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

Winfred Rambert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and was arrested as a teenager after fleeing a Civil Rights demonstration. He survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement and spent seven years on chain gangs. Years later, at the age of fifty-one and with his wife Patsy's encouragement, he unearthed scenes from his youth by carving and painting on leather, using tooling skills he had learned in prison. Rembert's paintings, lavishly reproduced here, attest to his standing alongside Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden as one of the great artist-chroniclers of Black American life.

This Pulitzer Price-wining memoir, told in Rembert's captivating voice alongside his stunning artwork, 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 bound he found with Patsy. With exuberance and tenderness, Rembert pays tribute to the Black community of his hometown of Cuthbert, Georgia, and the people who helped him find the courage to revisit a traumatic past. Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing testimony in prose and painted leather that celebrates Black freedom struggles and summons readers to confront painful and urgent truths at the heart of American history and society.