Key quotes by Boy Willie:

Regarding Lymon’s cousin back in Mississippi, “Got near about a hundred acres. He got it set up real nice” (5).

Regarding the land he wants to buy, “Got a hundred acres. Good land” (10). “This time I get to keep all the cotton. Hire me some men to work it for me. Gin my cotton. Get my seed” (11).

“But I ain’t scared of work. I’m going back and farm every acre of that land.” (17)

“Berniece don’t believe in nothing. She just think she believe. She believe in anything if it’s convenient for her to believe. But when that convenience run out then she ain’t got nothing to stand on.” (35)

“They mistreat me I mistreat them right back. Ain’t no difference in me and the white man.” (38)

“I don’t go by what the law say. The law’s liable to say anything. I go by if it’s right or not.” (38)

“She ain’t doing nothing but letting it sit up there and rot. That piano ain’t doing nobody no good.” (42)

“If my daddy had seen where he could have traded that piano in for some land of his own, it wouldn’t be sitting up here now… See, he couldn’t do no better…The only thing my daddy had to give me was that piano. And he died over giving me that. I ain’t gonna let it sit up there and rot without trying to do something with it.” (46)

“Land the only thing God ain’t making no more of. You can always get you another piano.” (50)

Regarding Great grandpa leaving the pictures on the piano and his father dying to get the piano, “Now, I’m supposed to build on what they left me…Alright now, if you say to me, Boy Willie, I’m using that piano… [Berniece] building on it… I got to find another way to get Sutter’s land… You just looking at the sentimental value… You can sit up here and look at the piano for the next hundred years and it’s just gonna be a piano.” (51)

“I got these big old hands but what I’m gonna do with them?...Where’s the tools?...Unless I go out here and kill me somebody and take what they got.” (91)

“If you teach that girl that she living at the bottom of life, she’s gonna grow up and hate you.” (92) and Berneice replies with, “I’m gonna teach her the truth.”

“That’s all I’m trying to do with that piano. Trying to put my mark on the road… My heart say for me to sell that piano and get me some land so I can make a life for myself to live in my own way.” (94)