Dutchman starts with an African-American man, Clay, riding the subway alone in the summertime. Clay is holding a magazine but “looking vacantly just above its wilting pages” (3), occasionally looking out a window. The train pulls into a station, and Clay looks up to see a white woman, Lula, looking at him through the window. The two smile at each other—first, for Clay, “without a trace of self-consciousness” (4), before a sense of awkwardness and embarrassment sets in and he looks away. The train starts moving again and blocks his view of the woman, but Clay smiles, “more comfortably confident, hoping perhaps that his memory of this brief encounter will be pleasant” (4), before becoming idle once again.

Lula enters the train car. Eating an apple, she moves toward Clay and is “waiting for [Clay] to notice her before she sits” (5). He does and looks up at her, and the two begin to converse. Lula asks why Clay was staring at her through the window and accuses him of checking her out, saying he was “staring […] down in the vicinity of my ass and legs” (7).