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Chasing Me to My Grave

An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South

Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

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 listeners to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society.

Includes a bonus PDF of artwork.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Dion Graham transforms his voice to portray artist Winfred Rembert, who escaped the cotton fields of the Deep South he labored in as a child. During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, he was nearly lynched by law enforcement and then found himself incarcerated and forced to work on a chain gang. Delivering this in-your-face memoir, 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. This is an important account of the life of a gifted American artist, as well as a wrenching, soulful history of the mid-twentieth-century United States. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 24, 2021
      In this posthumous work, artist Rembert (1945–2021) offers a powerful, unfiltered look at life growing up in Jim Crow Georgia. “This was a time when everybody was above the law—if you were White... they just made up their mind about what they wanted to do with you and that’s what they did,” he recalls of his childhood growing up with his great-aunt. Even from a young age, Rembert was exposed to murders, mutilations, and humiliations designed to break and degrade the Black residents in his town. His artwork vividly showcases harrowing moments in his life, from picking cotton in endless fields to the horrors of being on a chain gang in prison for stealing a car (to escape a “White mob”). Especially graphic is his account of narrowly surviving his own lynching: “They hung me up by my feet in a tree... and stuck me with the knife... I was bleeding like a hog.” Despite his incredible hardships, Rembert highlights the beauty he encountered, such as the kindness of strangers and his wife, Patsy, who encouraged him to “turn my stories into art.” This is a stunning portrait of hope in the face of evil, barbarity, and racism. Agent: Stephanie Steiker, Regal Hoffman & Assoc. (Aug.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated where the author grew up.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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