The Piano Lesson family tree

The Piano Lesson family tree begins in slavery. Robert Sutter owned the Charles family in Mississippi. He wanted a piano owned by Joel Nolander in Georgia as a present for his wife Ophelia, and because he had no cash he traded people for it. Nolander chose Mama Berniece and her young son Papa Boy Charles.⁴

Ophelia came to miss the two of them, and Robert Sutter set Mama Berniece’s husband, Papa Boy Willie, a carpenter, to carve their faces into the wood. He carved his wife and his son and then went on to carve more scenes from the family’s history.^4,1 On the chart Papa Boy Willie and Mama Berniece stand at the top as a couple parted by the sale, and a dashed line from Robert Sutter marks the trade.

Doaker tells this history in Act One, Scene 2. LitCharts makes Mama Berniece the great-grandmother of Berniece and Boy Willie and Papa Boy Charles their grandfather, so Papa Boy Willie is their great-grandfather on The Piano Lesson family tree, although one LitCharts entry calls him a great-grandmother by mistake.²

Papa Boy Charles had three sons, the third generation of The Piano Lesson family tree. Boy Charles was the eldest, and Doaker and Wining Boy were his younger brothers.² Neither source names their mother, so the chart draws the three from Papa Boy Charles alone.

Boy Charles came to believe that as long as the Sutters held the piano they held the family. On the Fourth of July, while Sutter was at a picnic, he took the piano from the house with Doaker and Wining Boy and carried it by wagon to the house of his wife Mama Ola in the next county.⁴ The Wikipedia article dates the theft to 1911, and the LitCharts scene page gives no year.^1,4

That night his house was set on fire. He ran for the 3.57 train on the Yellow Dog line and hid in a boxcar with four hobos, and the boxcar was set alight and all five men died. Nobody knows who set the fire, and the legend of the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog begins with those deaths.⁴ Mama Ola polished the piano for seventeen years after his death, which is why Berniece will not sell it.⁴

Doaker works on the railroad and keeps the house in Pittsburgh. Wining Boy, a piano player, was married to Cleotha Holman, who has recently died in Kansas City.² In 1930 he called on the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog at a crossing.⁴

Berniece and Boy Willie are the children of Boy Charles and Mama Ola. The quarrel between them is the spine of The Piano Lesson family tree. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano and buy the land that the family worked as slaves. Berniece keeps it and will not play it.^3,1

Berniece was married to Crawley. Three years before the play, Boy Willie and Lymon were taking wood they had hidden, Crawley came with his gun to back them, and the sheriff’s men shot him dead. Lymon was shot in the stomach. Berniece blames her brother for her husband’s death.⁴ Their daughter Maretha is eleven and lives with her mother and Doaker.²

Avery Brown followed Berniece north from Mississippi and plans to found a church. He asks her to marry him and she refuses.^2,3 In Act Two, Scene 3, Lymon and Berniece kiss in the kitchen.⁶ Boy Willie brings Grace home in the same scene, and LitCharts says Grace ends up with Lymon.^6,2

The Sutters stand on the left of The Piano Lesson family tree. Ophelia never appears on stage and is not drawn. Sutter, the man who has died when the play opens, is the grandson of Robert Sutter and owned the land in Mississippi where the Charles family had worked.² The sources do not name the generation between them, so the chart sets Sutter on the row of Boy Charles without a parent line.

In Act One, Scene 1, Boy Willie brings the news that Sutter fell down his well, and a rumour says the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog pushed him. Berniece says she has seen Sutter’s ghost upstairs and accuses her brother of pushing him.³ In Act Two, Scene 1, Doaker admits that he saw the ghost at the piano before she did.⁵ The chart marks Sutter as dead with a state that reads his ghost is at the piano, and a red zigzag joins him to Boy Willie.

The play is set in Pittsburgh in 1936, after the Great Depression, in the living room and kitchen of Doaker’s house. The family on the chart is split between that house and Mississippi, where Boy Willie still farms and where the Sutter land lies.²

Wining Boy, Boy Willie and Lymon have all served time on Parchman Farm in Mississippi. The Yellow Dog is a railroad line, and its 3.57 train is the one Boy Charles ran for.⁴

The play has been filmed twice. A Hallmark Hall of Fame film directed by Lloyd Richards aired on CBS in 1995, and Netflix released a film directed by Malcolm Washington in 2024. Both follow the same family, and The Piano Lesson family tree here draws the play.¹

On The Piano Lesson family tree a square is a man and a circle is a woman. A line between a couple with a line down to the children is a marriage, and a cross marks a death. Everyone in the top three rows is dead before the play begins.

The green ring holds the Charles family and the red ring the Sutters. The orange zigzag between Berniece and Boy Willie is their quarrel over the piano, and it becomes a plain line in the last scene.

To build a Piano Lesson family tree of your own, open the chart in the editor from this page or start from the story charts. The symbols are set out in the genogram symbols.