Content Warning: These Act Summaries & Analyses describe racism and discussions of racial violence and lynching. This guide quotes and obscures the playwright’s use of the n-word.

The play is set in 1936 and takes place in the parlor and kitchen of the Pittsburgh home shared by Doaker Charles, who lives downstairs, his niece Berniece, and her daughter, 11-year-old Maretha, who live upstairs. In the parlor, there is an upright piano with carvings on its legs of faces that look like African masks. It’s five o’clock in the morning, and Doaker enters to answer the insistent knocking on the door. He is surprised to see Berniece’s younger brother, Boy Willie, who has come unexpectedly with his friend Lymon from the family’s former home in Mississippi to sell a truckload of watermelons. The drive took two days, since Lymon’s truck kept breaking down. Lymon has come to Pittsburgh to stay, but Boy Willie plans to go back to Mississippi when the watermelons are sold. He wants Lymon to drive him back, but considering the truck’s unreliability, Lymon suggests that Boy Willie will have plenty of money to take the train. Berniece enters, awakened and irked by Boy Willie’s shouting.