The more of Wilson’s plays I read, the more I appreciated The Piano Lesson for its stark symbols and robust characters: Boy Willie and his determination to buy the land his ancestors had slaved on; Berniece, resolved to keep the piano and build a life for her daughter in Pittsburgh; Sutter’s ghost haunting the house, the family, the instrument, from the top of the stairs.
By Michael Bennett
I still remember my first time watching the Hallmark adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. The film aired on primetime television when I was eight years old, wise enough to know this was an important occasion, if only because my parents were taping over their VHS recording of Dances with Wolves. It was the late nineties, and we didn’t have cable. Save for the occasional trip to Blockbuster, we depended on the TV guide and whatever channels our antenna could summon for our evening entertainment. My parents said the play was written by a famous Pittsburgher, and the story took place in our city. They thought I might find the film relatable, even though it was a period drama from the 1930s, and the characters rarely left the house.
But they weren’t wrong. The house alone captured my attention, because it was so similar to mine, some version of the two-story arts and crafts build from the early 1900s that you could find in almost every neighborhood in Pittsburgh. We had the same foyer, with the same square stained-glass window and wood bannister running up the stairs. And there was the added coincidence that we had a piano decorating our foyer.
The film begins on a stormy night in the empty first floor of the Doaker house, with curtains rustling, the sound of thunder. We hear music coming from the piano, see the white keys being played by the invisible hands of a ghost. As the title suggests, this haunted piano is the crux of the story’s conflict. The family heirloom was sold to their ancestor’s slavemaster, Sutter, in exchange for their grandmother and father. The ghost, we soon learn, is Sutter’s grandson who has just fallen down a well to his death. Sutter appears several times at the top of the stairs in a blue suit, holding his hand on his head, haunting Doaker, his niece Berniece, and her daughter Maretha. He calls out the name of Berniece’s brother Boy Willie, who has come up to Pittsburgh trying to sell the piano and buy a plot of Sutter’s land.
We never see Sutter’s ghost, but he haunts almost every character before the end of the play. Even Boy Willie, who refutes Sutter’s presence throughout the film, wrestles with the ghost before he is chased out of the house. “Hey Berniece,” he says, halfway out the door, “if you and Maretha don’t keep playing on that piano, ain’t no telling, me and Sutter both liable to be back.”
I sat sweating on the couch, terrified from the start. I had an irrational fear of ghosts, and darkness, and boogiemen. I could not go to sleep without a nightlight and a parent to check under the bed. But I did not stop watching The Piano Lesson for all the reasons I should have. I was too captivated by the setting, its eerily familiarity. After that night, I spent years walking through my house in fear that the keys of our piano might start to move, or I would see Sutter at the top of the stairs. Sutter’s ghost was more terrifying to me because he never materialized on camera, because I could not put a face to his name. I could only see the terror in the eyes of the characters he haunted.
The Hallmark film was an exhilarating introduction to August Wilson’s work, which I devoured in later years. By the time I was in high school, Wilson had completed his century cycle, the ten-play project that would become his oeuvre, with one play set in each decade of the 20th century.
The Piano Lesson was the only play adapted for the screen during Wilson’s life. Taking the form of a classic ghost story, the play is more accessible than some of his other plays, like Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and King Hedley II, which are ominous and blue, the polygonal Seven Guitars, or Gem of the Ocean which leans heavy into the supernatural.
One review from the year it was released claims that the film, “fails to make any psychological or ectoplasmic ghosts come alive for the audience,” adding that the central problem of the piece “is its obviousness.” Yet, The Piano Lesson’s overt plot was precisely the feature that attracted me. The film was a proper history lesson for me, the piano, a tangible symbol of a not so distant time when people were auctioned and enslaved, sold and sent away from their families in exchange for an instrument. Perhaps Wilson’s point, in this case, was that even a child should understand our country’s sins, our curses, our history.
The more of Wilson’s plays I read, the more I appreciated The Piano Lesson for its stark symbols and robust characters: Boy Willie and his determination to buy the land his ancestors had slaved on; Berniece, resolved to keep the piano and build a life for her daughter in Pittsburgh; Sutter’s ghost haunting the house, the family, the instrument, from the top of the stairs.
I keep coming back to the ghost, the larger allegory I could not grasp at that young age. Sutter was a manifestation of southern slavery, following the Charles family north. From Sutter’s first appearance, Boy Willie is skeptical, not because he is a ghost, but because they are so far from the south. “How he gonna find his way all the way up here to Pittsburgh?” he asks. “Sutter ain’t never even heard of Pittsburgh.” No matter how far the Charles family traveled north, they would still be haunted by white structures, and white people.
Sutter is one of several white people mentioned in The Piano Lesson who never appear, living instead in the imagination of the audience. White characters often hover behind the curtains in Wilson’s plays, manifesting through the stories of Black characters, as architects of power and contradiction and sometimes catastrophe. Doaker’s older brother Wining Boy tells a story about a Black man being jailed for taking berries from a white man’s land, but when he buys the land, the white man still claims the berries. “He go and fix it with the law that them is his berries. Now that’s the difference between the colored man and the white man. The colored man can’t fix nothing with the law.”
