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Plot synopsis

Characters

• Boy Willie
• Lymon
• Maretha
• Doaker
• Grace
• Avery
• Berniece
• Wining Boy

The play concerns a brother and a sister who argue about whether they should sell their family piano. Boy Willie, a sharecropper from the South, wants to sell his family's ancestral piano to buy land thats his family worked on as slaves. His Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania sister Berniece insists on keeping it. The piano has the carved faces of their great-grandfather's wife and son, who were sold in exchange for the piano during the days of enslavement.