Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South
A compelling and important history that this nation desperately needs to hear. --Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative
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 fifty-one 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 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
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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. www.winfredrembert.com.
Dion Graham is an award-winning narrator named a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine. He has been a recipient of the prestigious Audie Award numerous times, as well as many other awards. He is also a critically acclaimed actor who has performed on Broadway, off Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series, including HBO's The Wire and A&E's The First 48.
Erin I. Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. She specializes in ethics and criminal law and is the author of The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility (Harvard University Press, 2018). erinikelly.com
Bryan Stevenson is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a professor of law at New York University Law School. He has won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, argued five times before the Supreme Court, and won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color. He has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.
A love story...[that] documents racial and economic violence under white supremacy as a living history. It also gives us an example of how to live without bitterness or seeking revenge.
-- "Chicago Review of Books"A stunning portrait of hope in the face of evil, barbarity, and racism.
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Rembert's self-portrait in word and image belongs in every library.
-- "Booklist (starred review)"An ultimately uplifting journey from the ugliness of virulent racism to the beauty of art.
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Narrator Dion Graham...has an aged, comfortable tone, as if Winfred is sitting around the table telling the whole family his life story. Though Karen Chilton, who portrays Patsy, the love of Winfred's life, delivers fewer passages, both voices--heartfelt and down-home--complement each other.
-- "AudioFile"Rembert...reveal[s] 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 "Winfred Rembert paints a world too little depicted and a reality we can't afford to forget.
-- "Albert Woodfox, author of Solitary"Unvarnished literary and visual power.
-- "Carol Anderson, author of White Rage"A profoundly moving, devastatingly painful, and wonderfully transformative experience.
-- "Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield"At turns harrowing and haunting...And through it all, joy, no matter how elusive, never disappears.
-- "Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine"Rembert's account reminds us that it is in the remembering of the past that we keep it from becoming prologue.
-- "Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon"
