Call-and-response: parallel "slave narrative" in August Wilson's 'The Piano Lesson.' (African American author)

So much has been written on August Wilson's project to chronicle the African-American experience through each decade of the twentieth century that the series, which now includes seven plays - Jitney!(1979), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), The Piano Lesson (1990), Two Trains Running (1992), and Seven Guitars (1996) - sometimes seems like a monolith. This effect may be more thematic than theatrical; the plays are rich in their variety of characters and conflicts, and in the resolutions to these conflicts. But beneath the diversity within the dramatic framework of the plays lies the assertion that the present for black America has been invariably shaped by a history of race-related stolen opportunity and broken relationships, or what Michael Morales calls "a simultaneously reactive/reconstructive engagement with the representation of blacks and the representation of history by the dominant culture" (105). Traditionally in Wilson's plays, the protagonist's personal past is the lens through which the present situation is seen. In The Piano Lesson, however, Wilson traces the play's historical complications back three generations, to an incident in the family's slave legacy that has left them to face the present in terms of a history that, seventy-five years later, is not just personal, but communal and familial.

The action of the play is driven by conflict over how best to engage history - as iconographically centered mythology, which would celebrate the events of the past, or as foundation for the present, which would seek to fulfill its promise. The fulcrum of the conflict is the piano. Boy Willie, the great-grandson of the slave whose art graces the piano, has come north to Pittsburgh to claim his half of the piano, which is currently in the possession of his sister, Berniece. He is a ruffian, and feels that the proceeds from the sale of the piano offer him his best chance to escape the economic and social oppression that has burdened the men in his family since slavery. His dream of escape is blunted, however, by Berniece's unwillingness to sell what is, for her, a sacred icon of the family's sacrificial legacy. Throughout the play, then, the piano becomes a touchstone by which antithetical attitudes about the past may be evaluated (Pereira 90). The result is that Wilson has redefined the frustration of carrying the burden of the past, which is at the center of his other plays, into a question of how best to utilize the past. He told an interviewer, "The real issue is the piano, the legacy. How are you going to use it?" (DeVries 25).

This question is brought into focus at the point where Doaker - Boy Willie and Berniece's uncle - tells Boy Willie's friend Lyman the reason that Berniece refuses to sell the piano (40-46). He relates the story of his grandfather's carvings on the piano in a tale so imbued with rich images of bondage, acceptance, and retribution that it seems to have been handed down, father-to-son, detail-by-detail, since the time of its origin. It is, in other words, the family's slave narrative. For Boy Willie, however, the dynamic of enslavement is not just a product of oral tradition; the events of his own life constitute, in his mind, a second, metaphorical, enslavement - economic, not physical - from which he attempts a desperate flight to freedom through the acquisition of James Sutter's land, upon which his family had worked as slaves, and which would offer him, for the first time in his life, a substantial degree of achievement and self-realization. Arnold Rampersad identifies such a pursuit of self-realization as an inherent feature of the slave narrative (105), so that the play itself comes to constitute a broader, metaphorical slave narrative, one being lived out by Boy Willie as he searches for economic freedom.

The structure of the play, then, is a narrative within a narrative, a literal slave narrative integrated into a metaphorical one, with the latter (Boy Willie's narrative) reflecting both a continuation of and an attempt to bring to fruition the former one (the family's). The success of Boy Willie's narrative is dependent upon a shared understanding of the traditional family narrative, the one related by Doaker, so that the interchange between the two narratives becomes a form of the black folk tradition of call-and-response, through which a performer interacts with an audience in a rhythmic counterpoint of improvisation and emotive language that becomes both song and dialogue, as in the black religious tradition (Byerman 3). In this story, the call consists of the slave narrative that has been carved into the body of the piano; Boy Willie's response is his improvised effort to translate that myth into the reality of his own economic and social emancipation.

The transition would be easier for Boy Willie if the narratives were better integrated, so that one narrative does not get destroyed by the preeminence of the other. But the interaction in The Piano Lesson is instead structured like the classic call-and-response; the two narratives are linear - evolutionary rather than integrated - and so, in the manner of the traditional call-and-response pattern, the direction of the interaction is not toward resolution or even progress, but toward an appropriate response to the call. The result is an ever-changing series of recreations of the myth, in which the narrative gets repeated in a different version every time, each with its own veracity (Byerman 7).

