Dutchman and the Slave Book

The Dutchman and the Slave are two plays by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) from 1964. Both plays deal with black/white relations, specifically slave heritage and oppressor heritage respectively. Also, both make the point that sexual relations across racial lines does not increase understanding, nor should it contribute to any sense of authority about the life of the other.

In the Dutchman, we witness a subway ride with Clay, a early-20s middle class black man, and Lula, a closer to 30, provocative white woman. Throughout the play Lula teases Clay, hints towards the prospect of sex, claims to know about his "type", then later moves towards insults and "Uncle Tom" derisions, escalating the scene significantly. Basically, at its core, Clay is representative of black assimilationists, and Lula could be any white liberal who claims to know how black people are and how they should be, and Amiri Baraka ultimately seems to have no patience for either one of them.

If the Dutchman is full of hatred, the Slave takes that theme to a whole different level. In this play, we have 3 characters Grace and Easley, a white liberal couple; and Walker a black man that we are first introduced to as drunk with a gun, but later find out that he is the ex-husband of Grace. In the background explosions indicate a present or future war between blacks and whites. Walker is the leader of a violent radical black liberation movement whose ultimate goal seems to be to kill all white people. We learn that Grace had left Walker years before for the very simple reason that if his goal was to kill all white people, and she happened to be white, then she couldn't consider herself safe. Even though Walker is a murderer, he is still clearly a victim in this play, since the need for violent racial war could only arise out of decades of oppression without relief. The vitriol builds in this play in such a way that there is only one inevitable conclusion.

These are shocking, angry plays, but especially for the time, gestures such as these were probably the only things that could wake up some people.