She can go on back to bed. (p. 2)
This is the play's call to action - both of Boy Willie, and of Wilson himself. Boy Willie arrives at dawn and makes a powerful ruckus, rousing everyone from their easy complacent sleep and their easy complacent lives. He knows the storm he is bringing, but offers that everyone can go "back to bed" when he's done shaking things up a bit. Wilson too is insisting that the audience wake up and listen to him for two hours, before going back to bed themselves.
Now what I done learned after 27 years of railroading is this... if the train stays on the track... it's going to get where it's going. It might not be where you going. If it ain't, then all you got to do is sit and wait cause the train's coming back to get you. The train don't never stop. (p. 19)
In this speech, Doaker introduces his world view, inspired by the railroad. The train here is a metaphor for the path of modernity - white modernity - and of history. The black man can't change the path of the train. He can only ride along to wherever it's going. And he has no choice in the matter either, for there will always be another train coming along behind the last.
If Berniece don't want to sell that piano... I'm gonna cut it in half and go on and sell my half. (p. 28)
This challenging statement by Boy Willie at the end of the first act raises the stakes for the conflict between Boy Willie and Berniece. It also evokes the biblical parallel of the Solomonic compromise, foreshadowing that Boy Willie will ultimately be deemed an unworthy inheritor of the piano and its legacy. By threatening to cut the piano in half, Boy Willie makes it clear that he has no interest in the piano's symbolic value.
That's the difference between the colored man and the white man. The colored man can't fix nothing with the law. (p. 38)
This is the moral of Wining Boy's parable about the fence around berries in a yard. He is illustrating the deeply ingrained differences between society's treatment of the races. The law may be technically neutral (although at this point in time, in the 1930s, the law still had a long ways to go before even being almost-neutral), but the key is that even the simplest law can be manipulated and controlled by a white man. This power is not available to people of color.
Now, who am I? Am I me? Or am I the piano player? Sometimes it seem like the only thing to do is shoot the piano player cause he the cause of all the trouble I'm having. (p. 40)
This is the culmination of the philosophical crisis created by Wining Boy's years on the road as a traveling pianist. He could only enjoy that life for so long, until he began to notice that he was nothing but a piano player. He couldn't do anything else, wasn't seen as anything else. He was chained to that piano, and he could only free his true self by shooting the pianist.
All this thieving and killing and thieving and killing. And what it ever lead to? More killing and more thieving. (p. 52)
Berniece is frustrated because of the pattern of violence and crime that she sees in the men of her family, and more broadly of the African American community. Through Berniece's mouth, we learn that the role of women in this community is to support the men and pick up the pieces of their families after they are driven to desperation and violence by the hardships forced upon them by white society.
You sure is country. I didn't know you was this country. (p. 73)
After Boy Willie counters Grace's complaints about sleeping on the sofa with a story about his grandfather taking women on the backs of horses, Grace is amazed by how "country" Boy Willie is. This serves to heighten the difference between Boy Willie and Lymon at this point in the play. Boy Willie belongs down south, farming, and leading a country life. Lymon is a man for the north, happy to mix into integrated society.
A nigger that ain't afraid to die is the worse kind of nigger for the white man. He can't hold that power over you. That's what I learned when I killed that cat. I got the power of death too. (p. 88)
Boy Willie believes that the crux of the degrading relationship between the races is that the white man can hold the threat of death over the black man. By not fearing to die, Boy Willie reasons, he has removed the white man's greatest weapon. If the black man can wield death like the white man, then black and white are on equal footing.
I got to mark my passing on the road. Just like you write on a tree, "Boy Willie was here."
The other key to Boy Willie's world view is his need to leave something behind. He doesn't need to create art or change the world. He just needs to affects things somehow, to cause a ruckus, to avoid the traditional route of keeping your head down and your mouth shut. Like his great-grandfather carving the family history into the wood of the piano, Boy Willie will carve his name into the wood of the world.
I want you to help me
I want you to help me
Mama Berniece
I want you to help me
Mama Esther
I want you to help me
Papa Boy Charles
I want you to help me
Mama Ola
I want you to help me
(p. 107)
This is Berniece's song, performed when she finally finds the will and the strength to sit at the piano. She doesn't play just any song. She invokes the spirits of the piano, and the spirits of her whole family, to help rid the household of its ghosts. She is performing an exorcism, both literally - removing Sutter's ghost from the house - and figuratively, kicking out the ghosts that have haunted her life. She is no longer afraid of the piano and its spirits, but embraces them.
