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Chasing Me to My Grave Spiral-Bound | 2021-09-07

Winfred Rembert Erin I. Kelly Bryan Stevenson (Foreword by)

★★★★☆+ from 501 to 1,000 ratings

$29.69 - Free Shipping
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

Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket
Pages: 304 pages
ISBN-10: 1635576598
Item Weight: 2.5 lbs
Dimensions: 7.5 x 1.0 x 10.3 inches
Customer Reviews: 4 out of 5 stars 501 to 1,000 ratings
"An unparalleled account of the devastating legacies of American slavery and a luminous self-portrait of one defiant artist's extraordinary triumph over white supremacy and segregation." --Douglas A. Blackmon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Slavery by Another Name
"Chasing Me to My Grave is a harrowing document of Jim Crow and its legacy, a testament to the pain and brutality of that era. It is simultaneously an ode to the power of love and art that lifts humanity above degradation. An immense achievement that will last the test of time." --Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
"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." --Bookpage, starred review
"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." --Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review
"Frank and compelling... An ultimately uplifting journey from the ugliness of virulent racism to the beauty of art." --Kirkus Review, starred 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
"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." --Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative
"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
"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." --Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
"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
"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." --Albert Woodfox, author of Solitary

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.