Survival Tactic
Lester, Julius
Survival Tactic DO LORD, REMEMBER ME by Julius Lester Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 210 pp. $ 13.95. The chief character in Do Lord, Remember Me is a black preacher, the Reverend Joshua Smith, who...
...From the very beginning of the book, the Reverend Smith suggests to us a central theme: "Dying wasn't nothing but going back to the beginning...
...They were the parents and grandparents of the men and women who, in the spring of 1954, liberated themselves and their French masters at the battle of Dien Bien Phu...
...Julius Lester is a skilled story-teller...
...He does not maneuver us into any direction or conclusion, but by infusing his words with both reason and feeling, he moves us to ask ourselves fundamental questions about life and liberty, death, slavery, and the meaning of freedom...
...Currently he teaches Afro-American and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts...
...After a heart attack in July 1983, he expects death and tries to compose his obituary...
...Ideally, the book should be read three times fully to discover and savor its compelling power and its purifying force: the first time, to hear the words and music of well-orchestrated sentences...
...Any victim of oppression and repression preparing for the day of liberation has to work out a strategy for survival—not only survival at the individual level but also for the community and for the preservation and continuation of historical memory...
...He was a well-known activist in the 1960s and is a recent convert to Judaism...
...He attempts to remember details of his own past, his grandparents, his parents, his children...
...The reader sees the pattern, but each pattern is itself woven into designs, pictures, brutal facts, and philosophical observations...
...From these memories emerges a vivid panorama of the black struggle for liberation in the United States...
...Tran Van Dinh (Tran Van Dinh teaches at Temple University...
...The Reverend Joshua Smith brings to mind the Confucian-Taoist-Buddhist scholars in residence in Vietnamese villages during the French occupation...
...Reading this novel is like admiring and contemplating a Persian tapestry hung against the wall of a meditation room...
...the second, to penetrate the feelings and to participate with imagination in the historical remembrances of the characters, and the third, to grasp the unifying meaning of seemingly disparate messages...
...History determines liberation, and liberation actualizes history...
...This concept serves as an ideology for survival, which is the demarcation line between life and death, between liberty and slavery...
...He does not enjoy unanimous approval in his community, however, because he is married to a light-skinned woman...
...The chief character in Do Lord, Remember Me is a black preacher, the Reverend Joshua Smith, who was born in northern Mississippi in 1900...
...In presenting him to us, Julius Lester elevates him as much as he purifies us...
...The Reverend Smith's role in the black struggle for liberation in this country is no less...
...Endowed with a talent for communication, and inspired by a deep love for God, he is called the "colored Billy Graham" by a Des Moines newspaper and known as the "singing evangelist" to his followers throughout the South...
Vol. 49 • December 1985 • No. 12
