When my mama died I shut the top on that piano and I ain't never opened it since. I was only playing it for her. When my daddy died seem like all her life went into that piano. She used to have my playing on it (...) had Miss Eula come in and teach me (...) say when I played it she could hear my daddy talking to her. I used to think them pictures came alive and walked through the house. Sometime late at night I could hear my mama talking to them. I said that wasn't gonna happen to me. I don't play that piano cause I don't want to wake them spirits.

This passage elaborates Berniece's relation to the piano. Berniece played the piano for her mother alone: when she played, her mother could hear her father speaking to her. Thus, the young Berniece—associated with a sort of maternal legacy—appears as a sort of priestess, the role she will decisively assume in the final scene in the exorcism of Sutter's ghost. In some sense, this speech establishes her duty in maintaining the family legacy. Berniece is the link to the ancestors, the means by which the living can invoke and implore their imagined origins for aid.