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

 

Book Discussion of Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).

                       Chasing Me to My Grave won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

 

Winfred Rembert was an artist who painted scenes from his life in Cuthbert Georgia onto leather. His story details the hardship of his life in Cuthbert, his being abandoned by his mother, his being sentenced to a chain gang, and his near lynching. The shining light in his life was his marriage to Patsy, who he proposed to while still a prisoner. Winfred and Patsy moved to New Haven, CT, where encouraged by Patsy, Winfred began to seriously work on his art. Winfred Rembert passed away in 2021.

 

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued Saturday Dec. 3^rd at the Wilson Library. Twelve of us met in person and one member, Marilyn, even joined us over the phone.  This was Janice’s first time attending the book discussion although she had kept up with the reading list over the last couple of years. She started us off by sharing how much she really appreciated the book and that she’s lived here in New Haven most of her adult life yet was unfamiliar with Winfred Rembert.

 

Maria said she loved the book. She had listened to the story on Hoopla and said the actor who read it was just wonderful. (The actor was Dion Graham; Patsy’s part of the story was read by Karen Chilton. Of course, Bryan Stevenson read his own foreword and William Rembert himself read the preface.)

 

Barb added that the art depicted in the book by itself was just amazing, that the memoir, with no art depicted would have been amazing.

Laura shared with the group how she actually saw men working on a chain gang when she was a child in North Carolina. Having said this, she stressed that Mr. Rembert's story was one in a million. What's amazing is that he was able to tell his story. He had to see a therapist later in life because of PTSD. Laura continued, "One of the things that struck me was that how many people had this experience. His wife Patsy encouraged him to do his art and she encouraged him to seek therapy."

 

Meghan pointed out that he choked while doing the flour painting. The woman who raised him was allergic to flour, yet she would suffer through near choking while baking cakes for Winfred and her daughter throughout their childhoods. He had also witnessed a lynching and suffered physically when he tried to paint the lynching.

 

Bonnie recalled how when she read the biography of Frederick Douglas, she was struck that someone intervened in his life and taught him how to read and write. The same thing happened here with Winfred Rembert. The biography she read was Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by Historian David W. Blight. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History. Bonnie agreed with Laura that yes, countless people have these stories, but most never received the intervention of someone teaching them to read and write. 

Sun shared with us that this was such a tough piece to read and then have conversation about. She reminded us that the Great Migration didn't just happen because Black people were interested in going North or out West. They were being terrorized by Jim Crow, lynching, and the sharecropping system that basically tied them to plantations. Newspapers enthusiastically announced that there was going to be a lynching. People were sending Black people's body parts to their friends and relatives as souvenirs. When I hear people say, "I didn't know this was happening during my lifetime," I say, "What world are you guys living in? Children were there. Rembert himself didn't know how to respond to a lynching he had witnessed (not his near lynching, another one, an actual one) This is trauma that never stops."

 

Kay said that when she was reading the book “it was like sitting across the table from the person talking to me.”  She had taken meticulous notes and mentioned the Black man being attacked by a white man in the shoeshine parlor, the chain gang, people in the cotton field receiving their pay from the owner’s cigar box, and the home remedies, especially a spider web for healing cuts. Kay brought an old cigar box to the meeting so we could see one. She said she knew it was old because the cigars were fifteen cents. 

 

Marilyn made a point (over speakerphone) to validate Robin’s earlier statement that she didn’t know about all that went on in the south. Marilyn said, “You didn’t know because you were probably sheltered. Just like now they're trying to keep so called Critical Race Theory (CRT) away from school children. It's not your fault that you didn't know but I do appreciate that now, through these book discussions, you're trying to learn. 

 

Connie called our attention to p. 125 at the bottom:

“Reidsville was a miserable place and I was mad with the world. I was mad because I was locked up. I was mad because I had to pick cotton and mad because I couldn’t read and write. It’s hard when you can’t read and write. 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 the 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.”

After Reidsville, Winfred was transferred to Lee State Prison, where he me a couple of teachers who were locked up for demonstrating for civil rights. They taught Winfred how to read and write.

Robin: Once he learned to read and write, he wrote these amazing letters to Patsy. This was a man who hadn't learned to write as a child, yet he was able to produce these wonderful letters.

 

a portion of one of Rembert's letters to Patsy from 1974

Patricia said she was so taken by this book. She said if forced to use one word, it would be “extraordinary.” “For me, it was like humanity in a nutshell. I did appreciate it on a completely different track than a book about an artist and his work. I Looked at him like someone who was a great problem-solver.”

Marian: This book won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His lifelong confusion and sense of rejection stemming from his birth mother giving him up was the reason for a lot of his troubles. I think that at the very end, he was able to if not forgive her, release his feelings about her. 

Meghan: He seemed willing to place the blame on other people in her life, she was such a young person. I have a hard time forgiving her for the cold way she treated him when he ended up on her doorstep. Her husband seemed willing to embrace him and even forgive him when Rembert stole his money. 

Robin: All of his mother's other children went to college. He shared half their genetics but he had such a different experience in what opportunities he might have had if he had been brought up in her house. 

Sun pointed out that the mother treated him cold, but she had heard about all the trouble he had gotten into. He could have been a serious threat to the rest of the family. Remember the incident when he went to someone else's house and the wife turned him in? The wife didn't want to jeopardize her husband's safety. Remember, now the law is involved. Everyone's going to be harmed now. 

 

Janice: I tend to read multiple books at the same time. I was reading about Emmitt Till and Randall Horton’s book (Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays,) in which Horton said that upon your eighth federal conviction you automatically get life. Horton never had a visitor throughout his entire incarceration.  Horton’s book also described the largest mass lynching in American History: Over twenty Asians were lynched in Los Angeles Oct. 24, 1871.

Patricia: He had PTSD. Some people would have said, “I can’t make this art anymore.”

 

Sun: When I think of the artistic side. Leather can endure. I do love the beauty.

 

Laura: The other thing about leather is that it was skin. Look at page 266 in the painting called Winfred’s Marbles, you can see the ripples depicted in the skin.

 

Kay pointed us to the painting called Chain Gang (All Me) on pages 232-233.  

 

Laura also noted the last painting in the book, the one of Winfred on the railroad tracks trying to get to his mother. The title is “Looking for My Mother.” Laura thought this was so epic. He was finally able to draw himself as a child on the railroad tracks, noting the craving for his mom his whole life.