Chasing Me to My Grave

An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South

Winfred Rembert, Erin I. Kelly

WINNER OF THE 2022 PULITZER PRIZE

"A compelling and important history that this nation desperately needs to hear." —Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative

Chasing Me to My Grave presents the late artist Winfred Rembert's breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers, joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs. There he learned the leather tooling skills that became the bedrock of his autobiographical paintings. Years later, encouraged by his wife, Patsy, Rembert brought his past to vibrant life in scenes of joy and terror, from the promise of southern Black commerce to the brutality of chain gang labor. Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and painted leather that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American society.

Booklist #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year * African American Literary Book Club (AALBC) #1 Nonfiction Bestseller * Named a Best Book of the Year by: NPR, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, Barnes & Noble, Hudson Booksellers, ARTnews, and more * Amazon Editors' Pick * Carnegie Medal of Excellence Longlist

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Walking to My Mother
• 2 From Cain’t to Cain’t
• 3 Hamilton Avenue
• 4 The Everyday Lie
• 5 Doll’s Head Baseball
• 6 In Deep
• 7 A Man Don’t Know What He Can Go Through
• 8 Reidsville State Prison
• 9 Finding Patsy
• 10 The Chain Gang
• 11 Out of the Ditch
• 12 Becoming a Leather Man
• 13 Bridgeport Docks and Projects
• 14 A Good, Bad Man
• 15 Patsy’s Story
• 16 I Had to Scuffle
• 17 Life on Leather
• 18 A Thinking Man’s Thing
• 19 Homecoming
• 20 Searching for the Riverbanks
• Acknowledgments and Collaborator’s Note
• List of Illustrations
• eCopyright