Notes on The Piano Lesson - Session #7, Week 5
Session #7
For starters, I just noticed in the production history that Samuel Jackson played Boy Willie in the first Yale Rep production of The Piano Lesson in 1987. So his participation in the upcoming fall 2022 Broadway revival is a bit of a revival for him personally, to say nothing of the film adaptation when the Broadway run ends, probably in 2023.
We spoke Thursday about the Romare Bearden collage that originally inspired Wilson to write the play, and how Bearden was inspired by the Matisse painting by the same name and, in turn, Matisse was inspired by the Van Gogh painting on the same theme with a different name, Marguerite Gauchet at the Piano. Van Gogh had more than just a passing interest in music. He took piano lessons with a noted organist of his time, Hein van der Zanden. Van Gogh’s primary interest was in the interplay between colors, as described by Goethe and later developed by Delacroix, and music tones. For a deeper exposition, check out this website: https://vincentvangogheindhoven.nl/synesthesie/play-it-again-vincent/. Ultimately, if we travel far enough down the rabbit hole, we arrive at "synesthesia," first reported by philosopher John Locke when a blind man claimed to see the color scarlet whenever he heard the sound of a trumpet.
Apparently there is a whole genre of Piano Lesson representations in art. Just Google "The Piano Lesson" and click on Images. Whoever knew August Wilson was writing a play in such a rich, broad and deep artistic tradition!
Very briefly we talked about Doaker’s role as peacemaker and moderator of family squabbles. Doaker is in many ways the family patriarch, as the oldest, Wining Boy, has abdicated that responsibility. Structurally, Doaker performs the role of the chorus, a group of actors and players in Greek drama who described and commented upon the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation. Doaker narrates the family history, when it is required, as in the explanation why Berniece will not agree to sell the piano. But Doaker is imperfect as a middle of the road guy - behind her back Doaker thinks Bernice should get rid of the piano. He also thinks she’d be better off marrying Avery.
It’s interesting how Boy Willie supports what he thinks might be the motivations of their father, while Berniece upholds the struggles and wishes of their mother. It is unfortunate that the two ended up in pursuit of such different and divergent directions, enhancing in many way the Berniece/Boy Willie split. We also talked about how the emotional impairment of their mother forced Berniece and Boy Willie early on into a mother-son relationship that was not healthy for their sister-brother relationship.
I covered in earlier session notes my suspicion that Boy Willie and Lymon were behind (literally!) the death of Sutter. I also mentioned the thematic relationship the Yellow Dog killings had to the Greek myth of Narcissus - I thought it was interesting.
Our discussion of the “trifurcation” of religious practices between the traditional African-American interpretations of Christianity, the fragmented practices of African spiritualism carried forward through slavery, and humanistic, perhaps atheistic views of folks who reject the previous two will come in handy as we see a similar separation of beliefs in subsequent plays.
It is always worth mentioning the Toni Morrison foreword where she talks, among other things, about the benefits of reading plays. That said, the collapse of time in the final scene, as well as the dynamic animation in the Berta/Berta kitchen table has elements that are lost in the mere reading of the play, unless the group reads it out loud and acts out the parts.
Session #6
Here is a link to the full-length film adaptation:
And here is a link to the playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0Lvs-e_eIXYBNIkZcDVM0y_xff-c1zCi
I think this particular film adaptation is very important to the overall body of Wilson's work because Wilson himself was on the set, directing, changing text positions, and creating new scenes in the film not possible in the stage production. We see an example of his standards for future film adaptations of his plays.
For this week's review, I want to take a closer look, based on the play text, at how Sutter died. My opening hypothesis is that Boy Willie and Lymon actually did kill Sutter and dump his body down the well. At the end I want to explore the symbolism and metaphor of death in a well.
We know that Lymon is "on the lam" for a different reason. He was arrested for vagrancy, fined and sentenced to 30 days. Mr Stovall (where have we heard that name before?) pays his fine and contracts him to labor for a year to pay back the investment. Not wanting to work for Stovall, Lymon escapes and drives to Pittsburgh with Boy Willie. Of course he does not intend to return. He is, in effect, a fugitive.
Boy Willie is different. He flees with Lymon, but he has committed no crime that we know of. But we know he has a record and previously spent three years incarcerated on Parchman Farm.
The subject first comes up early in Act 1, Scene 1. Boy Willie tells Doaker and Berniece that he and Lymon are celebrating the death of Sutter at the hand of the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog. Doaker asks for details. Boy Willie immediately provides his alibi (without actually being asked): "About three weeks ago. Me and Lymon was over in Stoner County when we heard about it. We laughed." Then he provides an interesting detail: "A great big old three-hundred-and-forty pound man gonna fall down his well." When Doaker prompts Boy Willie about his unsolicited alibi, Boy Willie tells what is obviously a contrived story about working for Lymon's cousin, then quickly changes the subject to the watermelons they have hauled to Pittsburgh to sell.
Smelling a rat, Berniece asks three times about how they acquired the truck (the getaway vehicle). Three times. Boy Willie claims Lymon bought the truck from Henry Porter, the name, by the way, of a British writer who served for 25 years as an editor at Vanity Fair. But that's another story.
Berniece smells another rat about the truck and posits that Lymon may have stolen the truck. Again, Lymon doesn't intend to return South, and later suggests he may sell the truck. But back to the murder mystery.
