In two of August Wilson’s plays, The Piano Lessonand Fences, we see two separate and distinct families. Both families go through a conflict, and each one is resolved in their own way depending on the attitudes and previous experiences each family went through. In The Piano Lesson, the conflict is over a piano, at least superficially. As discussed in class, the underlying conflict, the REAL conflict is over how to best use the past to help the family in the present. Boy Willie thinks the best way to do that is to buy the land his family used to work on and make money off of it by growing cotton, only the way he says it on page 11: “This time I get to keep all the cotton. Hire me some men to work it for me” is almost like he is trying to turn the tables on the people who used to own his family during slavery. Berniece thinks the best way is to hold onto the piano, even though she never uses it, and her daughter Maretha uses it very seldom. She treats the piano itself almost like family, especially when on page 52 she says this: “Mama Ola polished this piano with her tears for seventeen years. For seventeen years she rubbed on it till her hands bled. Then she rubbed the blood in…mixed it up with the rest of the blood on it.” Now to me that means all of her family’s blood, which is what she wants to hold onto the most, she wants to stay as far away from the land they worked as possible because of the slavery but wants to remember all those who were enslaved. When she finally realizes why Boy Willie wants the piano, for him to use the money so he can
