Spirituality and the Supernatural Theme Analysis

The Piano Lesson is strongly characterized by spiritual and supernatural elements. For example, Avery’s ambition to become a Christian preacher and start a church is presented in a sincere and favorable light. More strikingly, however, encounters with ghosts and other unexplainable forces are sprinkled throughout the play. Even when certain characters don’t believe in the specific supernatural experiences that others describe (like Berniece dismissing Boy Willie’s explanation that ghosts killed Sutter or Boy Willie’s disbelief that Berniece has seen Sutter’s ghost), all of them seem to accept the basic reality of such powerful forces. As the play goes on—especially as Berniece succeeds in banishing Sutter’s ghost herself—it emerges that the significance of spiritual encounters lies in how they help characters deal with the concrete struggles in their lives. Particularly through Berniece’s exorcism of Sutter’s ghost, Wilson argues that the supernatural realm is most valuable as a site of personal and communal self-realization.

Wilson first establishes the plausibility of the supernatural within the play by showing that various characters have had encounters with the unseen, not just those (like preacher Avery) who are obviously “spiritual” in temperament. In other words, the supernatural is presented as an accepted, taken-for-granted aspect of reality, but one that’s highly individual in nature. When Boy Willie and Lymon arrive at Berniece’s house, one of their first pieces of news from Mississippi is that Sutter has died from falling down a well. “The Ghosts of the Yellow Dog” got him, Boy Willie explains. Because the “Ghosts” aren’t fully explained until near the end of the play (they’re said to be the ghosts of men who were murdered by a group of vigilante white men, and they’ve been systematically killing their oppressors), they hover in a vague, threatening way over the entire story—undeniably present and powerful. Uncle Wining Boy believes in the Ghosts, too. He claims that he stood at a certain railroad crossing in Mississippi and was filled with the Ghosts’ power: “A lot of things you got to find out on your own. 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 walked away from there feeling like a king. Went on and had a stroke of luck that run on for three years. […] I know cause I been there.” Wining Boy’s testimony suggests that each person has to experience supernatural things for themselves, and that it’s up to each person to make sense of that experience. Ultimately, no one should blindly accept somebody else’s testimony about such things, and likewise, nobody can explain anyone else’s experience.

Berniece’s experience with Sutter’s ghost shows that each person has to wrestle with the supernatural individually, and that the significance of such encounters lies in how they equip an individual to move forward in life. In the play’s first act, Berniece suddenly sees what she believes is the ghost of Sutter standing in her house. Boy Willie doesn’t believe her, but Doaker asks her to tell the whole story. It turns out that Doaker has seen Sutter’s ghost, too, and he blames the presence of the storied family piano: “Berniece need to go on and get rid of it. It ain’t done nothing but cause trouble.” Berniece rejects this idea and asks her boyfriend, Avery, to bless the house, believing that this will rid them of Sutter’s ghost. But it doesn’t seem to work: as Avery reads passages from the Bible, Boy Willie begins to be choked and thrown around by Sutter’s ghost. The fact that Avery’s conventional exorcism is ineffective suggests that the problem is not the presence of an evil spirit, as Doaker suggested with regard to the piano; the real problem is Berniece’s avoidance of her past. Avery tells Berniece he can’t stop this, and Berniece has a sudden, unexplainable realization of what she has to do: she sits down and plays the piano for the first time in many years, calling upon her relatives’ spirits for help. As she repeats their names in a kind of incantation, the struggle between Boy Willie and the ghost subsides. The play closes with Berniece thanking her ancestors, as she’s apparently now at peace—both from Sutter’s haunting and from the grief she’s long associated with the piano (thus refusing to play it for years). The key to dealing with Sutter’s ghost, then, was not banishing some disembodied evil; it was Berniece’s willingness to accept the past in order to move forward.

Wilson’s treatment of the supernatural in The Piano Lesson suggests that, in his view, the most important thing about spirituality is not even its precise content, but what it means to individuals in their personal struggles. By extension, he hints that the value of belief in the supernatural is how it helps communities—especially the African-American community—cope with the painful “ghosts” of their past in order to face the future with confidence and hope. Even Sutter’s sinister presence wasn’t a threat in itself; ultimately, it prompted Berniece to realize her own spiritual power.