Later in the same scene, Sutter's ghost makes his first appearance. Berniece sees the ghost, wearing a blue suit (strange for farming) and claims the ghost was calling Boy Willie's name.
OK. Sideboard. Remember in Ma Rainey? After Levee's mother was gang-raped, Levee's father went out on a vendetta to kill the rapists. He killed four of them before he was himself tracked down. The revenge motive. Boy Willie's father was killed when the sheriff and several men (including Sutter) set the box car on fire as he attempted to flee the scene of his crime, stealing a piano. One by one, all the people involved in that murder were killed by falling into a well, allegedly the actions of the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog. But we know there is no such thing as ghosts. End sideboard.
Then, out of nowhere, in a seeming non sequiter, Lymon asks Berniece a curious question about Sutter's ghost, "Did he have on a hat?" At that point, we know Lymon was at least at the scene of the crime.
Doaker has some great lines, both about his personal philosophy and about the history of the piano and the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog. After the second appearance of Sutter's ghost, Lymon and Boy Willie reveal how Berniece's husband, Crawley, really died. Berniece rejects the story and instead blames Boy Willie.
Moving forward, early in Act 2, Scene 5, Boy Willie makes an interesting revelation. Speaking about a puppy he had when he was a child, Boy Willie riffs on his own stoicism, sounding a bit like Troy Maxson in Fences and Herald Loomis in Joe Turner reciting his lack of fear of death. When he took the dead puppy to the church after much prayer over it's dead little body, and learning that praying in the church could not restore life to the puppy, Boy Willie proclaimed "Well, ain't nothing precious," and goes out and kills a cat in retribution. Later he says "That's what I learned when I killed that cat. I got the power of death too. I can command him. I can call him up. The white man don't like to see that. He don't like for you to stand up and look him straight in the eye and say, I got it too.""
Yep. Boy Willie did it. In fact, he may actually be a serial killer, as earlier, when Wining Boy asked him how many men the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog had killed, he claimed "Must be about nine or ten, eleven or twelve. I don't know." Boy Willis may be a true psychopath.
OK, this may all be a stretch.
Now. Death by the well. I have seen a few wells. Out in what we used to call "the country," every house had its own well. Some had pumps to bring well water into the house, but some hauled water out using buckets. We used to drink the well water from the bucket, using a steel ladle. Such memories. That well water was so cold and so sweet. Now, the well was surrounded by a type of housing that was built higher that we were tall, to keep children from falling down the well. Still it happened sometime. My father used to lift me up so I could see down into the well. I always wanted to see stuff as a little boy. If the sun was just right you could see the surface of the water and if the sun was just right, you could see your reflection on the water. You may see where I'm going with this.
"Narcissus, a beautiful youth, son of the god of the river Cephisus and the nymph Liriope, was born at Thespis of Boeotia in ancient Greece. He saw the reflection of his image in the clear waters of a fountain, and became enamored of it, thinking it to be the nymph of the place. His fruitless attempts to approach this beautiful object so provoked him that he grew desperate and killed himself. His blood was changed into a flower, which still bears his name." Lempriere's Classical Dictionary
Is it a stretch to consider that August Wilson expropriated the Narcissus myth to make a statement about human nature? There's probably more to discuss. If you look closely at the Bearden painting from which Wilson found inspiration to write the play, there is a curious black mirror on top of the piano. Just saying.
Finally, and unrelated consciously to August Wilson, I wrote a poem about Narcissus some years ago. May I share it with you?
Narcissus
We stare into our computer screens –
it’s retina display, of course – clearer
than one’s reflection on a still pond.
The image we see of ourselves is sharp
and well defined – in Facebook and Twitter
and Instagram, and all the rest,
even in the poetry we write and post.
We fall in love with that image,
that reflection we see. We worship
the likeness we have created, validated
by likes and shares from all our imaginary
friends. We think we are godly, all knowing.
We believe we now know all of beauty.
Entranced, we cannot move away
to eat or sleep or love. We waste away.
We die. A drooping daffodil marks the time
and space, a date stamp of our delusion.
Post discussion notes.
There seems to be a consensus that female characters are not as fully developed as male characters are. That surprises me because it seems a lot of space is dedicated to Berniece’s development track. Only a few people bought my theory that Boy Willie was a closet psychopath and serial killer. Well, I said it was a stretch. And I only got a couple of nods on my myth-of-Narcissus theory. C’est la vie!
Lots of discussion on Boy Willie and Berniece filled the space. Their relationship to each other, their relative positions vis-a-vis the piano, and the development of their characters throughout the play were discussion points. We agreed to a parallel between the “seance” in The Piano Lesson and the “Juba” in Joe Turner. Also, the lyrics to Berta, Berta gave us insight into the inner motivations of Herald Loomis in Joe Turner. Comparisons were made Zora Hurston’s Spunk and Toni Morrison’s Guitar in Song of Solomon (I’ll have to look these up).
Our discussion about the disposition of the family heirloom became a brief chat about erasure/cancel culture. I mentioned the current debate about changing the name of a DC high school from it’s original namesake, President Woodrow Wilson because of his racist practices that particularly affected DC blacks. Ed mentioned the name change of a law school in California for genocidal practices of its namesake, Serranus Clinton Hastings. I think the equating of selling the piano, which is both a family heirloom as well as an archive of the family’s history is a worthy discussion connected to The Piano Lesson. Related, I mentioned an op-ed I wrote several months ago about removing statues from the Capitol Rotunda was not well-received by readers of the Washington Post.
