For what? For a piano? For a piece of wood?” Berniece’s refusal to give up the piano is tied to the way she carries on her mother’s grief over her father it doesn’t occupy a positive role in her life. Then she rubbed the blood in Seventeen years’ worth of cold nights and an empty bed. For seventeen years she rubbed on it till her hands bled. When Boy Willie argues that their father would have understood the value of selling the piano in order to buy and farm his own land, Berniece doubles down, appealing to family history: “ Mama Ola polished this piano with her tears for seventeen years. Cause her daddy died over it.” The reason Berniece’s father died over the piano, though, is because the brothers believed they had to reclaim the piano as a demonstration of their freedom from the Sutters and their ownership of their family story. As Doaker concludes the story, “Now, that’s how all that got started and that why we say Berniece ain’t gonna sell that piano. When the current Sutter patriarch found out, he had Boy Charles tracked down and burned to death. Say we was still in slavery.” So one day, Doaker and Wining Boy stole the piano. Boy Charles’s brother Doaker explains that Boy Charles would “Say it was the story of our whole family and as long as Sutter had it…he had us. Berniece and Boy Willie’s father, Boy Charles, talked about the Sutter piano all his life. The piano represents sorrow in the family’s past and, by extension, holding onto the piano is a way of characters symbolically clinging to their past hurts. Through Berniece’s conflicted attitudes toward the piano, Wilson suggests that history must not be ignored but faced directly-something that demands both active engagement with past pain and celebration of the good-for the sake of a better future. Though Berniece still owns the piano, she only associates it with the family’s past pain and grief and will neither play it herself nor tell her daughter Maretha its history. Years later, Boy Charles and his brothers stole the piano from the Sutters, and Boy Charles was killed in retaliation. Boy Willie’s and Berniece’s grandmother and their father, Boy Charles, were traded by the Sutter family in exchange for the piano their grandfather Boy Willie, a woodworker, carved images in remembrance of his wife and son on the piano.
The piano came into the family’s life back in the days of slavery (only a generation removed from most of the characters).
It’s a unique piano, not only for its beautiful and well-maintained quality, but for the carvings of family members engraved on it.
The most important historical symbol in the play is the family piano.
0 kommentar(er)
