Her skepticism is palpable as the men insist upon the truck’s primary characteristic—its legitimacy—just as they insist upon their own honesty. They take pride in being able to repair it as it breaks down three times on the way to Pittsburgh and several times after its arrival. In spite of their frustrations, their industry pays off and they are able to get to a neighborhood where they can sell their watermelons. The produce the truck holds is convenient and symbolic, since watermelons are iconographically and comically related to black people. Yet here they represent the best kind of self-help. The truck’s breakdown journey is as interesting as its passengers. It has been home and hiding place for Lymon and a double necessity to Boy Willie’s project: he expects its bed to hold two sources of income—selling produce and transporting the valuable piano. Finally, its exit enables a couple, Lymon and Grace, bent on being one, to escape; and it forces Boy Willie to abandon his goal, with no option but to take the train home.

The truck bears a heavy weight as symbol and dramatic glue. Integral to the action, it sits offstage but not off page, where it stokes the imagination. What color is it? What make? What is the mechanical problem? What is its future? What will become of it and Lymon and Grace? Like a magic carpet it arrives, solves problems, and disappears with lovers aboard. The time such ruminations take and the pleasure they summon are most available in reading.

The second thing that strikes one in reading the play (which its staging may not stress) is the fear that animates it. Ostensibly, we are in a safe house on a quiet street preoccupied by the question of who will triumph—Berniece or Boy Willie—and whether a ghost is real and, if so, is it dangerous? But even a threatening ghost hovering in any room it chooses pales before the gripping fear of what is outside—the steady, casual intimacy with imprisonment and violent death. Parchman Farm, a prison, is referred to several times as a place where characters have met each other, served time on, and know as well as they know their hometown. The anecdotes about other friends and relatives are marked by bloodletting, sometimes mistaken, sometimes casual, and other times deliberate. What Lymon’s mother felt she had to do was necessary in order to free her husband from jail. A hopeless sacrifice, one gathers, for he is later murdered.

WINING BOY: . . . L. D. Jackson. That was one bad-luck nigger. Got killed at some dance. Fellow walked in and shot him thinking he was somebody else.

Berniece cautions Lymon about city life and its women.

BERNIECE: You don’t need to be out there in them saloons. Ain’t no telling what you liable to run into out there. This one liable to cut you quick as that one shoot you . . . I don’t know what them women out there be thinking about.