There will be more tomorrow when I watch the recorded video.
Post-post notes. The Piano Lesson really lends itself to what we have discussed earlier as a Dantean analysis (as mentioned last week, I am engaged in a daily reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy and I can’t seem to prevent it from spilling over into Wilson’s work, and vice versa. Might open up some new possibilities). In Dante’s world, literature is analyzed on four levels or layers or using four approaches – the literal, the moral, the allegorical, and the spiritual/mystical. Shall we proceed?
The literal, for The Piano Lesson, is easy. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to buy farmland and Berniece wants to keep the piano as a family heirloom. at the moral level it begins to get bit hazy. As stolen property, Sutter’s ghost has the strongest claim, perhaps. Beyond that, however, I think Boy Willie has the strongest claim in his plan to sell the piano and share the proceeds equally with his sister. At the allegorical level, the piano has acquired family heirloom status, preserving the history of the family as a record, and as a container for the family’s collective hopes and aspirations. The Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant, I say in a previous post. So Berniece has the strongest claim. At the spiritual/mystical level, Berniece’s final emergence as the high priestess of the spirit of the piano, calling on the ancestors and receiving their affirmative response, awards the piano to Berniece. And that’s how it all ends. Boy Willie returns to Mississippi, Berniece keeps the piano, and Sutter’s ghost departs the house (we hope!).
What about August Wilson the poet vs August Wilson the pilgrim in the play?
Session #5
For each session, my intention is to come up with some unique perspective in understanding the play. Sometimes I succeed and achieve that goal. Sometimes I do not. This time I come pretty close.
The key issue, and the central lesson of The Piano Lesson, is repeated by August Wilson in interview after interview. The issue is, ”can you acquire a healthy sense of self worth by denying your past?”
On the surface, it might appear that Berniece is the one who wants to preserve the historical basis of the family’s sense of self-worth through her refusal to sell the piano with all its artifacts that detail the family history. Similarly, on the surface, it might appear that Boy Willie is willing to ignore that history in order to buy the 100 acres of farmland where their ancestors were slaves and later, sharecroppers.
But beneath the surface, we learn that 1) Berniece never plays the piano; and most significantly, 2) Berniece has never explained to her daughter Maretha the history of the piano and its symbolic artifacts, the history of the family, or anything else that might actually suggest a sense of self-worth. Berniece tells Maretha “don’t act your color,” suggesting there is something inherently inferior about her complexion. Additionally, while “fixing her hair,” Berniece tells Maretha that if she were a boy, they wouldn’t have to go through that painful process of placing a hot comb to her scalp, suggesting there may be something inferior, as well, about her gender. That Berniece is a piece of work! Berniece wants to ignore her family history in the rural south in order to build a different future for her family in the urban north.
Boy Willie, perhaps on the other hand, acknowledges his southern roots, so much that he wants to buy the land his ancestors worked when they were enslaved. But in order to complete the purchase, Boy Willie has decided he needs the proceeds from selling the family heirloom, the piano.
The tradeoff, stripped of all the accompanying baggage, seems very straight forward.
Let’s pause here and come back later. Let’s talk about the art.
According to Wilson, the Romare Bearden painting, The Piano Lesson, provided him inspiration to write the play. In the Bearden painting, you see what appears to be Maretha seated and Berniece standing over and instructing her at the piano.
The painting actually was a tribute to the jazz singer/artist/performer Mary Lou Williams, with whom Bearden’s wife Nanette and her dance company had done an artistic collaboration while Williams was Artist in Residence at Duke University. The original Bearden collage/painting didn’t have all the family portraits carved into the wood. That was Wilson’s innovation.
But back to the collage. In a wide ranging interview with Myron Schwartzmann in a huge coffee table book Schwartzmann completed entitled, “Romare Bearden: His Life and Art,” whose foreword was written, by the way, by August Wilson, Bearden takes us from the original diagrammatic drawing (ink on paper), to the black and white 1983 oil with collage of the Mecklenburg Autumn series, to the silkscreen ink on tracing paper, to the final 1984 version fully colored.
The complete Mecklenburg Autumn series, named for the North Carolina county where Bearden was born, included, among many, a piece called Autumn Lamp, which featured a guitar player and his guitar. In producing the painting/collage, Bearden followed a procedure established by the French impressionist Edouard Manet, as recorded by his contemporary, another French impressionist, Claude Monet. Monet wrote that Manet always wanted to give the impression that a painting was completed in one sitting (a tenet of Impressionism), so at the end of each day in production, he would scrape down whatever he had produced, keeping only the lowest layer. Then each new day he would “improvise” on that bottom layer. At some point, Manet would stop the process, but in fact, a Manet painting made in this manner was never fully completed.
In other paintings in the series, Bearden used images from his childhood.
