On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

Winfred Rembert’s memoir, Chasing Me To My Grave, tells a life bursting joy, agitated by trauma, and marked by dramatic changes. Born in Cuthbert, Georgia, just down the road from Jimmy Carter’s peanut farm, his very first memory is of a cotton field. His childhood education was pushed aside.  The boy picked cotton on a plantation with harsh labor conditions that negated the Constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. His great aunt raised him, his mother having abandoned the baby to her. He ran away from home and the fields to live his hometown’s vibrant Black quarter, favoring juke joints and pool halls, honing his skills as a singer and dancer. He attended civil rights demonstrations and was thrown into local lockups. As a 19-year old, he fled a civil rights demonstration in Americus, Georgia in a stolen car and was arrested and beaten. He remained in jail for two years without a trial, protested by flooding his cell toilet, fought and disarmed a guard, and escaped. Apprehended, he was nearly lynched, his would-be executioner poised to slash his genitals with a knife. This led to a seven-year stretch in prison.

Rembert (whose name echoes remember) first told his life story in vivid images carved, tooled, and colored on sheets of leather. The scenes he chose for his artwork are deeply personal and yet many would be familiar, not only to Black people in his hometown, but to anyone living in the rural South in the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s. His story in words, as told to Erin I. Kelly in 2018, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, would not be as familiar to Whites; it’s not what a person could have observed from a truck on a country road or in an art gallery. Chasing Me to My Grave tells the inside story of the experiences his works illustrate. [Left: Picking Cotton, 2009]

Rembert’s dustups with the authorities began in his early youth, with increasingly impulsive acts and tragic results. In Rembert’s hometown, a “bad decision” for a Black person often meant triggering the violence of Whites. This could happen if you didn’t stick your head in the “laughing barrel” in the town center and laugh out loud on demand at a White’s joke. Or if you looked too steadily at a White person. Or if you didn’t say “sir.” Or if you had a problem with being called the usual epithets. In young Rembert’s world, to resist soul-bending humiliation was to invite inevitable harm.

True life, in Rembert’s telling, the kind that nurtures body and soul, was Black communal life: cafes, juke joints and pool halls on Hamilton Avenue, dance troupes, doll’s head baseball, feasts with giant batches of Brunswick stew, and Christian celebrations.

Kelly did a superb job of eliciting and arranging the chronological narrative. She captured Rembert’s dialect and preserved his voice. She also drew out the feelings behind the events, filled in the understory — for example, what the elders wouldn’t tell: why a young Black girl’s mother would not allow her to work in a house with a White man present. The book also conveys, without straying from Rembert’s personal point of view, a Black man’s “New South,” and the impact of the Civil Rights movement as it developed in the early 1960s. Those who have followed Rembert as an artist will be familiar with much of his life from the 2011 film “All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert,” his children’s book Don’t Hold Me Back, and articles written about him over the years.

At times the memoir’s time sequence is jumbled and gaps occur. The first chapter leaps through several locales, such that I had to backtrack a few times to figure out where Rembert was on specific dates. Prior to state prison, Rembert spent two years in lockup, and the only other person who intervened was the jail cook. Rembert’s great-aunt, whom he calls Mama, and  his friends drop out of the story.

[Right: Shovels, 2009] About doing time, Rembert reflects: “I escaped the cotton fields, but I didn’t know nothing about life. I was so far behind. All I knew about was picking cotton. So I did contrary things. Not following rules gives you a way to express your anger. I wasn’t enjoying my twenties like you are supposed to — you know, those years as a young person when the whole world is open to you? The world wasn’t open to me.”

What opened Rembert’s world was, above all, his wife Patsy, a woman fierce, visionary, and unflinchingly devoted to her husband and their children. But what he learned in prison, on his own, also strengthened him: a love of reading and the craft of leather-working.

I learned leather tooling in my high school shop class. Although I didn’t pursue it further, I can still remember wetting the leather — Rembert uses a spray bottle; we used sponges. The cushy feel of the leather under the tools in your hand. The satisfaction of making a texture with metal stamps, of rubbing the dye into the design, so the textured parts and carved lines become darker. Even as a novice, you can produce gratifying designs, practicing and experimenting with more complex notions. Most people, thinking of tooled leather, picture intricate botanical designs on brown leather. Rembert’s work is uniquely his own. In prison he made utilitarian objects with African-American motifs to sell or for his children. After his release, encouraged by a friend and Patsy, he began to use leather as bas-relief “canvas.”

Once leather became his image-field, his interest in it became painterly. The work of Miguel Covarrubias especially inspired him; his first painting on leather was a copy of Covarrubias’s “On a Spree” (1927). Covarrubias’s art resonated with Rembert’s own aspirations: “He drew Black folks with big lips and big noses. His pictures had a lot of movement and they seemed to get something right about the way Black people are …” Patsy encouraged him to illustrate his own life, and those works led to his renown.

Movement permeates Rembert’s visual art and, in a more literal sense, his story. The book starts with him as teenager walking on railway tracks. The story is threaded with chase scenes, Rembert chasing this or that and being chased — usually by the police. The title, Chasing Me to My Grave, declares desperate motion.

Rembert is chased to his grave by traumatic memories. The horror of his near-lynching recurs in nightmares; he can never gain enough distance from it. One could also surmise that even into old age he chased after a mother’s love — perfect, unconditional, all-healing. His painting Looking For My Mother depicts him fleeing the police at age 16, walking along the railroad tracks. He did, in fact, once trek 40 miles to find her — and was greeted by her saying, “What are you doing here?”

After the long prison sentence and marrying Patsy, they went north to Connecticut where he became a deacon, dealt heroin, went back to prison, and resumed his leather work. In the catalog of his 2012 show at the Hudson River Museum, Rembert is quoted as saying, “Curved cotton rows make a beautiful pattern. But as soon as you start picking, you forget how good it looks and think how hard it is.” Rembert’s memoir doesn’t make you forget how good his art looks, but it brings you under the skin of his work, and it makes you think hard about a place and time, an American milieu, that still stands at the edge of living memory. More exactly, the memoir brings you to a man in his places and his times.

Rembert died at age 75 in New Haven on March 31, 2021, just months before publication of Chasing Me to My Grave. Of his self-illustrated memoir, Walt Whitman’s words are entirely apt: “Who touches this touches a man.”