The Piano Lesson: Act 1, Scene 2 Summary & Analysis

Three days later, Wining Boy, 56 years old, is sitting at the kitchen table, drinking, while Doaker washes dishes. Wining Boy used to be a professional musician and still tries to project that image, but he comes across as outdated and a bit pitiful. He and Doaker discuss Boy Willie’s plans. Boy Willie and Lymon haven’t yet sold their watermelons. They keep intending to sell to the white people who live in Squirrel Hill, but their truck has repeatedly broken down on the way there.

Doaker also tells Wining Boy about Berniece’s lingering grief over her husband, Crawley, who died three years ago. He thinks Berniece needs to get out and date more, and that perhaps Avery will be the right man for her. Then they shift to talking about Wining Boy’s ex-wife, Cleotha, who recently died. Wining Boy was living in Kansas City and received a letter from Cleotha’s friend letting him know. Wining Boy reminisces about his love for Cleotha—they’d met when she was 16—and his tendency to “ramble” continued even after they married. Eventually, Cleotha asked Wining Boy to move out, though Wining Boy always knew she still loved him. Doaker, too, was once married, to a woman named Coreen. Coreen lives in New York now, and Doaker claims that he’s let go of his feelings for her.

Boy Willie and Lymon come in; they’ve had to leave the broken-down truck with a mechanic and are arguing over which of them should sleep in the truck to guard the watermelons. Boy Willie starts talking with Wining Boy about Sutter and the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog. Boy Willie says the Ghosts have gotten around a dozen men so far, though Berniece claims that she doesn’t believe in them. Wining Boy says that even white people in Mississippi believe in the Ghosts. He claims that he’s contacted the Ghosts himself and knows they’re real.

Wining Boy explains that in 1930, he was at a low point in his life and decided he’d call upon the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog for help. He stood at a certain railroad crossing and called the ghosts’ names. He says that the ghosts made him feel strangely full and like a king. In fact, he felt so strong he almost didn’t get out of the way of an oncoming train. When he did, he claims he went on to have three years of good luck. So it doesn’t matter to him if Berniece believes in the Ghosts—he was there, and he knows for himself.

The men drink whiskey, and Wining Boy asks Boy Willie and Lymon about their time on Parchman Farm, where he’s done time himself. Boy Willie explains that this happened after he and Lymon were accused of stealing wood. On that occasion, Crawley tried to defend them and got killed; Lymon got shot in the stomach. The sheriff is still looking for Lymon, who was later fined and jailed for being unemployed. After Lymon’s bail was paid by Stovall, the judge made Lymon work for Stovall to pay off the debt, overruling Lymon’s preference to serve jail time instead. After that, Lymon got his truck so that he could dodge both the sheriff and Stovall.

Lymon claims that he’s going to stay in Pittsburgh because people are treated better here. Boy Willie says that no matter where you are, people treat you how you let them treat you. If he’s mistreated, he mistreats right back; there’s no difference between him and a white man. Wining Boy agrees that this might be the ideal, but it’s not true in real life. He gives an illustration of a Black man getting thrown in jail for picking berries on a white man’s unfenced property. Later, if the white man sold his land to the Black man and insisted that the berries nevertheless remained his, he could even “fix it with the law” that the berries were his. A Black man couldn’t do that.

Boy Willie claims that he doesn’t care what the law says—he goes by whether the law is right in his eyes or not. Lymon says that’s why Boy Willie is going to wind up on Parchman Farm again. But pretty soon, all four men are singing a song that they remember from Parchman Farm, harmonizing as they stamp and clap in time.

Then, Boy Willie encourages Wining Boy to play the piano for them, but Wining Boy declines. He says he’s given up the piano and that it’s the best choice he ever made; the life of a musician tied him down too much. For the first few years, all the whiskey and women were enjoyable, but one day he grew sick of it all, no longer sure how to distinguish between himself and the piano player.

After they admire Berniece’s piano, Doaker starts telling Lymon the story behind Berniece’s refusal to give it up. It dates back to slavery, when the family was owned by Sutter’s grandfather. The piano was originally owned by a man named Joel Nolander in Georgia. One year, Sutter’s ancestor Robert Sutter wanted to buy the piano for his wife, Ophelia—but being cash poor, he had to trade some slaves for it. Mr. Nolander insisted on picking out the slaves for himself, and he chose Doaker’s grandmother Mama Berniece and his father, Papa Boy Charles, who was a child at the time.