For The Piano Lesson, also called Homage to Mary Lou Williams, Bearden found inspiration in two Matisse paintings, The Music Lesson and The Piano Lesson, below
Without going too far afield, one can see not only how Bearden’s images influenced Wilson, but also how his processes and production “technologies” influenced how Wilson produced plays, going through multiple rehearsal revisions, yet improvising on the ever present foundation drawing, the original vision if you will. Yet another piece of the story is that Matisse was influenced by Van Gogh, who did his own “Piano Lesson,” Marguerite Gachet At The Piano. I will leave this link with you for further study and investigation. https://www.vincent-van-gogh-gallery.org/Marguerite-Gachet-At-The-Piano.html
Bearden continues in this part of the interview with other influences on his work, his study of the Dutch Masters, especially Vermeer, his study of the French impressionists during his sojourn in Paris, and his reading of Clausewitz, On War, and how the chaos of war is resolved though the elimination of superfluous options. He wrote of classic Chinese painting which he considered the “greatest of paintings,”
“For instance, a Chinese painter, in the classic days, when he looked at the rocks and trees, felt a certain oneness with them. And he was, himself, although painting it, part of the landscape which he was painting. He looked upon the large tree, let us say, as a father tree, the others as his children; the largest mountain, perhaps, as a father mountain, or a mother, and smaller, children mountains. So he imbued nature with human concerns. . . . In this way he was able at the very beginning, to think of the relationships in his painting because of the relationships with a family.”
I have gone a bit off on a tangent with this Bearden thing, but when Wilson says that Bearden was one of his principle influences, we really should both take that at face value and look deeper.
An interesting story captured by Richard Long, essayist and critic, in his essay “Bearden, Theater, Film and Dance,” reports how Long noticed an op-ed Wilson wrote for the New York Times that mentions his indebtedness to Bearden’s influence. Long showed the op-ed to Bearden over breakfast and asked him if he had seen it and what he thought about it. Bearden who had never met and would never meet Wilson remarked, “Well, he could have at least sent me tickets to the show.” Wilson would say in subsequent interviews that he actually stood outside Bearden’s apartment but would not go in to see him (hoping perhaps to catch him in transit, maybe). It’s a shame they never directly collaborated.
Two more thoughts on The Piano Lesson before I stop.
It dawned on me, and perhaps on you, that Boy Willie and Berniece are quibbling in the play over what amounts to stolen property. In a previous session I traced the lineage, the provenance of the artifact, the piano. The transaction that resulted in the Charles family acquiring the piano was a theft by Boy Willie’s father, Boy Charles, along with his uncles, Doaker and Wining Boy. Plain and simple. I know all about how the piano was exchanged for two enslaved people who were also ancestors of Boy Willie and Berniece and I know how horrible slavery was as an institution. I am descended from enslaved people and I grew up hearing the stories from the old folks. But let’s be honest. Slavery was protected and preserved by the U.S. Constitution. Slavery was the law of the land in the states where it was legitimately practiced. The state legislatures approved it. The national Senate and House of Representatives allowed it. And the Supreme Court affirmed its legitimacy in a number of cases and decisions. They were all in on it. It took a Civil War and the deaths of over six hundred thousand soldiers on both sides to correct the wrong that was slavery, something that should have been able to be worked out by rational people over a dining room table.
Yet, try as we might, we cannot really morally justify the theft of the piano, no matter what images were carved into it. Don’t get sucked in by the emotional appeal.
Finally, I want to call your attention to the fact that The Piano Lesson was the first August Wilson play adapted for film, and for television, no less. Hallmark. One astute observer recorded that on the night that the Hallmark movie aired on television, more people were exposed to August Wilson than all the audiences of all the plays previously performed in all the theaters worldwide. Le’s add that more black people got access to August Wilson that night than ever before. As we know from earlier reading, mechanical reproduction will increase the exhibition value of Wilson’s work but what is lost is the cult value, the ritual of the romance of the energy exchanged across the stage and into the audience.
postscript. Samuel L Jackson plans to produce and direct a Broadway revival of The Piano Lesson late this year, and a film adaptation using the same cast in 2022. Let us add, the Good Lord and COVID willing.
postscript #2. NaPoWriMo requires a poem about a piece of art. How about The Piano Lesson?
The black mirror invites my inspection –
A scaled representation of the whole.
The wooden metronome in its foreground
Reminds one of rhythm and time’s passage,
The pendulum’s swing until the winding
Dies. The young girl, black like the mirror, plays
As her mother directs. The mother’s face,
More blue than black, leans in attentively.
A non-flowering plant rests in a vase.
A paintbrush seems out of place. It could be
A missing conductor’s baton. The sun
Bursts through the window as a slight breeze blows
The curtains askew. A ceiling lamp and
A table lamp compete to light the room.
Session #4
Toni Morrison’s Foreword
Toni Morrison’s foreword, first of all, left me breathless. Too bad it was not included in her last collection of essays, The Source of Self-Regard. In the foreword she writes,
“It was in reading the text that I was struck by the beauty and accuracy of August Wilson’s language, as well as the richness waiting to be mined from the interstices between performance and text, between stage and the readerly imagination.”
She goes on to point out the “narrative threads” that figure most prominently in the unravelling of the plays central plot, the life of the truck that Boy Willie and Lymon arrive in and constantly go back to throughout the play, and the fear (and suspense) that animate the play.