In The Piano Lesson, Boy Willie is never able to take charge of his own narrative; every move he makes in his attempt to escape the legacy with which he has been left is made in response to the mythology of the piano. Even his final desperate attempt to defy the myth and steal the piano is frustrated, and he is forced, finally, into acquiring his freedom and self-realization in the emotional realm, not the economic one, by confronting Sutter's ghost instead of buying his land. What Wilson demands, then, is that the theatregoer understand the ultimate importance of the slave narrative depicted on the piano in authenticating Boy Willie's metaphorical slave narrative, and how, because of the linear nature of the relationship, the family myth must be destroyed, or his own narrative altered, to create a new one.

Wilson posits, then, a complex, universal way of looking at black history, and does so by structuring The Piano Lesson on three tiers. First, he creates a play within a play by describing a mythological slave narrative carved into the play's focal object, an old piano, and repeated several times by the play's characters. Second, he uses the piano and its attendant narrative as a haunting presence in the call-and-response manner of black folk tradition, as the call to which Boy Willie, in his quest for self-realization, must respond if he is to achieve this goal. Finally, he juxtaposes Boy Willie's undertaking with that of his slave ancestors, and makes his quest an extension of theirs, so that Boy Willie's story, and the play itself, becomes a metaphorical slave narrative in its own right.

The purpose for the antebellum slave narrative was to help the slave remember the life he had fled (Stepto 1). Deep within each such narrative, then, is the psychological empowerment for self-identity, a vehicle through which the former slave might construct an apologetic for his or her own personality in terms of the response to that "peculiar institution." Doing so gave the former slave an opportunity to reconstruct his or her psychological health.(1) For Frederick Douglass, identity was rooted in the courage to design and execute a flight to freedom; for Booker T. Washington, it was in explaining how slavery had taught behaviors and attitudes to its victims which were subsequently making them successful in postbellum America (Andrews). In every case for such a narrative, the bondage is shown to have served ultimately the interests of the one who had been subjected to it and subsequently escaped it.

No one seems to need such a psychological reconstruction any worse than Boy Willie. He is essentially a rogue - a "survivor" who has learned, in the process of surviving, to steal, cheat, and lie, and who now sees his chance to emerge from the cycle that has killed more of the men in his family than he wishes to remember. His passionate denial of any responsibility for Crawley's death in the face of Berniece's accusations make that clear (52). But the accusations themselves remind Boy Willie of just how far he has come in the family legacy, and how close he is to escaping it through the piano. The fact that he now needs the piano, the hard evidence of the legacy, with the likeness of his ancestors carved into the wood itself, to complete his journey is the ironic evidence that his identity will forever be, for better or worse, intertwined with the past. For Boy Willie, however, stories of the family's courage in saving this icon are no longer sufficient for the maintenance of his own self-concept. He is left, then, with seeking to establish his own slave narrative, even a metaphorical one, to do for himself what Doaker's narrative has done for the rest of the family - communicate a mythology of black potential to succeed within the confines of, and by the rules of, a white world (Campbell 2). The narrative has worked for previous generations because of the piano, which has served as the touchstone by which members of the family could reinforce their position in the legacy, regardless of how far they roamed. Wilson suggests this in Doaker's story of the trains. They go in all directions, Doaker says, and many people assume they can arrive at their destinations by going in any direction, but in the end, the train always returns (18-19). Boy Willie and Wining Boy's simultaneous arrival in Pittsburgh reinforces a certain truth in the metaphor; to this point, Boy Willie's life has reflected this "restless wandering" of the freed slave experience (Pereira 1). For Boy Willie, however, the escape from white domination is more ambitious, and he seeks a change from which the train will never return (9092). The irony is that he must use the piano to accomplish such a change, to authenticate his identity, just as every male in his family has done since its construction. The difference is that, rather than discovering his identity in the piano's layering of myth, he must do so by demythologizing it.

His actions seem to fall logically within an evolutionary series of phases through which the slave narrative, as a literary form, has passed. Robert Stepto writes that slave narratives develop in three phases, each building upon the social and psychological dynamic of the previous stage. The first phase he calls the "eclectic phase," in which the evidence for authenticating the narrative is appended to the tale, and comes from outside the tale itself. The earliest slave narratives bore affidavits signed by white editors, writers, or slaveholders, stating that the witnesses knew personally that the slave was capable of writing, and had in fact written, the narrative to which the affidavit was attached. In the second phase, the "integrated phase," the authenticating evidence became integrated into the tale and became one or more voices within the tale. This appears to be the phase in which Doaker's narrative of the family legacy of the piano exists. It is replete with mythological elements, specific names and places and events, all of which serve to bear witness, through their connection with established fact, to the tale's authenticity (though it is important to notice that this tale, as with all such myths, may not be "authentic," in the sense of having occurred in the literal manner the narrative details). As such, it becomes the core of what Patricia Gantt calls their "shared southernness" (79). Boy Willie seems to have moved to the third phase, the "generic phase" of the slave narrative, during which it becomes no longer necessary to add details merely to authenticate the narrative; the narrative itself takes total precedence, subsuming all other authenticating documents or strategies (Stepto 4-6). At this point, the narrative stands on its .own merit.

