Chasing Me to My Grave, Winfred Rembert
Chasing Me to My Grave, Winfred Rembert
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Chasing Me to My Grave
An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South

Author: Winfred Rembert, Bryan Stevenson

Narrator: Dion Graham, Karen Chilton

Unabridged: 6 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/07/2021


Synopsis

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.

About Winfred Rembert

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.

About Erin I. Kelly

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

About Bryan Stevenson

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.

About Dion Graham

Dion Graham, from HBO’s The Wire, also narrates The First 48 on A&E. A multiple Audie Award–winning narrator and critically acclaimed actor, he has performed on Broadway, off Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series.

About Karen Chilton

Karen Chilton is an actor and author based in New York. A two-time Earphones award winner, she has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including the critically-acclaimed biography she authored, Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist. A SAG/AFTRA member, her voice can also be heard on numerous national network television, radio, and internet advertising campaigns. For more information, visit www.karen-chilton.com.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Alissa on December 24, 2021

This book is a masterpiece. Anyone looking to learn more about the African American experience will be unable to put this book down, but the story juxtaposed with the artwork is what makes this book truly extraordinary. Rembert is a gifted storyteller, and while the story reads like an adventure, he......more

Goodreads review by Susanne on March 03, 2022

This is an astonishing memoir, both for the vivid recollection of what life was like for people of color in Cuthbert, Georgia during the 1940s, 50s and beyond, and for the art that that an extremely talented man managed to create to document that life. The images of his artwork (paintings on carved......more

Goodreads review by Linda on October 14, 2022

Review to follow......more

Goodreads review by Amanda on January 24, 2021

This book reads like sitting at the kitchen table listening to elders tell random stories of days gone by. Like those times, there is an intimacy, but also disconnect between the different vignettes that loses something for the people who are external to the people and events being discussed. A sepa......more

Goodreads review by Alex on May 26, 2022

Amazing audiobook production of a very powerful voice.......more


Quotes

“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)

“Brutally honest storytelling helps us see the sacrifice and grit it took for Black Americans to survive in the Jim Crow South, something he said should make families proud and want to talk about their history.” NPR

“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)

“A gift to history.” Library Journal

“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

“Winfred Rembert paints a world too little depicted and a reality we can’t afford to forget.” Albert Woodfox, author of Solitary

“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 

“A profoundly moving, devastatingly painful, and wonderfully transformative experience.” Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield


Awards

  • Literary Hub Pick
  • Amazon Editor’s Top Pick
  • Barnes & Noble Best Book
  • Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
  • Voice Arts Award
  • Pulitzer Prize
  • Booklist Best Book
  • NPR Best Book of the Year
  • Publishers Weekly Best Book
  • BookPage Best Book
  • African American Literary Book Club Pick
  • Hudson Booksellers Best of the Year
  • New York Times Book Review pick