Exploring the concept of the absent father, this paper reads Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate as an intertext. While a great many canonical North American plays from the 20th century focus on the recurring theme of family disintegration, Jacobs-Jenkins attempts instead to present the meaning of family reunions inscribed with historical traumas (in this text, specifically, slavery). Jacobs-Jenkins openly acknowledges his appropriation of other texts, and in so doing intensifies opportunity for engaging his themes. After the death of the Lafayette family’s patriarchal head, three siblings (Toni, Bo, Frank) come together to mourn their father on a plantation in Arkansas. Unlike their late father, a Harvard-educated lawyer, the siblings do not have comparable jobs. Toni, foul-tongued, reminisces about him as brilliant and civilized, while Rachel recalls her father-in-law was an anti-Semite. He is also remembered as bipolar, and an obsessive hoarder. The play then shifts toward a photo album filled with horrifying images of slaves being lynched. The photos function as an objet a to raise the bereaved family’s reflections on enslavement and their father’s complicated, unsavory complicities. Intertextuality is the mode by which Jacobs-Jenkins excavates this family’s history, and this play asks for forgiveness for historical wrongdoings through the voices of white performers. The plantation is suffused with a polyphony of echoes; in summonsing uncomfortable truths on discrimination toward non-whites, Appropriate explores the discursive mesh of history, identity, ethics, and the relevance / feasibility of forgiveness.