominated, to be both independent as well as bound by some cohesive force. Ora clearly threatens the group physically, but he cannot subdue George and he accepts Foots as the leader.

The emphasis on physical contact, like that expressed in the training of some warrior or athlete, is reinforced in their male world by their excessively tough language. But it is a young male world activated by the image of man as a fighter-hero who battles the forces of evil mechanically (not all know why Karolis must be forced to fight) and who ignores the effects of his sexual changes. But such a warrior-athlete, if he is successful, is rewarded with sexual adulation, his female counterpart being reduced to serving him. The inhabitants of this male arena talk about the two characteristics of a man related to that image: fighting (what all their physical contact is directed towards as though they were going through a training process) and sex (what their changing glandular systems are preparing them for).

Their talk about fighting is always done in the context of their still being boys. The proposed fights are imagined, not real. Those in between are affairs of honor, involving an imagined or felt ideal, and following a definite ritual, borrowed possibly from white western movies or Batman comics. When Foots asks Knowles to stop drumming on the walls, Knowles threatens to drum on Foots' head. Ora threatens to "stomp mudholes" in Farrell's head if he doesn't shut up.

The central incident, however, is a matter of honor. The gang has dragged Karolis to the toilet room where he is supposed to fight their leader Foots. According to Hines the gang does not intend to beat him up. But by the time that they get him to his destiny, he has been considerably mauled. Foots pays homage to Ora who has hit Karolis by saying "You a rough ass cat, Shot. He sure don't look like he's in any way to fight anybody." But Foots is supposed to fight Karolis because the white boy had written him a letter calling him beautiful and saying "that he wanted to blow him." The talk among them is of killing as though the fighting were to be for real on some battlefield. But it is not. When Karolis pulls himself up unsteadily and says that he wants to fight Foots, Knowles exclaims "You mean that sonofabitch wasn' dead?" Or when Foots comes in and first sees Karolis on the floor, he asks "Damn! What'd you guys do, kill the cat?" Even Karolis says "I want to kill you" to Foots. All such comments refer not to the actual destruction of a human being but more than likely to an emphasis on fighting, hitting, or beating up, to some process not likely to end in death but which releases their internal tensions. Their language thus continually suggests that they are in a probationary period when all their actions are training sessions for the real thing. In the world of the play, however, they can never have the real thing.

But it is their language about sex and their sexual terms that most readily reveals their participation in a male world where their concept of maleness is affected by the masculine images provided by a white society. In the first place the emphasis is on their talking about sex; nowhere in the play do they actually engage in sexual activities. While they are not necessarily virgins or neophytes, they are certainly in that transition period where they lose their sexual innocence. But their uncertain sense of masculinity and of heroism has not taught them how to cope with their ambivalent sexual feelings and responses or how to express them. Under their internal pressures they play the game of the dozens in which they insult each others mothers. As Ora says, he would "rub up against" Love's mother, and Love replies "Ora, you mad cause you don't have a momma of your own to rub up against." But it is a game. They do not rub up against real women, not yet. They are not free enough of their maternal-female image to develop a separate sexual-female concept. In their rhetorical playing, the force is on talk and male dominance, as in the love of tall talk on the American frontier. Their language does not reflect the subtleties of the sexual feelings between men and women and the ways in which those feelings permeate all other relationships. Their vocabulary reveals their almost new yet crude concern for their penises, a self-interest which bothers them somewhat, perhaps even embarrasses them. They relish the names for their sexual masculinity which has suddenly become important to them. Perhaps that is why they want Foots to fight a duel with Karolis. As Perry says, Karolis wanted to "blow him" and Ora calls the white boy a "dick licker."

Their sexual reactions have yet to be directly transferred to women. They do not discuss going with girls, or bedding with them, or marrying them. They are still boys and apparently embarrassed or confused by their bodies and sexual stirrings. They conceive of sex in the terms of comic books, of sexual relationships in the metaphors of the white mythic heroes. They relate sex to their male egos and their need to dominate. Almost in retaliation for their changing selves, they stress their obvious maleness to each other in ritualized language which is often euphemized. They refer to a penis as a "joint." In the toilet or commode, like little boys they want to play with their urine. Even Ora, the most obviously physical boy, tends to giggle and grin as he pees over the seat of a commode; he flushes all the urinals in a row when he leaves. Hines tells Holmes that Love is in the toilet "pulling his whatchamacallit". And when Holmes asks him why he doesn't get Gloria to do that, Love says "She-et. [Grinning.] Huh. I sure don't need your ol' lady to be pullin' on my joint. [Laughs. …]". They even call each other "cocksucker," a term which when it applies to them is less pejorative, perhaps even complimentary, than the term "dick licker" which they apply to Karolis.

