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

This is Winfred Rembert's own account of his life, told to the philosopher Erin Kelly and published the same year he died, and it follows him from a childhood picking cotton for almost no wages in Cuthbert, Georgia, into the civil rights protests of the 1960s that led to his arrest without charge and seven years on a Georgia chain gang. Rembert tells of surviving a lynching attempt during those years, an attack he carried the memory of for the rest of his life, before serving out his sentence and eventually finding, in prison, the tooled leather craft that would become his art.

The memoir follows Rembert into decades of obscurity after his release before his self taught leather artwork, painted and carved scenes recreating the Jim Crow South he had actually lived through, began drawing serious attention, culminating in a 2010 solo exhibition, Memories of My Youth, at Adelson Galleries in New York, and a 2011 documentary, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert, that aired on PBS's America ReFramed series. Erin Kelly, a Tufts University philosopher whose own scholarly work examines punishment, blame and moral responsibility, worked with Rembert to turn his spoken account into the finished book, staying close to his own voice and his own memory of events rather than smoothing them into conventional narrative.

Reading the memoir means hearing a self taught artist's own account of surviving Jim Crow violence in his own words, plain and specific rather than literary, and it suits a reader who wants the Jim Crow South described by someone who lived its worst violence directly rather than by a historian working from records. The book and Rembert's leather artwork tell the same story in two different mediums, and reading one makes the other easier to see.