The truck barely makes it to Pittsburgh with breakdowns, loss of breaks, failure of the radiator, etc., then throughout the play it reminds us that although the truck provides mobility, it only barely does so. There are the watermelon selling escapades (an inside joke) off the back of the truck, and there is Grace as a willing passenger for both Boy Willie (one night) and Lymon (another day). Ultimately the truck is to be the vehicle that takes the piano to its new owner (although it never happens) and alternately, the vehicle that Lymon uses to resettle in Pittsburgh since Boy Willie aims to return by train.
I’ll stop here so as not to spoil for you the reading. If anybody doesn’t have the version that has the Morrison foreword, I’ll send it out separately.
The weird end of the play.
A mixture of weird events marks the end of the play, presenting what is bound to be a super challenge for any stage director. In a few pages at the end of Act 2 Scene 5, we go from Boy Willie’s wrestling with Sutter’s ghost, to Avery’s failed attempt to bless the house, to Berniece’s calling on the ancestors as she plays the piano which finally puts the ghost’s expressions to rest. There is a type of time collapse that takes place that can only be attributed to and explained by Borgesian magical realism.
We have mentioned that Wilson cites his top influences as the 4 B’s, Baraka, Bearden, Borges, and the Blues. On the surface, we are aware of Bearden’s immediate influence. His collage, The Piano Lesson, provides the primary inspiration for the play. We find in Borges’ magical realism a possible explanation for the appearance and reappearance of Sutter’s Ghost as well as the rapid recovery from an intense spiritual experience at the very end of the play.
Wilson addresses issues in The Piano Lesson in several interviews. He refers to Boy Willie as the heroic figure in the play, yet he calls Boy Willie’s character development static as opposed to dynamic: Boy Willie enters with a firm plan, reflected, not coincidentally, in the play’s epigraph, lyrics to a blues song by Skip James that become a sort of mantra Boy Willie recites throughout the play. Wilson lets on in conversations that he admires Boy Willie’s intention to return to the south and buy land, farm that land, and secure financial independence. Yet he says Berniece is the star of the play and that the play is about Berniece, not Boy Willie.
Wilson refers to The Piano Lesson as his best play.
The relationship between Boy Willie and Beniece
It is Berniece’s character that develops and evolves, and at the end she breaks through and does what she must to quiet Sutter’s ghost. Wilson mentions that in the first write, he gave Berniece some very “feminist” lines that were eventually removed as it would have been out of place for 1936. When Wilson is asked whether or not Berniece and Avery eventually get married, he expresses doubt, explaining that Avery’s accommodationist tendencies are unlike character traits of other men in her life, her father, her first husband and her brother, for example.
There are several clues in the play that give us important information about the brother-sister relation. A few facts are important. Berniece is five years older than Boy Willie. Following the murder of their father, Papa Boy Charles, their mother was essentially so emotionally impaired (there are subtle hints of this) that she was no longer able to effectively parent her children and Berniece more or less took over at Boy Willie’s mother figure. This became very apparent in the scene where Maretha is having her hair ironed and Boy Willie criticizes the way Berniece speaks to her daughter (as if she may have spoken to him like that in his childhood (my interpretation). This tension overrides the relationship between Berniece and Boy Willie throughout the play.
**********
During our group discussion we talked about how the idea to divide the proceeds from the sale of the piano was a concept that seemed to have evolved during the course of the play. Someone mentioned that in the case of a dispute like this over jointly held family property, the proper recourse would have been to sell the property and split the proceeds across the heirs or family members with a claim on the property. When Boy Willie first arrived, he was dead set on selling the piano and taking the proceeds to buy the property down south. Later on he modified his position to share the proceeds with Berniece, half and half.
Another discussion we had was the three part or tripartite religious spiritualism that ranged from the otherworldliness of magical realism, to elements of African spirituality, to more traditional Christianity, and how issues and events moved back and forth on that spectrum, perhaps positing that the African Spiritualism in the middle was somehow the golden mean. Avery, then, represented the traditional Christian faith, Berniece ended up representing the African spirituality, and Boy Willie wrestling with Sutter’s ghost represented the Borgesian magical realism and otherworldliness clearly distinct from anything else mentioned.
Session #3
I enjoy slightly retelling the stories in these August Wilson plays. It somehow helps me understand them better. My favorite thing is renaming each play. For example, I renamed Gem of the Ocean “The Adventures of Citizen Barlow.” The rename for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is “The Return of Deacon Herald Loomis,” though it could also named “Bynum Walker’s Fulfillment.” Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was easy, “It’s All About Levee,” although “August Wilson on Playwriting and Play Production” is running a tight second and may win the race overall. The renaming of this week’s play, The Piano Lesson, is a bit complex, but I think I have figured it out: “Sutter’s Ghost in the Archive.” Let me explain.
The repeated appearance of Sutter’s ghost and the whole yarn about the Ghost of the Yellow Dog are vital elements in the unfolding of the play’s various plots. Every time Boy Wille and Lymon try to move the piano, they hear the sounds of Sutter’s ghost. Berniece sees Sutter’s ghost at the top of the stairwell, holding his head. Doaker sees the ghost but remains silent about it. Maretha sees the ghost upstairs and is traumatized. Avery fails at expelling the ghost from the house, Boy Willie has an actual physical altercation with the ghost and gets thrown down the stairs (better than the well, I’d say!), and ultimately, Berniece returns to playing the piano, calling on all the ancestors (a la Toledo’s African conceptualization). Only she succeeds in driving the ghost of Sutter out of the house.
