WINING BOY: That’s when Sutter called our granddaddy up to the house.

DOAKER: Now, our granddaddy’s name was Boy Willie. That’s who Boy Willie’s named after . . . only they called him Willie Boy. Now, he was a worker of wood. He could make you anything you wanted out of wood. He’d make you a desk. A table. A lamp. Anything you wanted. Them white fellows around there used to come up to Mr. Sutter and get him to make all kinds of things for them. Then they’d pay Mr. Sutter a nice price. See, everything my granddaddy made Mr. Sutter owned cause he owned him. That’s why when Mr. Nolander offered to buy him to keep the family together Mr. Sutter wouldn’t sell him. Told Mr. Nolander he didn’t have enough money to buy him. Now . . . am I telling it right, Wining Boy?

WINING BOY: You telling it.

DOAKER: Sutter called him up to the house and told him to carve my grandmother and my daddy’s picture on the piano for Miss Ophelia. And he took and carved this . . . (DOAKER crosses over to the piano.)

See that right there? That’s my grandmother, Berniece. She looked just like that. And he put a picture of my daddy when he wasn’t nothing but a little boy the way he remembered him. He made them up out of his memory. Only thing . . . he didn’t stop there. He carved all this. He got a picture of his mama . . . Mama Esther . . . and his daddy, Boy Charles.

WINING BOY: That was the first Boy Charles.

DOAKER: Then he put on the side here all kinds of things. See that? That’s when him and Mama Berniece got married. They called it jumping the broom. That’s how you got married in them days. Then he got here when my daddy was born . . . and here he got Mama Esther’s funeral . . . and down here he got Mr. Nolander taking Mama Berniece and my daddy away down to his place in Georgia. He got all kinds of things what happened with our family. When Mr. Sutter seen the piano with all them carvings on it he got mad. He didn’t ask for all that. But see . . . there wasn’t nothing he could do about it. When Miss Ophelia seen it . . . she got excited. Now she had her piano and her niggers too. She took back to playing it and played on it right up till the day she died. Alright . . . now see, our brother Boy Charles . . . that’s Berniece and Boy Willie’s daddy . . . he was the oldest of us three boys. He’s dead now. But he would have been fifty-seven if he had lived. He died in 1911 when he was thirty-one years old. Boy Charles used to talk about that piano all the time. He never could get it off his mind. Two or three months go by and he be talking about it again. He be talking about taking it out of Sutter’s house. Say it was the story of our whole family and as long as Sutter had it . . . he had us. Say we was still in slavery. Me and Wining Boy tried to talk him out of it but it wouldn’t do any good. Soon as he quiet down about it he’d start up again. We seen where he wasn’t gonna get it off his mind . . . so, on the Fourth of July, 1911 . . . when Sutter was at the picnic what the county give every year . . . me and Wining Boy went on down there with him and took that piano out of Sutter’s house. We put it on a wagon and me and Wining Boy carried it over into the next county with Mama Ola’s people. Boy Charles decided to stay around there and wait until Sutter got home to make it look like business as usual.