By excluding whiteness from the stage, Wilson shows the absurdity and terror of American racism: that white people can manipulate the lives of Black people even in their absence, or perhaps because of it. Henry Louis Gates Jr. praises Wilson’s ability, “to register the ambiguous presence of white folks in a segregated Black world. The way you see them nowhere and feel them everywhere.” It’s fitting to think that I too was haunted by this phantom of whiteness; that the sins of slavery are like a ghost that trails everyone in this country.
All but one of Wilson’s plays are set in his childhood neighborhood, the Hill District. The plays, through their constant setting, are a window into the history of the Hill. At the start of the 20th century, the Hill District was a haven for Black migrants from the south. By the time of The Piano Lesson, the neighborhood had flourished into a locus of Black culture, home to famous jazz clubs, negro league baseball teams, and The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading Black newspapers in the nation.
But in the second half of the century, much of the neighborhood was destroyed, whole blocks of Black homes and businesses claimed by the city for urban renewal projects. In Two Trains Running and Jitney, we see the final years of a diner and a jitney station, their owners and employees struggling to stay in operation, as the city attempts to close their businesses. Again, we see the ominous presence of whiteness, in the form of the mayor, and the city planners, and the bankers, hovering over the neighborhood, waiting to seize it.
By the end of the cycle, the neighborhood becomes a kind of cursed setting, a place where the promises of the great migration sour into barrenness and blight. In King Hedley II, set in 1985, a man named King returns to his half-abandoned neighborhood after spending seven years in prison, struggling to find a decent job. “I used to be worth twelve hundred dollars during slavery,” King says. “Now I’m worth $3.35 an hour. I’m going backwards. Everybody else moving forward.”
There is a picture of Wilson in 1999, standing beside his childhood home. The exterior wall is half-splotched with white paint, some of the windows filled with bricks, others blocked with plywood. Litter dusts the yard next to the house, one of many abandoned lots where there used to be homes. It is a scene that could come straight from his last play, Radio Golf, in which a Hill District native uses his blighted neighborhood as a development site, fueling a doomed campaign to become the first Black mayor of Pittsburgh. Under his driver cap, Wilson’s eyes are morose, pained. We see why even Wilson—whose great-grandmother walked to Pittsburgh from North Carolina on foot, searching for freedom—decided to leave the city, and move west.
Nearly twenty years after Wilson’s death, Pittsburgh has finally elected its first Black mayor. Wilson’s childhood home has been renovated into a community art space, and his plays are performed each summer in the backyard. Yet we are still struggling to address the same dilemmas that plague his characters. In the last ten years, Pittsburgh’s Black population has declined by over 13 percent. As Damon Young writes, studies that track infant mortality, homeownership, employment, and life expectancy all show that Pittsburgh is one of the worst places in the country for Black people to live. Young concludes that Pittsburgh’s problem, “isn’t financial or political; it’s spiritual and emotional.” We are a city still haunted by whiteness.
From my backyard, I can see the silhouette of the northern side of the Hill District; a large nursing home, a few houses planted on the cliff, and bright lights towering over housing projects. Below, there is a constant stream of cars speeding along Bigelow Boulevard, the expressway that circumvents the neighborhood, snaking beneath it, through the trees.
I am one of many white Pittsburghers who grew up driving around the Hill District, but never through it. I feared the Hill District for its boarded buildings and abandoned lots. It was an abstract fear I inherited from other white people, from news anchors and schoolmates and neighbors; stories of riots and looting after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and rumors of the drug dealing and gang violence that festered afterward. Don’t drive through there with your doors unlocked. Stay away after dark. Wear the wrong colors and you might get shot.
If there was any morsel of truth to these myths, it was made false by the fact that their tellers were white people who had never stepped foot in the Hill. As we see in Wilson’s plays, the real victims were never white people—they were the people who lived in the Hill, the people who had seen their homes bulldozed, their families displaced, their communities destroyed.
My and any other white person’s fear of the Hill District was a different kind of fear: a refusal to witness the ruins of our own making. It is not so different than my fear of Sutter, an ambiguity in my imagination, a ghost of the past that might reveal the failures of my city, and my ancestors.
The film adaptation of The Piano Lesson introduced a whole generation to August Wilson’s work, garnering a larger audience than all his staged plays combined. There is still so much to learn from Wilson’s plays, through their dynamic characters, and heavy symbols, and resonant allegories about Black life, in all its multiplicities. It was here I discovered more about whiteness than I would ever gather from white writers. As Wilson said himself, “We know white America better than white America knows us.”
Denzel Washington has begun the great task of bringing Wilson’s entire century cycle to the screen. His next project is a new version of The Piano Lesson. I am interested to see how the new film portrays Sutter’s ghost. The special effects capabilities of the camera have certainly improved since the mid-90s, but I still find his presence more terrifying in my imagination.