The Ghost of the Yellow Dog story is significant because it is a ghost that kills Sutter, resulting from the burning of a railroad car by several men (including Sutter) that contained Papa Boy Charles and four hoboes. Papa Boy Charles stole the piano from the Sutter house. Each of the men involved in the railroad car burning (and subsequent murders) dies a horrible death (a la Milton Green killing each of the men involved in the rape of Levee’s mother in Ma Rainey), and each death is in turn blamed on the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog.
Altogether, this represents Borgesian magical realism at its finest, one of Wilson’s top influences. I mentioned magical realism in an earlier post, a story of fantasy within a story of realism. Borges himself referred to it as “the contamination of reality by dream.” It serves as motive force for internally pushing the plot forward, but it also tells its own story.
OK. The Archive. One normally thinks of archives in terms of written records, and normally, these days though it hasn’t always been, on paper. Let me change your thinking. The piano is a worthy museum piece, with the carvings and all, an artifact, but it wouldn’t normally be thought of as an archive. But this piano has carvings that represent several generations of the Charles family, births, marriages, transactions, deaths, etc. Those representations qualify it to be an archive itself, the images mere surrogates of actual events in the lives of actual people. Doaker and Wining Boy tell Boy Charles, “Bernice is not going to sell that piano,” because they know she recognizes the power of the record, of the representation.
I wrote in an earlier set of notes, “The piano is the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant in the origin myth story. The Holy Grail because it carried the “blood” of Berniece’s mother who so laboriously kept it sparkling and polished and it represents the “secret” of what happened to the family unit in slavery. It is the Ark of the Covenant because it represents the “chest” that contains the archive of the family history through the generations.
“Finally, what is the Lesson? I propose the lesson is that heritage and a family history of struggle and overcoming trump everything else. Money can’t buy it, not can it be traded for money. But you have to honor it, preserve it, celebrate it, and add to it with the achievements of each generation. Without the last piece, the life affirming and life-sustaining temple of our familiar becomes just a tomb of memories, a curious artifact of the past.
Here is a link to the YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0Lvs-e_eIXYBNIkZcDVM0y_xff-c1zCi
An interesting discussion Friday warrants this additional blog post.
There were a few comments on the relationship and relationship dynamics between Berniece and Boy Willie that really caught my attention, perspectives I had not considered previously. It was pointed out that Boy Willie and Berniece’s mother was pretty much a dysfunctional parent after the death of her husband and there are clues to this in the text. She spent all her time polishing that piano, rubbing it until her hands bled, then rubbing that blood into the piano wood. What normal person does that?
“Mama Ola polished this piano with her tears for seventeen years. For seventeen years she rubbed on it till her hands bled. Then she rubbed the blood in . . . mixed it up with the rest of the blood on it. Every day that God breathed life into her body she rubbed and cleaned and polished and prayed over it.”
OK. Not normal. It’s not a tremendous leap in logic, then, to hypothesize that the oldest child, Berniece, took on the “mother” role for a younger Boy Willie. And it emerges in the play. Whenever Boy Willie criticizes Berniece’s parenting skills, he speaks with an emotionalism that suggests he had personally been on the other side of those bad parenting skills. When Berniece tells Maretha “If you was a boy I wouldn’t be going through this,” Boy Willie has a very strong negative reaction. And when Berniece tells Boy Willie, in front of Maretha, “You right at the bottom with the rest of us,” Boy Willie recoils with “If you believe that’s where you at you gonna act that way. If you act that way then that’s where you gonna be. It’s as simple as that.” And Boy Willie goes on and on for two pages, acting out something that is clearly from his boyhood when Berniece was his loco parenti.
The brother-sister relationship between Berniece and Boy Willie was/is “overlain” by the mother-son relationship forced by the emotional absence of the actual mother figure in the family. Both of them resent each other because of it. But as was mentioned in our discussion, while there are times when Boy Willie seems almost affectionate towards his sister, in speech patterns and in general feelings expressed, there is seldom an exchange in which Berniece shows any affection for Boy Willie, that is, until the end of the play.
postscript. Berniece’s three years of grieving over her husband’s death may be a learned behavior, mimicking her own mother’s prolonged grieving over the death of her father. If so, it is not a good omen for the future.
OK. I’m not going to beat this horse to death. Each person in the group brings a wealth of background experience to our discussion. It is beautiful and I am so grateful to be a part of these discussions with you all each week.
Session #2
Opening today’s notes with a short video on Romare Bearden, whose collage, The Piano Lesson, provided inspiration for this Wilson play.
So, what is “The Piano Lesson?” It’s a question I ask myself. Is it what it appears on the surface, the not-unsubstantial question of preserving an artifact which is also an archive and a family heirloom, versus using the proceeds of the sale of said artifact to buy the farm where generations worked during slavery and Reconstruction. Which one has more practical and economic value? Which one has more spiritual and perhaps cultural value? Or is it a false dichotomy, an irony created to force us to take a closer look at the story?
Mass incarceration had by 1936 become a rite of passage for African American men. The thing that united all four male characters in the story is the time they spent incarcerated at Parchman Farm, thanks to that 13th Amendment cut-out.