This appears to be the point at which Boy Willie is attempting his escape from the family legacy. His own life is no longer authenticated by the piano and its mythological connection to the past. His only rationale for keeping the piano lies in Berniece's putting it to some practical use - giving lessons. In the absence of that, he himself is willing to put it to use.(2) But his identity is no longer based in the mythology it represents. This is the significant point in Stepto's typology; at this point, the narrative becomes a generic one it can be anyone's story. The myth for Boy Willie no longer demands that anyone have a piano; all that is demanded is a willingness to follow in the tradition of the myth, and to do whatever it takes to succeed, just as those who carved the piano, maintained it, and subsequently stole it for the family demonstrated. He becomes, in Pamela Jean Monaco's words, a "living reminder" of his family's past (95).

One of Wilson's important distinctions in the play is the difference between Boy Willie and Berniece. Each has an understanding of the world that demonstrates a certain nobility of vision, but their understanding of each other's visions is so limited that they seem, at times, not to have shared the same heritage (Kubitschek 193). Indeed, for whatever reason, they have arrived at different spiritual destinations. Slave narratives are essentially Bildungsroman, and like the typical Bildungsroman, slave narratives often fail to distinguish adequately between male and female development (Smith 33). The Piano Lesson could conceivably have told Berniece's story - the attempt of a strong woman to salvage the family history from a brother who would sell it. This would have required a greater investment on Wilson's part into "eclectic phase" narratives, along with the accompanying authenticating strategies - in this case, the rich detail of the story, the ghosts who seem to confirm it, the fascinating, almost mythic qualities to the narrative. This might have had the effect of tying the play even closer to AfroAmerican tradition, for in black literature, history often assumes a mythic quality in order to respond to questions of identity raised by a history largely told by and focusing on whites (Campbell 155). The result is a black American history structured as a continuing relationship between the living and the dead (Morales 106).

Consider, for example, the accidental deaths of white men being attributed to the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog. With near certainty, the explanations we hear in the play for the deaths are not the explanations that would be offered by the families of the victims, or by the mass media. They are mythical explanations, yet they serve to authenticate the lives of the men who died and became the Ghosts (just as Boy Willie seeks authentication through ownership of Sutter's land), and they serve to authenticate the sacredness of the piano itself - it was important enough for black men to die for, and it was important enough for white men to kill for. Berniece believes in the mythical power of the piano and acknowledges it as a point of contact with her ancestral heritage (Morales 108); this explains her absolute reluctance to sell it - it was important enough to die for (but only within the parameters of the myth). The result is an acknowledgment of the symbiotic relationship between her generation and those who came before - for mutual gain or mutual destruction - just as in the African ancestral rituals that were the source of the original myth (Morales 109). It is to these ancestors she turns during the family's confrontation with Sutter's ghost near the end of the play.

One of the strengths of such a mythology is its ability to empower the believer - particularly in its power to define the past and to define reality (Byerman 4). It was precisely for this reason that slave narratives and slave songs became such an important literary form for black America. Such narratives take control of the environment by shaping it sympathetically and, in doing so, giving individuals control over themselves and their destiny (Dixon 20). As a result, then, it is generally insignificant whether the myth bears the whole truth, or any truth at all. Frequently, slave narratives were shaped and reshaped by abolitionists who wanted to convey a specific political message (Smith 9-10). In The Piano Lesson, the truth of the narrative is subsumed by its communal and familial empowerment - consider the empowering effect achieved by Wining Boy's retelling of the Yellow Dog myth:

I done been to where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog and called out their names. They talk back to you, too. . . . I can't say how they talked to nobody else. But to me it just filled me up in a strange sort of way to be standing there on that spot. I didn't want to leave. It felt like the longer I stood there the bigger I got. (34-35)

Doaker's retelling of the piano myth offers the same sense of power (40-46). What is not so obvious is that Doaker's narrative bears internal evidence to some degree of inauthenticity. In documenting the family heritage, Doaker relates that Old Berniece and her son (Doaker's and Charles's father) were sold as payment for the piano to a slaveholder "down in Georgia" (42). In his grief over their departure (and in response to the white mistress's grief over losing her favorite slave), the first Boy Willie (Doaker's grandfather) carved their portraits, as well as much of the family history, into the piano. What seems problematic about this genealogy is that Doaker's and Charles's father would have been in Georgia, some distance away, when these statues were being carved, and was unlikely to have known anything about them, or that they even existed. Nevertheless, Doaker relates that Charles (his father) becomes obsessed enough with the piano to raid the Sutter farm and steal it, an act that would lead directly to his death. Now, even Sutter's grandson has become complicit in the myth, appearing like what Anne Fleche calls "the vampire from some expressionistic film" to take his revenge on those, like Boy Willie, who will not believe the myth, and who will not acknowledge his existence (9).

