Boy Willie Play Analysis

Throughout the entirety of this play, Boy Willie and Berniece were fighting. It started off because Boy Willie came to the house and was screaming at Doaker to wake Berniece and Maretha up. You could tell right away that the two siblings did not get along that well. Later in the play we find out that Berniece blames Boy Willie for the death of her husband, Crawley. This particular fight between the two started with something Berniece had said to Maretha. She made an offhanded comment on how if Maretha had been a boy, she would not have to deal with her hair. Boy Willie got angry after this comment and started yelling about how Berniece should never make her daughter feel as though she would have rathered a boy. Berniece fires back saying that until Boy Willie has a child of his own, he can not tell her how to raise hers.

He tells Berniece that Maretha should know all about the piano, and that she should throw a party in its honor every year, on the day Papa Boy Charles died. To show Berniece how wrong she is towards the world. He says that he never wants to bring a child into this world, he doesn’t want them to remember him like he remembers his father, “Many a time I looked at my daddy and seen him staring off at his hands. I got a little older I know what he was thinking.” ( 91) He knows what it was like for his father to know he can’t necessarily provide for a child with the talents because all he has are his hands, no additional tools, and no way of getting those tools. He knows he doesn’t have anything real to pass onto his child, he mentions how that, “If I was a Rockefeller I’d have forty or fifty. I’d make one every day. Cause they gonna start out in life with all the advantages.” (91) He realizes logically that he won’t be able to give the child the life that they