Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South

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 survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement and spent 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 painted leather that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society.