It is clear, however, that the myth has sustained Berniece to the present, and it is the myth that ultimately resolves the conflict over the piano, though she treats the myth throughout the play with a selective reverence. She refuses to play the piano, and has done so ever since her mother's death, as a way of forgetting the past - of keeping the spirits from "walking around . . . the house" - even as she honors its sacredness (70). Likewise, she denies the existence of the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog (15, 34), though she is ultimately forced to acknowledge both - the past and the spirits - in reclaiming her faith in the myth, when she plays the piano and furiously calls on her ancestors to help Boy Willie defeat the ghost of Sutter in a final showdown, for both Boy Willie and Berniece, between embracing the past and planning a future. For the family, it is a landmark moment, and a reconciling one, for by embracing the shared mythology, both Berniece and Boy Willie find what they seek (Werner 46). Berniece rediscovers the usefulness for the piano that Boy Willie was seeking, and Boy Willie is able to defeat the Sutter spirit that has oppressed the family for generations.

Boy Willie embarks on an archetypal quest for self-realization by attempting to purchase the very land that his family had been forced to work as slaves, and working it himself for his own profit. The cost of such self-realization is high - he must surrender the concept of community, the folklore of family, and the respect of his ancestors to acquire the means to his sense of selfhood. In the call-and-response of the parallel narratives within the play, Boy Willie is refusing to engage the call, seeking instead his own "song." To him, the decision seems to be a pragmatic one - the piano has gone untouched by Berniece since Mama Ola died seven years before (10). His argument places him squarely in the tradition of later slave narratives, which had come to view even slavery itself from an increasingly pragmatic perspective (Andrews 64). Nevertheless, it is more than mere pragmatism that sets Boy Willie's story apart as a classic "slave narrative." He was, after all, extremely pragmatic when he was still playing the part of the rogue; skimming wood for himself from the load he was hauling for a white man, as pragmatic as the decision may have seemed, was the catalytic event in Crawley's death. What sets Boy Willie apart, then, is that, like the archetypal hero of the Bildungsroman, he is moving from the somewhat idyllic world of an almost childlike ignorance, symbolized by his having recently come out of the rural South (a traditional metaphor for innocence and simplicity), into a metaphoric wilderness, just as dark and full of surprises as the ones his ancestors would have faced in their escape attempts. Once the commitment is made, turning back becomes impossible (Smith 33).

Furthermore, while he is not a literal runaway slave, his flight to Pittsburgh bears all the earmarks of the journey his ancestors would have taken a century before. He has come north, just across the Ohio River, seeking not only economic and social freedom but to reclaim the heritage built by his ancestors and stolen from him. He even seems to be pursued by a sort of spiritual slave catcher. His chief dissimilarity with the runaway slave would appear to be his inability to persuade anyone of the merits of his method. What he surrenders in nobility, however, he reacquires with singlemindedness: He is determined to take the piano regardless of Berniece's opinion or threats. This quality of being "driven" is a quality inherent in yet another literary motif - the running man, the man who is fleeing the culture in which he is the outsider: the immigrant from Europe at the birth of America, the pioneer in the westward expansion, the runaway slave (Klotman 17). What distinguished the runaway slave from the pioneer was the issue of choice - the slave never had the option of setting up life where he or she was (Klotman 17). Boy Willie's flight, even given his economic depravation, is his choice, one, in contrast to the trains which always return, from which he will not turn back.

The only obstacle to completing his journey is the material worth he possesses in the piano, a value that stands in contrast to the inherent transcendent and symbolic value it possesses for Berniece (51). To liquidate the piano would be to demythologize it, to profane it, to take away the essence of identity which Berniece has bestowed upon it, the same identity that she placed so completely in Crawley, who seemingly foreshadowed this loss by being taken from her, in her mind, by Boy Willie. In this sense, Boy Willie, by selling the piano, would be asserting the preeminence of his own narrative over that of the piano and its carvings - present over past, utility over tradition, freedom over community. It is an inversion of the call-and-response, an attempt to make the "song" that is his life truly his own. At that point, he would be retaking control over the text of his own narrative, a text that most slave narratives, even the one represented by the piano, surrendered to the demands of authentication and audience (Stepto 16-17). Certainly control over the text of bondage is no guarantee of freedom (McDowell 160). But it would be evidence of that freedom.

