Railroad Lore and Mysticism in August Wilson’s "The Piano Lesson" (eBook)

Academic Paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: A, Southern Illinois University Carbondale (Department of English - Southern Illinois University Carbondale), course: August Wilson Play Analysis, language: English, abstract: August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (1987) which plays in Pittsburgh in the kitchen and parlor of a railroad cook’s house in 1936 is the third drama of his cycle of an investigation of Black Americans’ lives in the U.S. after slavery.
Boy Willie travels with a friend to his uncle’s, a railroad cook’s, house where his sister Berniece lives, in order to sell their mutual heirloom, a piano bearing carved life scenes and faces of their ancestors, to buy the dead slave owner’s land for farming. Two of their ancestors once were sold as slaves for the price of this piano, and their father ultimately had been burned in a railroad car of the Yellow Dog for stealing the piano he conceived as family possession. The almost deadly argument between brother and sister ends in not selling the piano, after Boy Willie had to fight the ghost of the murdered slave owner, and Berniece saved his life by playing an exorcism song on the piano she had not dared to touch for years.
Wilson’s characters make gothic experiences at the famous railroad crossing at Moorhead, MS, where allegedly the ghosts of the Yellow Dog talk back to the seeker. Says Wining Boy, the musician: “The train passed and I started to go back up there and stand some more. But something told me not to do it. I walked away from there feeling like a king. Went on and had a stroke of luck that run on for three years.” (35) What do ancient African sacrificial rites have to do with American railroad lore? This review paper will focus on the importance of railroad music in The Piano Lesson, and the mystical veil covering the railroad crossing, “where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog.”