My mother’s house in Nebraska is primarily decorated in typical Midwest housewife chic. There is a tasteful couch set, conservative blinds and drapes, and numerous pictures of her three sons displayed prominently throughout the house. The one room that is a little outside of the norm is called “The Basketball Room”. The Basketball Room is a converted dining room designed to fit the needs of my hoops-obsessed 10-year-old brother Cole. The room has a 6-foot standing basketball hoop on one wall, plenty of space for vicious one-on-one games, and both a flip scoreboard and an electronic scoreboard to make sure that no one is ever confused about who is winning.
All of this seems normal to me. Heck, given the choice I would have a basketball room in my house too. What makes the room a little offbeat is the presence of an antique piano with the words “Black Power” prominently spray-painted across the top. So why is a 55-year-old Caucasian mother of three promoting a Black Panther slogan? As you can imagine, there is a story.
The piano once belonged to my great-grandmother Nannie. I don’t think that Nannie ever really played the piano, but pianos were just one of those things that people owned in the ‘40s and ‘50s. In the early ‘90s, Nannie could no longer live on her own and moved in with my grandparents. As a favor, she allowed my struggling uncle and his family to move into her old house. Due to the white flight to the suburbs in Omaha around this time, my uncle’s family soon was the only white family in the neighborhood. My uncle had a few run-ins with kids loitering in front of his house over the years. The day after one incident, my uncle came home to find the house trashed, including the spray-painting on the piano. Not long after, my uncle moved out, leaving behind everything in the house. After Nannie died, my mom went through her old house looking through all kinds of memories. One of the things she rescued was the piano.
I have asked my mom why she holds onto it, but have never really gotten a satisfactory answer. Sure, it is a heirloom left to her by her grandmother, but our family is not lacking in these. My mom is the only one in the family who plays the piano, but no more than in one week stretches every couple of years. She could easily get the spray painted portion replaced or simply cover it with a sheet, but she has never been inclined to do that. And this isn’t something she has just forgot about…it is one of the first things you see when you walk through the front door. It weighs a ton and she has had to deal with moving it two times in the last 6 years. It has taken me awhile, but I have come to accept that I’ll never know the real reason that she has such an attachment to that piano. I think she likes the mystery.
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