The prison labor contract system, also known as the convict lease system, allowed private individuals to lease the labor of prisoners from the state, for use in private business. This system was widely used in the South after slavery as a way of re-imposing control over African Americans and their labor. Frequently men were arrested on trumped-up charges, or given extreme sentences for trivial offenses, as a way of forcing them to work for white farm and business owners for free. The prisons were horrific, including extreme brutality, utter lack of medical care, and filthy living conditions.
The play includes a number of references to Parchman Farm. Although Parchman Farm was a state prison intended as an alternative to convict leasing, it reproduced many of the same evils as convict leasing. When Boy Willie starts singing "Bertha" and the other men join in, they are remembering their experiences as convicts working on Parchman Farm.
The Great Migration was the historic movement of African Americans out of the South, where slavery had existed up until the end of the Civil War (1865) to the Northern states, roughly from World War I to the Depression (1916 to the 1930s). This is part of the context for The Piano Lesson, which is set in Pittsburgh but in which all of the characters have connections to an earlier family home in the South.
Note: The term "Great Migration" is used to refer to several different phenomena in history. The links here all describe the movement of Black Americans from the South to the North in the early 20th century. If you do independent research on this topic, make sure you are looking at documents that are describing this phenomenon, not another "Great Migration."
Briefly, sharecropping is a system in which the owner of the land hires someone else to farm it and pays them a share of the crop (hence the name), after deducting the cost of seed, tools, and other supplies. Historically sharecropping often had the effect of keeping the farmer in debt, especially when combined with fraud and deception practiced against African American farmers by White land owners. "Debt peonage" means the condition of permanent debt that kept tenant farmers or sharecroppers permanently tied to the owner's property, almost like serfs in the Middle Ages who were forbidden by law to move off the noble's land.
Music is an important part of this play, which is only fitting for a work titled The Piano Lesson. The music the characters play and sing is rooted in African American traditions of work songs, worship songs, dance music, and other forms. All of this fed into the blues, which became the basis for much American popular music throughout the century, including ragtime, swing, bebop, gospel, rock, bluegrass, country, funk, soul, r&b, and hiphop.
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