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Memoirs

CHASING ME TO MY GRAVE

Erin I. Kelly Winfred Rembert

An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South

An artist's odyssey from Jim Crow era Georgia to the Yale University Art Gallery - a stunningly vivid, full-color memoir in prose and painted leather.

Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. At age nineteen he was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on a chain gang. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of 51 and with Patsy's encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison. Chasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert's breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert calls forth vibrant scenes of Black life on Cuthbert, Georgia's Hamilton Avenue, where he first glimpsed the possibility of a life outside the cotton field. As he pays tribute, exuberant and heartfelt, to Cuthbert's Black community and the people, including his wife Patsy, who helped him to find the courage to revisit a traumatic past, Rembert brings to life the promise and the danger of Civil Rights protest, the brutalities of incarceration, his search for his mother's love, and the epic bond he found with Patsy. Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and paintings that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society. Winfred Rembert (b. 1945) is an artist from Cuthbert, Georgia who lives and works in New Haven, CT. His artwork, often compared to that of Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the country, including the Yale Art Gallery, the Hudson River Museum, the High Museum of Atlanta, and the Adelson Galleries in New York, and been featured inThe New York Times, The Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, and Hyperallergic. Rembert is the subject of two award-winning documentary films, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert (2011) and Ashes to Ashes (2019), and was honored in 2015 by Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative. Erin I. Kelly is a professor at Tufts University who writes on ethics and philosophy of law, with a focus on criminal justice. She is author of THE LIMITS OF BLAME: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility (Harvard University Press, 2018).

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Book Published 2021-09-07 by Bloomsbury

Comments

Winfred Rembert paints a world too little depicted and a reality we can't afford to forget. While testifying to this nation's long history of racial injustice, Chasing Me to My Grave is also a must-read story of Black struggle, solidarity, and love.

Winfred's legacy, part of the on-going fight against racism in this country and elsewhere, is also being recognized by The New Yorker, who in this week's issue is serializing an excerpt from the book, accompanied by several of Winfred's art works. Read more...

Chasing Me to My Grave is a testament to the ways one man used his art to educate, delight and depict the trauma that arises out of memory.

The power of Rembert's Chasing Me to My Grave is in the unvarnished truth, in the writing, the storytelling, the artwork, his life. Unvarnished literary and visual power.

One-of-a-kind... Chasing Me to My Grave is a stunning piece of visual truth-telling. Featuring a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, it's a stark reminder of our nation's ugly history, and the power in reclaiming such history through art.

Chasing Me to My Grave is a brilliant reminder of where we've come from as a country. We've come to accept William Faulkner's adage, 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' But Rembert's account reminds us that it is in the remembering of the past that we keep it from becoming prologue. From the Jim Crow South to the chain gang to a life as an artist, Rembert reminds us of the terror and the possibility of America. That he became an artist while in prison says something about the gifts we bury, that he lived to tell this harrowing tale says something about the strength of this man.

While the horrors of the Jim Crow South have been well documented, Winfred Rembert's memoir in words and paintings lends immediacy and specificity to their lasting trauma. Rembert's survival could be described as miraculous if that didn't seem to discount his own tenacity or absolve his tormentors. Chasing Me to My Grave is painful to read, but it also celebrates beauty and joy and kindness. It is a powerful testament to America's most shameful history, but even more so to Rembert's talent and vision as an artist, and to his unique and indomitable spirit.

An artistic eye shines through in his elegantly natural prose.Rembert's recollections are conveyed in both words and images. A sort of call-and-response rhythm emerges as we move forward... the words providing insights and unseeable detail, the images deepening our sense of the emotional impact of the narrator's experiences.

CHASING ME TO MY GRAVE is the WINNER OF THE 2022 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY A Booklist #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year An African American Literary Book Club (AALBC) #1 Nonfiction Bestseller Named a Best Book of the Year by: National Public Radio, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, Barnes & Noble, Hudson Booksellers, ARTnews, and more An Amazon Editors' Pick A Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction Longlist

Frank and compelling... An ultimately uplifting journey from the ugliness of virulent racism to the beauty of art.

Chasing Me to My Grave offers a powerful, unfiltered look at life growing up in Jim Crow Georgia... A stunning portrait of hope in the face of evil, barbarity, and racism.

Chasing Me to My Grave is both a literary and artistic triumph. Winfred Rembert's memoir of the carceral state in the Jim Crow South is a profoundly moving, devastatingly painful, and wonderfully transformative experience. Rembert's earthy prose, evocative images, and grace in the face of racial oppression is an inspiring true story that will forever change the way we look at the system of mass incarceration and unequal justice and those who resisted with love, beauty, and artistic brilliance. This book is a must read for all who are interested in finding out the roots of our current racial crisis as well as the possibilities for truth, justice, and healing.

This is a book like no other, from Winfred Rembert's unique and uniquely powerful autobiographical paintings to his disturbing and courageous life story... Rembert recounts diabolical abuse and violence with rare candor and precision... By using carved, tooled, and dyed leather as the medium for vibrantly patterned scenes from his life, Rembert turned the scars on his body and soul into artworks of clarion witness and reckoning. With a foreword by Bryan Stevenson and superb color reproductions, Rembert's self-portrait in word and image belongs in every library.

CHASING ME TO MY GRAVE: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert wins the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography! Here is what the jury said: "A searing first-person illustrated account of an artist's life during the 1950s and 1960s in an unreconstructed corner of the deep Southan account of abuse, endurance, imagination, and aesthetic transformation." Read more...

This book is visually stunning, full of images of the late Winfred Rembert's art, which he carved and painted in leather. There are scenes of his life growing up in rural Georgia a jarring juxtaposition of nostalgic moments like fishing or dancing in the juke joint, and dark memories of picking cotton, escaping a lynching, and working on the chain gang. Rembert's brutally honest storytelling helps us see the sacrifice and grit it took for Black Americans to survive in the Jim Crow South, something he said should make families proud and want to talk about their history.

At turns harrowing and haunting, Chasing Me to My Grave is a testament to the rich cultural resources and the poetry of Black Southern life. Rembert's paintings, brilliantly composed, kinetic, and enchanting, are interspersed through his reflections about life in the cotton and carceral South. The language is elegant and vernacular, his observations are insightful and poignant. And through it all, joy, no matter how elusive, never disappears.

Rembert's art expresses the legacy of slavery, the trauma of lynching, and the anguish of racial hierarchy and white supremacy while illuminating a resolve to fight oppression and injustice. He has the ability to reveal truths about the human struggle that are transcendent, to evoke an understanding of human dignity that is broad and universal.