BOY WILLIE: Hey Berniece if you and Maretha don't keep playing on that piano ain't no telling me and Sutter both liable to be back. (He exits.)
BERNIECE: Thank you.

The struggle with Sutter having ended, Willie leaves the women of the Charles household with the charge quoted above. He states that if they do not continue playing the piano, he and Sutter are liable to return. Thus, the maternal line—already established in the play as the bearer of grief and mourning—is left with the responsibility of channeling the dead and maintaining the family's connection with its origins. These elliptical remarks also establish the allegorical nature of the struggle that has just come to pass between Willie and Sutter, a struggle across generations and across the grave over the family's legacy, the piano, and the avenging of past crimes. Willie functions here as almost a sort of revenant, embodying the ghosts of the past, and engaging in a battle between the Charles and the Sutters, the white and the black that spans time.