Tuesday, February 12, 2013

The Piano Lesson


If you haven’t watched the movie, don’t read this because there will be details of the movie in it. However, you can watch it on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baAWP5_0RZ0) and come back to this after.
In life you will see things that may not mean much at one moment, but later “the truth changes color depending on the light” (Eve’s Bayou).
I recently found a movie that my parents had shown me and my sister called, “The Piano Lesson” starring Charles S. Dutton, and Alfre Woodard. It’s set in 1930′s Pittsburgh, and tells the story of a family’s piano that holds their history…and the soul of the slave owner they stole it from. Now, watching this as a kid, it’s just something else my parents showed us, and I liked it because it was entertainment. And then I grew up…
Now, it represents the fight to get out of slaves hand, and move forward as a black person. To be something, and do something more than your parents did because you have the choice and more of the freedom to do so. The value of holding onto our history, and our story…and learning if it’s worth selling it to better yourself. Not to forget it, just, to better yourself.
In the movie Boy Willie is in a constant argument with his sister Bernice about selling the piano that their father stole back from the overseer who owned their family. Some would say it’s disrespectful to sell your family’s history to gain some land so that he, ”no longer have to work for someone else”(which…is a great feeling). Others would say that there is nothing wrong with him wanting to get out and stand on his own two feet without the white man making him doing. After all, it is JUST a piano…right?
Bernice told how their mother would polish the piano everyday with her tears (crying over the loss of her husband who died because he stole the piano), and that as she was rubbing in her tears, her hands would begin to bleed and she rubbed the blood into the piano as well.  Their history carved into the wood, their mothers sweat, blood and tears making it beautiful….why would anyone want to sell it? But how do you deny a man his dream?
Now, while your dreams may not involve you selling a family heirloom, what is the cost? And is it worth it? I believe that sometimes it is, simply because at some point, the risk may turn around and become something more amazing than you or anyone around you would have thought and now you have begun to open their eyes. Maybe I’m rambling…
There have been some very harsh remarks made about this movie. And, I can understand them. In a way it seems like a less well-written version of “Beloved” (another movie you should see) because of the idea of a family torn and brought together by a spirit of the past. The ending is a bit lack luster, but sometimes it’s more about the lesson that some extravagant ending…that is, if you get a lesson out of it at all. Which, not everyone will. 
Enough rambling, go check the movie out. I was so happy to find it on YouTube, because my family has been searching for it like crazy. Especially since the recording we have of it is messed up. I’m glad to have brought back some memories.
Until next time…keep chasin’!

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