The crossroads, in this case where the Southern (vertical, North-South from Washington, DC to New Orleans) meets the Yazoo Delta (aka, the Yellow Dog, horizontal across Mississippi) is a recurrent theme in oral folklore, music and literature. The God of The Crossroads, is known as Papa Legba in West Africa, Elegua in Cuba and Brazil. He is a trickster who will speak to you at the crossroads (decision-making moment) and allow you to sell your soul for quick fame and riches.
August Wilson includes the lyrics to three whole blues/gospel songs in the play. Think he’s trying to tell us something? Berta, Berta. I’m a Ramblin Gamblin Man. I Want You to Help Me.
Boy Willis has a unique rhythm to his speech in a couple of places. Almost like a mantra, a recipe he has memorized (sounds curiously like the Skip James epigraph):
In Act 1, Scene 1: “Sell them watermelons. Get Berniece to sell that piano. Put them two parts with the part I done saved. Walk in there. Tip my hat. Lay my money down on the table. Get my deed and walk out. This time I bet to keep all the cotton. Hire me some men to work it for me. Gin my cotton. Get my seed And I’ll see you again next year.”
Then in Act 1 Scene 2: “I sell them watermelons. Get Berniece to sell that piano. Put them two parts with the part I done saved.”
Avery, now a preacher, seeks Berniece’s hand in marriage. He has his eye on the piano for his future church and congregation, and his eye on Berniece as a future deaconess. By Avery’s stated estimation, Berniece has no value except as a wife. Berniece rejects that estimation. Avery fails in his attempt to bless the house and rid it of Sutter’s ghost.
Speaking of which, who/what is Sutter’s ghost attached to? Is it the piano? I laid out the “provenance” of the piano in a previous post:
Conclusion. But there is more to discuss. I wrote in a previous posting the following:
The piano is the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant in the myth story. The Holy Grail because it carried the “blood” of Berniece’s mother who so laboriously kept it sparkling (polished it until her hands bled) and polished and it represents the “secret” of what happened to the family unit in slavery. The Ark of the Covenant because it represents the “chest” that contains the archive of the family history through the generations. Finally, what is the Lesson? I propose the lesson is that heritage and family history of struggle and overcoming trump everything else. Money can’t buy it, not can it be traded for money. But you have to honor it, preserve it, celebrate it, and add to it with the achievements of each generation. Without the last piece, the life affirming and life-sustaining temple of our familiar becomes just a tomb of memories, a curious artifact of the past.
Wikipedia list of characters and synopsis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Piano_Lesson
YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0Lvs-e_eIXYBNIkZcDVM0y_xff-c1zCi
Session #1
Art work, Bearden, The Piano Lesson, aka Homage to Mary Lou Williams
August Wilson called “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” his favorite play, but he referred to The Piano Lesson as his best play. I haven’t come across any explanations but my own observation is that this play contains a richer variety of symbols and rituals than the other plays we have studied so far, though each was unique in its display of ritualistic behavior.
The Berniece/Boy Willie interface is reminiscent of the Jacob/Esau birthright conflict as well as the King Solomon cutting the baby in half suggestion. The four men at the table drinking and singing old prison songs until they work themselves into a near frenzy reminds me of a type of communal seance where distant spirits inhabit and emerge from the interplay between the participants. The piano combines the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant mythologies (we’ll spend more time on this later in this discussion. Avery’s failed blessing of the house is a type of exorcism, again that ultimately fails. Berniece is the high priestess who finally emerges to make a sacrifice to appease the family ancestors (gods). All this richness!
I am calling the the prison work song scene the first climax of the play because of all the action and discussion leading up to it and the falling action/discussion after it. After the song was completed, all four men opened up and spoke freely together, so it was also an “equalizing” event, similar to the Eucharist with bread and wine (note: drinking had occurred, but it was whisky, not communion wine. Anyway, you get the point.). Very moving scene. The prison work song, I propose, not only identified their common experience with incarceration in the South, but, much deeper, identified a spiritual basis or background they shared connecting them to their African roots and origin. The “sacrament” was ended with Whining Boy playing on the piano (the altar, the shrine). Berniece’s arrival changes the mood completely. She will have a separate cataclysmic event.
This is the third Wilson play based on a painting. The first one was Fences and the second was Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. All three were based on or inspired by paintings by Romare Bearden. So already there is an organic relationship between the three plays.
Who is the Wilson Warrior in this play? Is it Berniece, determined to hold on to the family keepsake (a shrine, an altar and a surrogate archive)? Or is it Boy Willie, who would prefer to sell the piano and use the money to buy the family plantation land down south (capitalism and wealth building)? I contend they are both Wilson Warriors per the Riley Temple definitions, characters who
“take a journey – a pilgrimage of redemption to find and to reconstitute who they might have been, and what they have become. And in so doing they must have the strength and the courage – the faith – to revisit the past in all its several guises and heaviness, to set down the burdens of that past, and become free. The faith is needed to know that the outcome will be as God intends, despite the difficulties attendant to the journey.”
“These men (and Berniece Charles) are warriors in fact, and not merely in spirit (but certainly in that as well), and have that Warrior courage. They make mistakes. Bad mistakes. They pay the price for them. Yet, they are not victims. They are fighters.”
those who fight – sometimes foolishly as Levee has just done, and who should and will pay dearly for such a tragic mistake.
