Ghosts and Ambition in Wilson's The Piano Lesson

August Wilson and the Pittsburgh Cycle

August Wilson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author particularly renowned for what is known as his Pittsburgh Cycle. From 1982 to 2005, Wilson worked toward the completion of a deeply ambitious — and, by critical consensus, largely successful — project in which he portrayed the lives of African Americans throughout the twentieth century. With one play for each decade, Wilson crafts a compelling experience in which the emergence of African Americans from slavery to freedom is chronicled. In the fourth installment of this cycle, The Piano Lesson (1990), Wilson casts the Charles family in the 1930s and features the Pittsburgh Hill District neighborhood that functions as a unifying thread throughout the series.

Another unifying thread is the thematic impulse of Wilson's plays. The Piano Lesson reflects a recurrent discourse on freed Black Americans learning to cope with a history of bondage and humiliation. The family at the play's center is one representative of many — only two generations removed from slavery and still subsisting under the oppressive weight of Jim Crow. In the Charles family, Wilson captures 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 practical implications of moving forward, such as land ownership and the seizing of opportunity for economic advancement.

Boy Willie, Lymon, and the Burden of Freedom

This dynamic between the past and the future comes to a head in the 1930s, with no figure illustrating it with greater clarity than Boy Willie. In one regard he is an ebullient and charismatic figure with a certain logic behind his ambitions for land ownership; in another, he is an insufferably self-interested and reckless man. Boy Willie is an African American archetype molded by the pressures of carving out a stake as a free American in a society and economy deeply entrenched to exclude people like himself. When he arrives before sunrise to the surprise of Doaker and Berniece, we regard his twin motives with only limited judgment. 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 magnify the kind of man Boy Willie has become.

His intent to take the piano by force and sell it — on the logic that Berniece does not play it — reflects the same self-interest. His cohort Lymon is another representative figure, a man who clearly persists on the wrong side of the law. Lymon's influence on the scenes in which he appears also suggests something of Wilson's view on the dilemmas facing African American men during the Great Depression. Indeed, there seems to be a parallel consideration of the period of enslavement that preceded the story and the period of economic depression that provides its backdrop; both offer context for the poorly evolving circumstances of many African American men. Lymon and Boy Willie are clearly among them. As Boy Willie reveals when Berniece drills him about the watermelons, the truck, and Lymon: "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 speaks to the sociological concerns that permeated Wilson's writing. These are also features that cast a logical and empathetic light on Berniece's unenviable position as protector of her family's history. She represents a desire to embrace the heritage that delivered them to freedom, while Boy Willie represents a reckless denunciation of the past. Even in his effort to buy the farm on which his family toiled as slaves, Boy Willie seems intent upon reversing or denying that history — a conflict made visible in his legal and ethical transgressions.

The Piano as Symbol of Heritage and Sacrifice

The complex dynamic embedded in the proposed exchange of the piano for a parcel of land reflects an extraordinarily difficult question for African Americans moving forward for the first time as free men and women. In one sense, the opportunity to own land — particularly the very land on which the family had once been forced to toil — represented an opportunity to move beyond the past. By contrast, the piano functions as the most explicit symbol of the family's history and the heritage it still wished to retain. Despite the suffering the land implied, and despite the opportunity for redemption in commanding that very acreage, the piano nonetheless connected the family to an aspect of its identity it was unwilling to surrender.

This irony is most vividly shown in the scene where Boy Willie demonstrates the piano's power to inspire joy. Sitting at the instrument and playing 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 piano's power — and recounts its history as an avatar for family members lost to the slave trade, as the vessel through which the family's history may be learned, and as a sacrificial object for which the brother and sister lost their father — is deeply significant. Ultimately, the piano's theft in flight from the Sutters' ownership would bind it inextricably to the Charles family's rise toward freedom.

Wilson's treatment of the blues tradition is central here: the piano is not merely furniture but a living archive, its carved figures representing enslaved ancestors whose stories must be told rather than sold.