August Wilson's The Piano Lesson

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When reading “The Piano Lesson” by August Wilson I had a constant visual of each scene. The comic lies out and follows the main plot of the play. The first thing that stood out to me when reading was the watermelons. I was confused as to why the men had watermelons to sell, what was so great about them? As I continued to read and we talked in class, I realized they actually did have an importance. Boy Willie and Lymon were living in Mississippi, an area down south of good farming land. As we know the goal of selling the watermelons was to get money to buy land. Northerners do not have great land to grow crops, so they are more likely to buy the watermelons, making their journey more successful than it would have been in the south where many …show more content…

Their family was traded for the piano during the time of slavery. “Say it was the story of our whole family and as long as Sutter had it...he had us. Say we was still in slavery”(45). I think the piano is important to both Boy Willie and Berniece, they just think of it differently. Boy Willie feels anger with the piano because of how his family was treated. On the flip side, Berniece holds the piano close because of the memories with her mother, father, and family. Also, to think that a human can be traded for an object is absurd and shows how their family was degraded. After their father stole the piano, cutting their final ties to slavery, it became a symbol of survival and the legacy their family has left displayed through the engravings in the wood. Berniece is very stern and does not want Boy Willie to sell the piano, but that does not settle well with him because he thinks the piano can represent something bigger than an object in a home. With that, Boy Willie and Lymon decide to take the piano to sell with out anybody knowing. “It’s stuck. Something holding it. How the piano gonna be stuck? We just moved it”(83). When they began to try and move the piano it would not budge. I think this shows that the piano is supposed to stay in that house and be played. If it is removed, the spirits could be woken up for

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