Do Lord Remember Me

Under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, many former slaves were sought out and interviewed between 1936 and 1938. Although the project lost its funding and ended in 1939, more than 2,300 oral histories had been recorded, and are now preserved in the Library of Congress. Out of this material, playwright James de Jongh has shaped Do Lord Remember Me, an intense and moving piece of theatre that incorporates all aspects of slavery as told by some of its survivors.

The lines and dialogue of the play are the words of Black men and women in their eighties and nineties, as they recall their experience of the “peculiar institution” as it happened to them nearly a lifetime ago. Using these verbatim texts, de Jongh has structured a projection into the past and an exploration of a collective memory. The reminiscences are sometimes tender, amusing and nostalgic, but the underlying brutality of slavery is ever present. The composite narratives tell the story of a people’s desire to survive under suppression, to become literate, to form and preserve families of their own, to worship in freedom, and ultimately to deliver themselves from bondage.