Every person has a past, every race has a heritage, and every family has a legacy. In Wilson's work, the four protagonists, Boy Willie, Berniece, Doaker and Wining Boy, are all wounded by their traumatic pasts and have only one memory of their family history: the piano. At the beginning of the play, Wilson describes the setting and illustrates a piano that dominates the living room and gathers dust in Charles' house. The piano is covered with carvings of events and “mask-like figures resembling totems.” Wilson then begins to describe the carvings as “graceful” and conveying a “power of invention that elevates them from the realm of craftsmanship and into the realm of art.” However, for the Charles family, the piano is not just an elaborately carved piano, but rather the sole symbol of their family heritage; the only way to understand the piano is to go back to the time of slavery. In the show, Doaker begins to reveal the family history to Boy Willie and explains the significance of the piano. During the slave period, Boy Willie and Bernice's grandfather (Willie Boy) was owned by a man named Robert Sutter. Sutter had traded his grandmother and uncle for the piano as a gift for his wife, Miss Ophelia. After growing tired of the piano, Miss Ophelia missed her slaves so much that Sutter had Willie Boy hand-carve the faces of his wife and son all over the piano. However, Willie Boy didn't end there; he engraved all his ancestors on the piano and "all kinds of things that happened with [the] family". Miss Ophelia was ecstatic when she saw the piano, because "now she had her piano and her niggers too." When she looked at the carvings in the piano, she could see all the faces of the slaves she missed and... the center of the paper... the past lives on, something that cannot be measured in monetary terms. Wilson truly demonstrates that understanding the past is valuable and worth more than monetary things, something that should be appreciated and understood, especially in the African American past with its never-ending struggle for self. Furthermore, with the culmination of religion, heritage, and family, Charles' family was able to shed their pain and sadness, face the truth, and embrace their values. Furthermore, August Wilson truly embodies the connection between past and future in his play, The Piano Lesson. Through his characters, Boy Willie, Berniece, Doaker and Wining Boy, he shows how we should not fear the past and avoid it and how it should be valued, embraced and accepted. Only then will you be free to move forward in life. The only way to know where you're going is to know where you come from.