“like the others: Solly “Two Kings” in Gem, who freed slaves and who turned to helping abused factory workers; Herald Loomis; Boy Willie of Piano Lesson who has to fight off ghosts of the past to help his sister unlock herself….Troy Maxson, of Fences, who battles death and the compulsion to save his son from racial humiliation…”
“Each one had knowledge of who they were right within their reach – their song was in their throats – they had to be guided to the soul’s destination to sing it.”
“He (Boy Willie) is, after all, one of Wilson’s warriors….(his) mistakes have been bad, some not so smart – even stupid. But he’s paid for them, he is struggling to walk upright and is determined to do so.”
[He] is no victim. He is a fully redeemed soul. He knows who he is and how he got to where he is. He knows his history; he has called on his ancestors; he knows on whose shoulders he stands; and he is comfortable and free. He remembers his past, and he engages in it – like the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who, as God directs, remember who delivered them.
Here is a Youtube video of the entire play:
Berniece is on a parallel development track. She is pursued by men and told she can’t be whole without a husband. She is pursued by fears, of ghosts, of what happened to her mother and father and husband. But she overcomes those fears in the final scene when she plays the piano and calls out to her ancestors (reminiscent of Toledo’s African conceptualization in Ma Rainey) for help after her primary suitor Avery’s Christian exorcism attempt failed. Berniece is the High Priestess/Warrior in the myth story but she has developed a fear of performing her function as High Priestess. Only when she succeeds in overcoming that fear is she able to quell the Sutter’s ghost issue.
The piano is the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant in the myth story. The Holy Grail because it carried the “blood” of Berniece’s mother who so laboriously kept it sparkling and polished and it represents the “secret” of what happened to the family unit in slavery. The Ark of the Covenant because it represents the “chest” that contains the archive of the family history through the generations.
Finally, what is the Lesson? I propose the lesson is that heritage and family history of struggle and overcoming trump everything else. Money can’t buy it, not can it be traded for money. But you have to honor it, preserve it, celebrate it, and add to it with the achievements of each generation. Without the last piece, the life affirming and life-sustaining temple of our familiar becomes just a tomb of memories, a curious artifact of the past.
I wonder if the back and forth between Berniece and Boy Willie over the piano was a sort of distraction, albeit a necessary one, to get to the real plot and character development in the play, the family united in purpose at the play’s end? In the end, the play highlights the family unit, resilient and purposeful.
Genealogy and provenance of the piano.
1. The first owner of the piano was Joel Norlander of Georgia.
2. Robert Sutter, grandfather of Jim Sutter. wanted to buy the piano for his wife Ophelia as an anniversary present, but didn’t have the money. He offered Norlander two of his “niggers” (slaves) in exchange for the piano.
3. Norlander chose two slaves, Berniece (Doaker’s grandmother) and Willie Boy (Doaker’s father), and exchanged them for the piano.
4. Willie Boy (Doaker’s grandfather) became an expert carpenter and woodworker.
5. At length, Ophelia began to miss Berniece and Willie Boy and decided she wanted them back. Norlander refused, and Ophelia became very sick. The Sutters instructed Willie Boy to carve images of Berniece and Willie boy into the wood panels of the piano. The carvings satisfied Ophelia’s longing for her sold slaves.
6. Several years later, on the 4th of July when the Sutter house was empty, Doaker’s brother, Boy Charles (father of Berniece and Boy Willie), who never stopped talking about the piano, took Doaker and Wining Boy to the Sutter house and stole the piano. They carried the piano to the adjoining county with Mama Ola’s people.
7. When the Sutters returned home, they assumed the theft was done by Boy Charles, so the Sutter men went out and set Boy Charles’ house on fire.
8. Boy Charles had left and taken the Yellow Dog train in a storage boxcar with four hobos. The Sutters arranged with law enforcement to stop the train, figuring Boy Charles was inside the boxcar, and set the box car on fire, killing Boy Charles and the other four.
9. Doaker moved to Pittsburgh and carried the piano with him. Berniece later joined him after her husband was killed.
postscript. The use of art (especially Romare Bearden) as inspiration for drama began with Fences, continued with Joe Turner and continues with The Piano Lesson. But in The Piano Lesson, we are faced with two works of art under the same title, Matisse’s The Piano Lesson and Bearden’s The Piano Lesson. Further, the juxtaposition of the two works of art force us to consider, what is art?
As an aside, the French Impressionists were considered outside the dominant school of French art at the time, the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The more traditionalist school considered them anti-establishment painters, many of whom failed the entrance exam for the Ecole, as pretend painters, and their work, merely an impression of art, and not art itself. Hence, they became known as Impressionists.
Late 1930’s.
In March of 1931, nine young African-American men were accused of raping two white women on a train. The Scottsboro Boys was the name of the case that involved African-American men ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen. Each young man was tried, convicted and sentenced in a matter of days.
African-American newspapers published news accounts and editorials of the events of the case. Civil rights organizations followed suit, raising money and providing defense. However, it would take several years for these young men’s cases to be overturned.
https://www.thoughtco.com/african-american-history-timeline-1930-1939-45427
1938
The work of Jacob Lawrence debuts in an exhibition at the Harlem YMCA. Crystal Bird Fauset becomes the first African-American woman elected to a state legislature. She is chosen to serve in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.