The playwright August Wilson, who's best known for his series chronicling 20th-century Black American life (colloquially known as the Century Cycle), paid forensic attention to how everyday families bear the scars'and inherit the triumphs'of collective histories. Art, especially music, was foundational to this understanding. In the Pulitzer Prize'winning The Piano Lesson, which was recently adapted into a Netflix movie, a piano is hand-carved with intricate portraits of an enslaved family'and years later, that family's descendants wrestle with the value of this heirloom. At one point, after Berniece Charles (played by Danielle Deadwyler) plays the piano, she is visited by ghosts of those early relatives, transforming the music from an abstract symbol of her past into a literal conduit for her ancestors. In The Piano Lesson, the titular instrument takes on greater significance because music, and the conditions under which members of the Charles family come to access it, is so central...
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