Clay

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Clay is a twenty-year-old black man, or as Baraka terms him, a Negro. The distinction lies in Baraka's definition, where a Negro is someone who sacrifices his own identity to maintain a harmonious relationship with white oppressors. Clay embodies the typical bourgeois black male, so predictably bourgeois that Lula can deduce his life story from his attire (a too-tight suit jacket), his demeanor (polite and hesitant), and his way of speaking (middle class, intellectual, and pretentious).

Initially, Clay is drawn to the alluring young woman who begins to seduce him provocatively and invites herself to his friend's party. However, her erratic mood changes and unexpectedly harsh racist remarks shock him. Despite this, he humiliates himself in his desperate attempt to stay composed and counter her aggression with intellectual finesse. He is inexplicably fascinated by her, as if she represents a social challenge he is determined not to fail. Ironically, it is his eagerness to prove himself worthy of her (white cultural) standards that leads to his failure. Clay, who once aspired in college to be a black Baudelaire (a renowned French poet), is part of the black bourgeoisie (upwardly mobile middle class), essentially "just a dirty white man," a white wannabe.

Clay is aware of the compromises he has made but recoils from committing the murder of whites that he believes would free him from these compromises. He seeks solace in his words. He warns Lula that the cultural conditioning of blacks might backfire, as they could soon rationalize their murders just as whites do. Lula's symbolic murder of him silences him, but it also represents an extreme version of the social death he undergoes by prostituting his manhood to conform to white values.

Characters Discussed

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Clay

Clay, a twenty-year-old, middle-class black man, a college-trained intellectual from New Jersey. He wears a three-button Ivy League suit and tie and passes time by reading a newspaper. He appears to be in control of himself and his environment, amenably aware of sex but not of race, as evidenced when a white woman enters a subway car and coquettishly sits down beside him. He is both embarrassed and fascinated by the woman. Clay is pigeonholed by the woman as being the assimilated African American who wants to pretend that people cannot see his blackness and that black and white people are free of their history. When Clay is insulted, taunted, and goaded by her, however, he loses control of both himself and his situation. Clay’s character is both real and symbolic. Symbolically, he represents black America, Adam, and the legendary “Flying Dutchman” of the play’s title who was doomed to sail forever unless saved by the love of a virtuous woman.

Lula

Lula, a thirty-year-old white woman. Tall, slender, and beautiful, with long, straight red hair, she wears loud lipstick, bright, skimpy summer clothes, sandals, and sunglasses. Clay perceives her as a white, bohemian-type liberal. Recognizing that beneath the surface of the supposedly assimilated black man is a savage spirit chafed by years of oppression, she begins to goad Clay with insults, seeking to uncover his true nature. Although she seduces the outward man, she wishes to seduce and control the inner man as well. She continues to taunt and embarrass him in front of others who have entered the subway car, goading him to show his raw, animal nature. Like Clay, Lula is both real and symbolic. Symbolically, she represents white America and its attempted seduction and consequent destruction of black manhood by assimilation or annihilation; she also represents Eve to Clay’s Adam, eating and offering him an apple just as the biblical Eve...

(This entire section contains 352 words.)

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did. She, too, can be viewed as the legendary “Flying Dutchman, cursed to sail forever with a crew of living dead and compelled to carry out an endless ritual of seducing and destroying.

Other Characters

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Conductor

The elderly conductor represents the stereotypical "Jim Crow" or "Uncle Tom" black character, often depicted as entertaining whites through song and dance. He appears content with his subservient role in society. His quick soft-shoe shuffle before leaving the railcar symbolizes the way African Americans expressed their constrained freedom through artistic forms such as dance, music, and song. Both Clay and Baraka viewed this sublimation of anger as ineffective and self-deceptive. However, by the end of the play, the conductor remains alive, whereas Clay is dead.

Lula

Lula, a thirty-year-old white femme fatale, alternates between seducing and insulting Clay. She represents a mythical Eve, offering the apple to a naive and clumsy Adam. Lula embodies Western Civilization—seductive, fiercely greedy, relentless, yet also psychotic, lonely, and trapped by her cultural identity. Unlike Clay, there is no sense of a real, beating heart beneath her cultural armor. Instead, she is the archetypal all-consuming female, mindlessly stripping Clay of his manhood (and later disposing of his corpse) to focus on her next victim. She is programmed to destroy, methodically placing one foot in front of the other.

Oppression bores Lula, and she often drifts into a daze, making morbid comments about her imagined seduction ("You'll call my rooms black as a grave. You'll say, 'This place is like Juliet's tomb'"). When Clay resists her seduction and refuses to engage in a wild erotic dance, she unleashes a barrage of racist insults. She cannot tolerate the brutal honesty of Clay's final speech, where he openly acknowledges his fate and his reluctance to change it. In the 1967 film adaptation of Baraka's play, Shirley Knight's portrayal of Lula illustrates her dangerous seduction of Clay, played by Al Freeman, Jr. Her irritation only serves to remind her of her duty—to eliminate this victim and proceed to the next.

Young Negro

The young black man, around twenty years old, appears to be Lula's next target. He boards the train immediately after Lula and the other passengers dispose of Clay's body. Like Clay, he carries books, signifying his intellectual pursuits. Also like Clay, he falls under Lula's gaze, and her mythical, ritualistic cycle of racial hostility begins anew.

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