After some time had passed, Ophelia began to miss Mama Berniece’s and Papa Boy Charles’s company and labor. When it proved impossible to trade the piano back for the slaves, Ophelia began pining away. Then, Robert Sutter summoned Doaker’s grandfather Papa Boy Willie, a talented woodworker, and made him carve his wife’s and son’s images onto the piano. Doaker indicates the carvings on the present-day piano. He also points out additional carvings of family members and significant family events. When Robert Sutter saw the extra carvings, he was angry, but Ophelia was so delighted with her decorated piano that he couldn’t say anything against it.

Doaker’s and Wining Boy’s brother, Boy Charles (the oldest of the three brothers and Berniece’s and Boy Willie’s father), talked about the Sutter piano all his life. He always said that the piano contained the story of their family and that as long as the Sutters owned the piano, they owned the family, too, as if they were still enslaved.  So one day, while Sutter was at a Fourth of July picnic, Doaker, Wining Boy, and Boy Charles snuck in and removed the piano, the other two brothers carrying it by wagon to Mama Ola’s house in the next county. Boy Charles stayed nearby, acting as though nothing had happened.

Doaker doesn’t know exactly what happened after Sutter got home. Soon after, Boy Charles’s house was set on fire. But by that time, Boy Charles had jumped on the 3:57 Yellow Dog train. The train was stopped, and the boxcar in which Boy Charles was hiding with four hobos was set on fire, killing them all. Nobody knows for sure who did that—whether it was Sutter, the sheriff, or a white man named Ed Saunders who, a couple months later, died from falling down his well. But it was around this time that the legend of the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog got started. And this, Doaker concludes, is why Berniece won’t sell the piano.

Boy Willie says this story is all in the past. If Boy Charles had known that he could trade in the piano for some land, it wouldn’t have wound up sitting in Pittsburgh. Boy Willie refuses to spend his life farming somebody else’s land like his father did. He’s going to try to build something on the piano that Boy Charles died to give him.

Wining Boy sits down at the piano and begins playing and singing. Berniece and Maretha enter, and Berniece greets Wining Boy briefly before going upstairs. After she’s gone, Boy Willie gets Lymon to help him attempt to move the piano. While this is going on, Doaker hears Sutter’s ghost. The ghost is heard again as they’re sliding the piano back in place—everyone hears it this time, including Berniece as she comes downstairs. She tells Boy Willie she’s done playing around with him and that “money can’t buy what that piano cost.”

Berniece turns to making Wining Boy’s dinner, but Boy Willie keeps talking. He argues that the only thing that makes the piano valuable is his great-grandfather’s carvings. If Berniece were offering piano lessons to help pay the bills, that would be a different story. Instead, the piano is just sitting there. Boy Willie refuses to be a fool about sentimental value. Unlike land that yields crops, a piano that just sits there doesn’t give you anything back, and Boy Willie knows that his father would have understood that.

Berniece stands by the piano and tells Boy Willie to look at it. She says that Mama Ola polished the piano with her tears and blood for 17 years. She cleaned it every day and asked Berniece to play music for her. But Boy Willie, she argues, never stops to think about their mother and what Boy Charles’s foolishness cost her—years of lonely widowhood. She says all the men in the family are alike—thieving and killing, which just leads to more thieving and killing, and it never stops.

When Boy Willie denies that he’s ever killed anybody, Berniece says that he killed Crawley just as surely as if he’d pulled the trigger. Boy Willie insists that by saying this, she’s just being ignorant—Crawley knew that he and Lymon were sneaking wood, and he chose to intervene. They asked Crawley to help them load up the wood, and Crawley brought his gun in case anyone else showed up. Sure enough, when they got there, the sheriff’s men were lurking, and Boy Willie and Lymon were ready to give up. But Crawley started shooting, and the sheriff’s men shot back. Berniece says all she knows is that if Boy Willie and Lymon hadn’t gotten Crawley involved, he’d still be alive today. Berniece starts hitting her brother, repeating, “He ain’t here, is he?” Boy Willie doesn’t try to defend himself, and Doaker pulls her back. Suddenly they’re interrupted by a terrified scream from upstairs—it’s Maretha calling, “Mama!”