87 pages • 2 hours read
The Piano Lesson
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Symbols & Motifs
The Piano
The piano is the primary and most visually prominent image in the play, sitting as the centerpiece the middle of the parlor. It is the object at the center of the play’s main conflict over whether to sell it or keep it. It is the Charles family’s only inheritance with monetary worth, but Berniece and Boy Willie can’t agree on whether the piano’s emotional and spiritual worth outweighs the financial opportunity that comes from selling it. The original owner traded it to slaveholder Robert Sutter for their great grandmother Mama Berniece and her son (their grandfather), Papa Boy Charles, as a gift for his wife, Ophelia. Sutter later instructed Papa Boy Willie to carve the faces of his own wife and son into the piano to soothe Ophelia’s sense of loss and loneliness. Papa Boy Willie was a brilliant woodworker, and he carved not only his wife and son but his entire family history. To Ophelia, these wooden likenesses were enough to replace the mother and child whom she viewed as property, and she was happy again. The stealing of the piano by Papa Boy Charles’s sons—Wining Boy, Doaker, and Boy Charles—was an act of emancipation, as Boy Charles couldn’t stand the idea of the piano that represented his family being owned by the white people who once enslaved them. After Boy Charles was murdered for stealing the piano, it also came to represent his body and sacrifice. Thus, Mama Ola polished it daily, rubbing her blood and tears into the wood, as a stand-in for the husband she mourned. She compelled Berniece to play the piano, which allowed her to talk to her dead husband.
When slavers kidnapped Africans and trafficked them as slaves, the people who paid for them felt entitled to ownership of not only the people but also everything they produced. Hence, Sutter exploited Papa Boy Willie for his woodworking, deciding that he was too profitable to allow him to be sold with his family. The piano is an artifact of Black culture that is rightfully owned by Black people, and of the rage of white people who were denied what they felt entitled to. It’s a European instrument, but it has been altered indelibly by Black hands and lives. It is also a metaphor for the appropriation of Black music by white people. Boy Willie sees the piano as “a piece of wood” that isn’t being used for anything productive and can be leveraged into land, which is the only thing that he feels has real worth (52). Berniece is afraid of the spirits that are connected to the piano, but she also feels the responsibility to keep it, as maintaining and caring for the piano as a shrine seems to be a matrilineal duty that her mother passed down to her. However, she also resents the piano as “a piece of wood” that wasn’t worth their father’s life (54). Notably, Crawley also died for pieces of wood. But Berniece sees selling the piano as selling their souls. Avery wants Berniece to put the piano in his new church and start a choir, which would be, in a sense, colonizing and gentrifying an artifact full of African spirituality and magic. Doaker finds the piano unsettling and just wishes Berniece would get rid of it, but he won’t let Boy Willie take it without her permission. In the end, the piano refuses to be moved, growing suddenly heavier when Boy Willie makes his mind up to take it. It compels Berniece to play it as the only way to rid the house of evil spirits. The spirits of the ancestors refuse to be ignored and forgotten
Sutter’s Ghost
When Boy Willie arrives unannounced at five o’clock in the morning to visit his sister and uncle, he brings the news that Sutter is dead. He is the latest (and perhaps last) in a line of 9 to 12 white men in Mississippi who have died by falling (or being pushed) into their own wells. According to local lore, they are all victims of the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog—spirits of the five men, including Berniece and Boy Willie’s father, who take revenge against those who burned them to death in a boxcar. The most recently deceased Sutter is the grandson of the Sutter who enslaved the Charles family. Now, Sutter’s brother has offered Boy Willie the chance to buy Sutter’s land, and Boy Willie is frantically trying to come up with the money before the two-week deadline when the land may be sold to someone else. Sutter’s ghost appears offstage before Berniece in Act I. She screams and reports that he is wearing a blue suit, holding the top of his head as if it might fall off, and calling Boy Willie’s name. Boy Willie insists that Sutter’s ghost isn’t real, but Berniece believes that his appearance means that Boy Willie killed Sutter himself. Doaker notes that Berniece wouldn’t have seen Sutter in a blue suit before, and that he believes that it must be the suit he was buried in. The tension as to whether the ghost is real is heightened at the end of the first act when Maretha screams and says that she saw the ghost, since she is the only character who never met Sutter. Later in the play, Doaker admits that he saw Sutter’s ghost three weeks before Boy Willie arrived, a few days after Sutter died. Like Berniece, he saw Sutter holding the top of his head as if he had broken his neck. Sutter’s ghost was sitting at the piano. In another instance, Doaker heard the piano playing itself.