For the first time, then, Boy Willie would have acquired a sense of place. Ralph Ellison writes, "If we don't know where we are, we have little chance of knowing who we are. . . . If we confuse the time, we confuse the place; and . . . when we confuse these we endanger our humanity, both physically and morally" (74). Owning Sutter's land would give Boy Willie that sense of place, of time, of identity. It was, after all, he who planned all along to return to the South, that metaphorical wilderness of bondage, while Lyman was staying in Pittsburgh (3). Meanwhile, Doaker, already in Pittsburgh, would continue to ride the trains in every direction as a Pullman porter (18-19). Doaker, literally a man without a place in his career, is also the heir who has given up his own claim on the piano, metaphorically renouncing any claim to his own identity, even one based in an authenticated narrative like the piano (69).

In the end, however, the piano will not authenticate Boy Willie's search for freedom. When he goes to move it, to take possession of it, to claim power over it, the piano will not move (83). As a result, he is ultimately forced into battle with the one thing that may still hold power over his narrative - Sutter's Ghost. Whether he killed Sutter, as Berniece believes (15), or whether Sutter has taken a position as representative of the whole white world directly in Boy Willie's path, the result is that Boy Willie must ascend the stairs - "go to the mountaintop" - and defeat this final obstacle to freedom. He had imagined all along that the piano was his final hurdle; now he finds this engagement with Sutter, which he has desired economically throughout the play, to be his "baptism by fire" - "baptism" suggested by his reference to water, "fire" by his reference to Hell (105).

This was the point at which the play originally ended; once Boy Willie engaged the ghosts of the past, he had cleared the very hurdle for which he sought to sell the piano (Shannon 14950). For Wilson, struggle with such ghosts of the past is a real phenomenon for black America, and the ambiguity of the outcome a thought-provoking reflection of reality (Shannon 206, 150). With Lloyd Richards's guidance, Wilson rewrote his ending, but the substance remains the same. Once on the mountaintop, Boy Willie finds the identity he has long sought, so much so that he returns from the conflict ready to grant the validity of the past, tempered by its utility in the present - "If you and Maretha don't keep playing that piano . . . ain't no telling . . . me and Sutter both liable to be back" (108). He leaves Pittsburgh no richer (with the exception of the proceeds from watermelons he has brought with him), but wiser - no longer completely disdainful of that which his ancestors loved, no longer completely trusting in his own pursuits.

At this point, the parallel narratives come together in a single call to the future; the response awaits. The family's slave narrative yields to the piano's pragmatic use, where its focus becomes the present and future, not the past. On the other hand, Boy Willie, having concurred with the importance of sanctifying the family's past, refocuses on an unchanged, but refined and more powerful, vision of his own future. In his struggle with the ghosts of the past, he has reached a new level of self-actualization and has taken the family's understanding of its shared slave narrative to its final, generic phase; now both he and Berniece may continue the narrative. Neither of them seeks, or needs, any further authentication of its validity.

Notes

1. Though I use both the masculine and feminine pronouns, most recorded slave narratives were authored by men, and narratives of the time written by women - stories such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or Harriet E. Wilson's novel Our Nig - offer ample reason to believe that the female slave narrative may have assumed different forms from those written by men. Consider Berniece's plea to Boy Willie that he consider not just his forefathers' roles, but also those served by his foremothers, in the family slave narrative: "Money can't buy what that piano cost. You can't sell your soul for money . . . . Mama Ola polished this piano with her tears for seventeen years. She rubbed on it till her hands bled. Then she rubbed the blood in . . . mixed up with the rest of the blood on it. You always talking about your daddy, but you ain't looked to see what this foolishness cost your mother" (50-52).

2. In the integrated phase of the slave narrative, such as that manifested by Berniece and Doaker, any icon would always remain unused, and even above the possibility of use, having acquired what sociologist Emile Durkheim called "sacred" status (52-57). According to Durkheim, the value of a sacred object lies in its ability to achieve results beyond its mere pragmatic utility - results such as beckoning the presence of spirits or offering physical protection. These results would be compromised by putting the object to practical use, for such use would place the object within the realm of the everyday, or what Durkheim called the "profane." That Berniece finally decides to play the piano in the climactic scene should be interpreted in light of the fact that her use of it is totally sacred (that is, as a relic by which to elicit the aid of spiritual ancestors in the family's present conflict with Sutter's spirit, and not as a mere musical instrument) and therefore represents no change at all in her position regarding the piano and its value.

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Devon Boan is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is currently developing a theory of African-American literary criticism.