The Piano Lesson

Boy Willie, who is 30 years old, is arguably the protagonist—he drives the main action of the play with his objectives and choices. He literally and figuratively wakes up his uncle and sister when he shows up unexpectedly at five o’clock in the morning and disrupts the routine of their lives. Boy Willie incites conflict when he announces that he plans to sell the piano, which Berniece co-owns. He is loud and brash to the point of abrasiveness, and he is relentlessly driven. Unlike the rest of the Charles family, Boy Willie stayed in Mississippi instead of migrating north to Pittsburgh, and he won’t be convinced to stay. Farming is what he knows, and he sees no point in abandoning that to start over and learn a new trade.

Despite Boy Willie’s disregard for the law and his truck full of watermelons of questionable origins, selling the piano isn’t some “get rich quick” scheme. Buying the land that his family worked as enslaved laborers is a measure of justice. Boy Willie chose not to escape to the North for the promise of a better life; instead, he has been fighting to take something back from those who enslaved his ancestors and murdered his father. He may have killed Sutter, depending on whether one believes in the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog. Boy Willie wants to leverage the piano into a future for himself and his family, and he sees this as honoring his father’s sacrifice. He is so focused on his determination that selling the piano is the right thing to do that he refuses to believe in the spiritual disturbances that the others see around it. Boy Willie is stubborn, but he is also brave. At the end of the play, he runs toward Sutter’s ghost and wrestles with him. He completes his journey as a character when he recognizes that the piano needs to stay where it is as long as Berniece keeps playing it.

Lymon, age 29, is Boy Willie’s longtime friend from Mississippi. He has supplied the gasping, breaking-down truck that they have filled with watermelons to sell. Lymon and Boy Willie served a three-year stint at Parchman Farm together for Boy Willie’s wood-stealing scheme, and during the arrest, Lymon was shot in the stomach and Berniece’s husband, Crawley, was killed. Lymon is escaping to Pittsburgh because after being arrested for not working, a white plantation owner paid his bail, and he was sentenced to work for this man for free to pay it off, essentially replicating slavery conditions. Perhaps Lymon prefers to avoid working altogether—Boy Willie jokes about his resistance to working when they were incarcerated—but he is staunchly against being forced to perform unpaid labor.

Lymon doesn’t have Boy Willie’s urgent ambition; what he wants out of life is peace and a good woman. Lymon pays Wining Boy for a supposedly “magic” silk suit because he is singularly focused on attracting women. According to Boy Willie, Lymon was unlucky in love in Mississippi, but Lymon proves to simply be more respectful and less assertive with women than his friend. His brief romantic encounter with Berniece is sweet and gentle compared to Boy Willie’s fervent, lamp-crashing sexual pursuit of Grace. At the end of the play, when everyone else confronts Sutter’s ghost, Lymon leaves to take Grace home instead. This final exit makes sense for this character, since he isn’t a member of the family and can’t exorcize their ghosts.

Berniece, who is 35 years old, is Boy Willie’s older sister and the mother of 11-year-old Maretha. If Boy Willie is the protagonist, then Berniece is the antagonist, although it could be argued that Berniece is the protagonist and her brother the antagonist. Berniece’s main objective in the play is to stop Boy Willie from taking the piano. When their mother, Mama Ola, was alive, she poured her sweat and blood into caring for the piano, polishing it endlessly and compelling Berniece to play the instrument. Mama Ola spent her life mourning for her husband, who was brutally lynched for stealing the piano, and believed that Berniece’s playing allowed her to speak to him. Now, Berniece’s life echoes her mother’s as she mourns the death of her own husband, Crawley, who was shot by police three years ago for helping Boy Willie move stolen wood.

Although Berniece is afraid to play the piano and hasn’t touched it since her mother died, she has inherited the responsibility for caring for it, and she is adamant that the piano is too significant to the family to sell. Berniece resents her brother and blames him for Crawley’s death, insisting that Crawley was innocently lured by Boy Willie into committing a crime and refusing to acknowledge that Crawley brought a gun and tried to fight the police instead of running. Berniece is trying to raise Maretha without the burden of their haunted and tragic family history. She is allowing Avery, a Christian pastor, to court her, and she asks him to expel Sutter’s ghost from the house, an attempt to reject the spirits and spirituality of her ancestors. But in the end, she faces her fears and plays the piano, calling on her ancestors for help. Her journey through the play is accepting the family’s history with pride. Wilson argued that slavery was nothing for Black people to feel shame over, just as Boy Willie insists that the stealing of the piano should be a point of family pride, even though the story includes their father’s tragic death.

Berniece’s daughter, Maretha, is 11 years old and represents the family’s future generations. Berniece has tried to spare Maretha the pain and burden of not only the family’s history but the history of slavery. She allows Maretha to play the piano, because to Maretha, it’s just a piano. She doesn’t have the same sense of music as the others in the family, and she tells Boy Willie that she can only play when she has sheet music. But Maretha sees Sutter’s ghost, even though she is the only character who never met or heard about Sutter. Maretha’s presence in the play suggests that it is not possible to sever one’s roots, and that Black Americans should learn their history proudly.

Avery, who is 38, is also from Mississippi. He came to Pittsburgh two years ago—a year after Crawley died—to pursue Berniece romantically and convince her to marry him. Berniece, who is still in mourning, resists his prodding to take their relationship to the next level of commitment. Avery has a respectable job as an elevator operator, and he is also a Christian preacher who applies for a loan to start his church. Avery represents the complex history of Christianity in Black American culture. It was the religion of slaveholders that was forced on enslaved people to eradicate their indigenous religions, but over time, it became embedded and even enmeshed with African spiritualities. Avery felt called to become a pastor when he had a dream about Jesus asking him to lead sheep, which is much tidier than the notions of the Charles family spirits tied to the piano, the vengeful ghosts who kill, and plantation-owning ghosts who show up to haunt the house. Avery is clean-cut and law-abiding, which means deference to white society in comparison to Boy Willie’s reckless disregard for laws that treat him unfairly. In the end, Avery’s spirituality has no power to expel Sutter’s ghost, and Berniece must reach toward her own ancestors.

At 56, Wining Boy is Doaker’s older brother. Unlike Doaker, who has settled in place and wishes everyone else would do the same, Wining Boy wanders. He is a casualty of the Great Migration, a common trope in Wilson’s plays, a man who has been severed from the home where he was born and now meanders, rootless and restless, from place to place. He left his wife, Cleotha, whom he loved, because he couldn’t stay in place and remain faithful. She died recently, and Wining Boy wasn’t able to receive the news in time to attend her funeral. He overemphasizes his career as a musician, which was short-lived, and he refuses to admit that he has no money, even though his family knows that he only visits when he’s broke. He gave up playing the piano, much like Berniece, when he started to feel that it was a burden. As Wilson describes, “He is a man who looking back over his life continues to live it with an odd mixture of zest and sorrow” (32). Like Doaker, Wining Boy also acts as a griot, a traditional storyteller from West African cultures. As his name implies, Wining Boy likes to drink, although he seems to lean more toward whiskey than wine.