Sutter’s ghost never appears onstage, which means that the director and audience can decide whether he’s real or metaphorical. It’s never clarified whether Boy Willie had anything to do with Sutter’s death, but the ghost seems to be there for the stolen piano, and perhaps to keep Boy Willie from buying the land. The belief that Sutter was killed by the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog suggests that he was involved in the killing of the five men in the boxcar. Symbolically, Sutter’s ghost represents the specter of slavery, which may be technically dead in 1936, but it continues to haunt Black Americans who are trying to improve their circumstances. Sutter was part of the sharecropping system that held Black laborers, including Boy Willie, in virtual servitude after slavery ended. In a sense, both siblings are trying to cast out Sutter’s ghost in their own way. Berniece is trying to ignore the past or will it to stay in the past, and Boy Willie is trying to push through to the future, disempowering the Sutters of the world who might hold him back.
Sutter’s ghost becomes an oppressive force in the house, and by the end of the play, none of the characters denies its presence or that it needs to be exorcized. Berniece turns to Avery and asks him to do it by blessing the house. But Avery and his Christian faith aren’t equipped to exorcize the ghost of a white man from a slaveholding family who probably practiced Christianity and forced it on the Black people they controlled. Boy Willie rushes up the stairs and tries to fight the ghost physically. But the only way to get rid of it is for Berniece to call on their ancestors. Boy Willie warns Berniece to keep playing or he and Sutter’s ghost might be back, suggesting that the only way for Black Americans to move forward is to connect with their history.
Trains and Trucks
Trains are a significant symbol throughout the play, as is the contrast of the truck that Boy Willie and Lymon drove up from Mississippi. Doaker has worked for the railroad for 27 years. Although his job as a cook takes him traveling along the railroad line, Doaker’s life is focused on staying in place. The trains are reliable, and they go exactly where they say they are going. But, Doaker complains, people are always getting on trains that are going in the wrong direction and acting surprised when they end up in the wrong place. The trains are a metaphor for the paths in life that people choose to take when they are desperate for change. Once someone gets on a train, they are going where the train is going. It’s predictable. Boy Willie is barreling forward like a train in his mission to become a landowner. He believes that if he can sell his watermelons, bully Berniece into selling the piano, and hop on a train back to Mississippi within two weeks, Sutter’s brother will still be waiting to sell him the land. He believes that owning a piece of land will change who he is in the world and place him on even footing with men like Jim Stovall. But as Wining Boy points out, white men can bend the law to make it work for themselves. There’s a good chance that Sutter’s brother has already sold the land, or that Boy Willie will meet with racist resistance if he manages to buy it. History has proven that the train goes exactly where the timetable says it will go—unless a white man stops it to set a boxcar on fire. If Boy Willie gets on the wrong path or boards the wrong train, he might be too far along the rails before he realizes that he needs to turn back. In a sense, this also refers to August Wilson’s beliefs about the Great Migration, as those who transplanted to the North often found that life was no better there.
The truck is a symbol of Boy Willie’s determination to become a landowner and Lymon’s determination to start a new life away from Mississippi. Lymon originally bought the truck as a place to sleep so he could avoid the sheriff. He was arrested for not having a job, under vagrancy laws that targeted Black Americans and forced them into stints of de facto slavery within the penal system, and he was determined to escape his sentence to do unpaid labor for Stovall. Therefore, he went with Boy Willie’s plan to move north. Boy Willie loaded the truck with so many watermelons that he likely caused at least some of the breakdowns on their trip to Pittsburgh. Like Sutter’s ghost, the truck is an important image that is never seen. The audience is left to imagine what the truck looks like and the number of watermelons in the cargo bed. Once they make it to Pittsburgh, the truck breaks down repeatedly when they try to take their melons to sell in the rich part of town. The mechanics are questionable, and Boy Willie gets ready to hop out each time Lymon has to pump the brakes to stop, although Lymon insists that they’re perfectly safe. The world is against them and their lemon of a truck. Boy Willie in particular is swimming upstream. They finally manage to drive the truck all the way to the white area of Pittsburgh and sell their watermelons, but the piano resists being picked up and loaded in the truck. Lymon tells Boy Willie up front that he isn’t driving the truck back down south and risking more breakdowns, so Boy Willie decides to take the train. The train is an upgrade and a more direct route, and it will take him where he is going faster. In the end, Boy Willie leaves with Wining Boy to take the train to Mississippi, but he hasn’t sold the piano, so his next steps are unclear.
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