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Synopses & Reviews
An artist’s odyssey from Jim Crow–era Georgia to the Yale Art Gallery — a stunningly vivid, full-color memoir in prose and painted leather, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson.
Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. 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 chain gangs.
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.
Review
"Frank and compelling....An ultimately uplifting journey from the ugliness of virulent racism to the beauty of art." Kirkus Review (Starred Review)
Review
"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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
"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." Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Bastards of the Reagan Era and Felon
Review
"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." Carol Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage and One Person, No Vote
About the Author
Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) was an artist from Cuthbert, Georgia. His paintings on carved and tooled leather have been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country, and compared to the work of Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Horace Pippin. Rembert was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015, awarded a United States Artists Barr Fellowship in 2016, and is the subject of two award-winning documentary films: All Me and Ashes to Ashes. In the last decades of his life, he lived and worked in New Haven, Connecticut.
Erin I. Kelly is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. She lives in Massachusetts.