When Love says that Karolis never bothered him, Ora turns his reply into the dozens by saying that Karolis always tells everybody that "he bangs the hell out of Caroline, every chance he gets." Holmes answers by asking if that's the name of Love's mother. Even Ora calls his own penis a "nice fat sausage" for Karolis. Such excessive use of euphemisms suggests their sense of embarrassed de-light and highly limited response to their sexual organs. For them it is insulting to be compared with a girl. Knowles says to Ora, after Karolis had struggled to his feet, "Shit, Big Shot, you must hit like a girl."

Their range of emotional responses to each other is apparently limited by their inner sense of manhood. They tend to eschew girls; they emphasize physical touch; they pretend to play basketball. In general they tend to transfer their sexual impulses into such games as the dozens, bluff, or the affair of honor. Their reaction to their emotions and to the problems of personal involvement with each other suggests the same mechanical quality that strikes one in the behavior of the Lone Ranger, Superman, or any of the other mythical heroes of white society.

The actions of the gang members, furthermore, strengthen their unconscious imitation of such models. The boys stress agility, strength, a super-masculinity. They feel insulted by the thought of a white boy calling one of them beautiful and wanting the pleasure of intimacy. Perhaps their unconscious image of a super, but false, masculinity can best be seen in their relationship with their leader Foots.

It is Foots whom Karolis says that he wants to kill, not Ray. The implication is that Karolis sees Foots as two different persons: Ray, a human being, beautiful, whom he wishes to be involved with; and Foots, a stereotyped leader of a gang of corrupt heroes. Like Foots, Karolis has some dimension to his development in the play. But the other persons are nearly caricatures in Baraka's strategy.

They are hardly the models for black dignity. Their stereo-typing is most obvious. Foots, the leader, is short and intelligent. On the other hand Ora is short and ugly. Most of the others are tall, like Hines who is "big" and "husky." Foots does not rule the gang through physical strength. He cannot even break Karolis' choke hold. Instead he rules by cleverness, by wit, or by some charisma he holds for the other boys. The authorities in the high school, whom he mocks, find him smart, a credit to his race. In explaining why he is late for the duel, Foots says that he was detained by Van Ness, symbol of the high school authorities, who wanted him to help keep all the unsavory boys in line. Foots directly implies in his statement that his gang are some of the "unsavory … elements." Neither the gang members nor the high school authorities, apparently, accept Foots as a person. Rather both groups see him as an agent whom they can exploit for some particular quality he has, perhaps his cleverness or sure intelligence. Whatever it is, their relationship with him is mechanical and stereotyped.

What does Foots receive from them? From the high school authorities, he probably gets a good laugh; what he receives from his gang cannot be so easily answered. In terms of his reaction to Karolis, what Foots desires is some acceptance of himself as a young man, a recognition of his feelings. Karolis has appealed to him in a way that his gang friends cannot. The white boy sees beauty and love in him. Instead of trying to use Ray, Karolis is willing to risk his person for the black boy's love. As a human being needing and responding to love, Foots has to return, therefore, to the beaten boy. In the solitude of the room, the loneliness and stench intensifying his compassion, as Ray he holds Karolis' head in his arms. At that moment with another human being, Ray expresses a mature tenderness and love which his mythic destiny had denied him with his gang. The relationship between the two has to be private to be meaningful, to take place in a toilet in order for it to rise above the stereotyped and artificial responses of the other boys.

In its dramatic strategies "The Toilet" implies Amiri Baraka's awareness of how a white society has affected the lives of black boys. At a critical time in their passage from boyhood to manhood, their conceptions of manly behavior, conditioned as they are by the mythic heroes of a white culture, have made them incapable of responding fully as complete human beings. They have no expression for beauty, for compassion, for selfless love. No black music penetrates their world; no blues affects their body rhythms. To all appearances the gang members are alienated from the world at large. Their center of operations is a crude and foully smelling toilet room where they stand revealed as rough caricatures of mythical heroes, like puppets created in some lesser image of an imperfect dream.

They leave the room carrying their wounded, Foots, after what has been a mock battle of honor. The stage is left for those who have some acceptance of their new sexual feelings; the future belongs to Foots. He leaves the gang for love and tenderness. He is needed for himself, not for his leadership qualities or his ability to be a credit to his race. He has become a man, or at least he alone has the possibility of becoming a man. In his past are the unhuman mythical heroes of his gang. Perhaps his future is to be a human being, black, a different kind of model for his gang.