In it, a teacher from a woman's college in Boston is searching for Robert Johnson, to pin down his influences (which she believes come from the same muse as Shakespeare, and echo the same urgent human truths) and unwind the mysticism and dense mythology of the south. Hers is one of three story lines in the play, and while not the most important, says a lot about how the play's writer (and possibly the audiences in the northern states) see the south.  Though somewhat accurate in the depiction of a deeper mysticism in the black and white southern traditions, there's an air of ignorant hubris to the language, an assumption made about southern blacks that derives it's narrow view from a sort of inverse-Disney post-slavery history.  One of the five characters, a blind, cane-wielding elderly man, is the town mystic for lack of a better term.  His mother was a prophet and healer.  He picked up her gifts, and his blindness lends him a stereotype so deeply fictitious that the actor need only hit the right twang to sell the person. His counterpart, the young white school teacher, is a manic, fragile, overly-obsessed woman who spouts Shakespeare lines in tourette-like spasms.

At one point in the play, the action drops away (the play does this several times during narrative moments) and the school teacher walks to the front of the stage and complains to the audience, bitterly, for quite some time about her travels so far, and about being tricked by "niggers and mystical coloreds" in the process of trying to find Robert Johnson.  Her lines spoken in high Boston english, her casual demeanor all raked across the audience; it took most of the play to get used to hearing these words spoken this way, in a casual setting, to the faces of the intended victims.

The school teacher is in a bad way, physically and mentally, from her trip across the south, a world as foreign to hers as any.  She keeps trying to find Robert Johnson only by name and the vaguest descriptions, finding over the course of her search that names don't carry any history or identity when they are artificially granted.  "Our true names are African," the blind man says, "and have as much in common with us as you have." Looking for a man by his name won't work. His name isn't who he is.  His name is who his parent's owners were, his name is as mutable as his situation in life, and changed as needed by convenience or force.

The woman is on her quest for Robert Johnson because she heard his music after her grandfather's funeral and it affected her deeply.  She claims she felt, for the first time, how bleak the world could be, how honest the truth could cut.  It takes her quite some time to understand that the longing and hurt played into those blues came not from some universal muse, but from Robert Johnson, his life, his race, his identity.  Though he never cops to being a voice for a generation of black people, he seems to be aware of his impact, not surprised that she'd come from Boston just to talk to him.  He's been avoiding her, though, fearing harm; her search has run him ragged as well, and he seems to think her the devil.  What she's really after, though, is atonement: her grandfather died, and left her his fortune.  A fortune that she welcomed, but once she heard Robert Johnson's music, and realized her family fortune came from selling slaves, she hit the road to find him, see if his music has come from the devil or from man or from some universal truth. She determined to find him and give him the fortune that his ancestors had created with their backs and blood. She wanted to buy her comfort (she complains that since she's heard the blues, she cannot sleep without nightmares). She wanted to buy him off, pay off the blacks for the white evil.

Her feelings for her past are a study in the roots of southern liberalism, wherein we attempt to atone from a distance.  She maintains her superior swagger, maintains her stance, her insulting terms for a race she can't possibly understand but attempts to buy off.  Before he dies she forces a small bag filled with cash into Robert Johnson's hands (a side note: the production here was awful, in that the cash literally had blood all over it) and he refuses, throws it back at her. Refuses because she needs to atone for herself, he won't be an instrument for her forgiveness. Refuses to get paid off.

Because, you see, the devil follows that cash, the devil is in that money.  No good can come from bad. 

During his revelation about the crossroads and what he actually did there, he says he saw her, there, in hell, and that she had to find her own way out. She refuses to accept this piece of mysticism, insists on trying to ply him with cash.

Her opinion of him and his race remains unchanged; she still pities rather than cares, sees blacks as a step down from her.  She never attempts to apologize, instead her last lines are "the world and it's work are not my fault!" as she runs away from him, wild-eyed.  She places the blame squarely on her grandfather and on the world and deflects any blame for her own actions and thoughts, her casual racism a benign behavior in her circles, as natural as any label.

At the very end, as Johnson lies dead, she speaks to her English Lit class.  She says his music, it did come from the Devil.  That he played what he did and as well as he did because he sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads.  That, and nothing more.  She sidesteps the real root cause of those blues, the deeply entrenched racism and hatred. It was The Devil, that mystical fiction, and nothing more...not her, not the class, not their grandparents.  The Devil, and nothing more.

But we know the devil. Robert himself says that when the devil appeared at the crossroads, he was just another old white man, no cloven hooves or horns or flaming pitchforks. Then, at that time and place, the devil was any white, and the way Robert Johnson tricked the devil was through his music, learning how to play to a white ear and maintain his own message, pull the pain from his roots and place it in blues slides that spoke more to the soul than to the ear.  He maintained his own method and message, and did so while selling his music to white America as much as black America. He wore fine suits, carried himself with a cocky swagger because he had, after all, taught the devil a lesson.  He'd played for the devil so fine and hard a song that his music could not be ignored, could not be called inferior, had to be noticed on it's own, as his own. His blues playing was influenced by those before him (Son House and others), though after a while, he explains, he started finding his own music, making his own technique, and by the end?  By the end the devil had grown quiet, then had angrily admitted defeat.

In this play, a black man (a jealous husband) kills Robert Johnson with poison.  The implication us heavy and unavoidable, a brick upside the head about black on black violence and the worth placed on the lives of blacks, but the larger crimes were bigger than any murder.  Johnson moves from life into death and in so doing creates a mythology that still serves to remind us that truth and talent cut through hate and myopia, that even a co-opted  and distorted history is capable of telling the truth at it's core.  He did trick the devil, and in doing so elevated his art beyond the mundane and into myth.

We use the same words here in the south, we just use them in a different way. So when we speak of mystical things, we're just telling stories.  It's the plot that is the point, and not the words used to market it.