Piano Lesson Ghosts of the

Piano Lesson Ghosts of the Past and Ambitions for the Future in the Piano Lesson August Wilson is a Pulitzer Prize winning author who is most particularly renowned for what is known as his Pittsburgh cycle. From 1982 to 2005, Wilson worked to the completion of a deeply ambitious and by the critical consensus largely successful project in which he portrayed the lives of African-Americans throughout the 20th century.

With one play for each decade, Wilson crafts a compelling metafictional experience in which the emergence of African-Americans from slavery to freedom is chronicled. In the fourth installment of this, 1987's The Piano Lesson, Wilson casts the Charles family in the 1930s and features the Pittsburgh Hills neighborhood that functions as the unifying thread throughout the cycle. Another unifying thread is the thematic impulse of Wilson's plays, with The Piano Lesson reflecting the recurrent discourse on freed blacks learning to cope with a history of bondage and humiliation.

In this particular installment, the family in question is one representative of many only two generations removed from slavery and still subsisting under the thumb of Jim Crow. In the Charles family is captured the struggle to retain a connection to the past both in remembrance of those who suffered and in preservation of a cultural identity made unique by the impact of slavery. This struggle is challenged by the rational implications of moving forward such as land ownership and the seizing of opportunity for economic advancement.

This dynamic between the past and the future comes to roost in the 1930s, with no figure illustrating this with greater clarity than Boy Willie. In one regard an ebullient and charismatic figure with a certain degree of logic to defend his ambition for land ownership, and in the other regard an insufferably self-interest and reckless man, Boy Willie is an African-American archetype molded by the pressures to carve out a stake as free Americans in a society and economy deeply entrenched to exclude those such as himself.

Thus, when he arrives before sunrise to the surprise of Doaker and Berniece, it is with only a limited degree of judgment that we consider his twin motives. He tells his Uncle Doaker, "Me and Lymon selling watermelons. We got a truck out there. Got a whole truckload of watermelons. We brought them up here to sell." (Wilson, 2) That the watermelon truck is stolen helps to magnify the type of man that Boy Willie has become.

And his intent to take the piano by force and sell it on the logic that Berniece doesn't play it revolves on a self-interest characteristic of Boy Willie. His cohort in Lymon is another representative figure, a man who clearly persists on the bad side of the law. His influence on the scenes in which he's present also suggests something of Wilson's view on the dilemmas and difficulties facing African-Americans during the Great Depression.

Indeed, there seems to be a parallel consideration of the period of enslavement which preceded the story and the period of depression which provided its backdrop.

Boan (1998) commends on this dynamic, relating that "beneath the diversity within the dramatic framework of the plays lies the assertion that the present for black America has been invariably shaped by a history of race-related stolen opportunity and broken relationships, or what Michael Morales calls 'a simultaneously reactive/reconstructive engagement with the representation of blacks and the representation of history by the dominant culture.'" (Boan, 263) The result is both a past and a present that speak to the poorly evolving state of many African-American men experiencing so-called freedom.

Lymon and Boy Willie are clearly among these struggling men. So reveals Boy Willie as Berniece drills him about the watermelons, the truck and Lymon in general. Here, Willie reveals that "Lymon bought that truck so he have him a place to sleep. He down there wasn't doing no work or nothing. Sheriff looking for him.

He bought that truck to keep away from the sheriff." (Wilson, 6) The correlation between joblessness and crime is a familiar refrain in the African-American experience and denotes some of the sociological issues which permeated Wilson's writing. These are also features which cast a logical and empathetic light on Berniece's unenviable position as the protector of her family's history. She represents a desire to embrace that which had delivered them to their freedom where Boy Willie represents a reckless denunciation of the past.

Even in the effort to buy the farm on which his family persisted as slaves, Boy Willie seems intent upon reversing or denying his history. No doubt this conflict is present in the legal and ethical indiscretions of which he is guilty. To this discussion, the complex dynamic persisting in the notion of the exchange of the piano for a parcel of land reflects an extremely difficult question for African Americas going forward for the first time as freed men and women.

In a manner, the opportunity to own a parcel of land, and particularly that on which the family had once been forced to toil as slaves, reflected an opportunity to move forward. By contrast, the piano would function as a most explicit symbol of the family's past and the heritage which it still wished to retain.

For the suffering implied by the land and the opportunity for redemption in commanding that very acreage, the piano would nonetheless connect the family to an aspect of its history which it desired to retain. So is this most ironically shown in the scene where Boy Willie demonstrates the piano's power to inspire joy. Sitting at the piano and punching out a simple boogie-woogie, he says to Maretha, "See that? See what I'm doing? That's what you call the boogie-woogie. See now.

you can get up and dance to that That's how good it sound. It sound like you wanna dance. You can dance to that. It'll hold you up.

Whatever kind of dance you wanna do you can dance to that right there." (Wilson, 22) That Boy Willie recognizes the power of the piano, and recounts its history as an avatar for family members lost to the slave trade, as the vessel by which the family's history may be learned and as a sacrificial object for which the brother and sister would lose their father. Ultimately, its theft in flight from the ownership of the Sutter's would correlate the piano inextricable to the Charles family's rise to freedom.

As Boy Willie and Lymon amble wastefully through their freedom, we are given a more pensive insight into the great equalizing forces of nature. Wining Boy, the older brother of Doaker, is characterized as an old bluesman who "looking back over his life continues to live it with an odd mixture of zest and sorrow." (Wilson, 228) On reflection of the death of former slaveholder Old Man Sutter, Wining Boy ponders, "so the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog got Sutter.

That just go to show you I believe I always lived right. They say every dog gonna have his day and time it go around it sure come back at you. I done seen that a thousand times. I know the truth of that. But I'll tell you outright.

.if I see Sutter's ghost, I'll be on the first thing I find that got wheels on it." (Wilson, 28) This is a compelling reflection for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the profundity with which it captures the irrelevance of racial distinctions. All men must die in the end, slave and slaveholder alike. Wining Boy does not seem to find comfort in this so much as irony.

To rule over men and to trade women and children, and yet to fall into a well and die alone. Sutter would ultimately prove the inherent rationale of the end of slavery. And yet, there is another level to that which Wining Boy ponders which leads us to another recurring theme throughout the Pittsburgh cycle. The reference to ghosts and phantoms is a common feature of Wilson's work and has an important role in defining the African-American culture's spiritual way of connecting to its past.

This is underscored in the comments by Nadel (1994), whose text remarks that "Wilson's historical project moves into a world of ancestral visitations, visions, and ghosts. The mystical elements intertwine closely with Wilson's historical project in what might be characterized as an experiment in African-American historiography." (Nadel, 106) Indeed, that the ghost of Sutter would appear to Berniece in a dream ahead of Boy Willie's arrival is suggestive of a connection between the family's history of bondage and the portentous arrival of Berniece's scheming and selfish kin.

Ultimately, the Charles family's struggle over the piano is based on the conflicted desire to hold on to the ghosts of the past in order to honor their memory and their toil and, contrarily, to become ensconced in the same games and deceptions as the white man had done to them. This is certainly suggested in Boy Willie's ruthless and callous demeanor with respect.