A review by unladylike
Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert, Erin I. Kelly

5.0

The events in this man's life are absolutely incredible, but I believe him. Fighting a sheriff off while locked in a jail cell and making off with his gun?! Surviving a lynching?! Selling heroine for years to provide for his family and somehow not being seduced into drug addiction?! There are so many times you would expect Winfred Rembert to have been killed in this memoir, and yet he lived just long enough to get his life stories written down for the rest of us - he completed the interviews for this book in March 2020 and then died in March of 2021 at the age of 75. Just 75 years and he experienced this much hate and violence from mobs of white people, prison wardens, judges, and potential employers! This is all so recent! He was about 25 years younger than my own grandparents but born into a culture out to dehumanize and kill him. And then late in life starts churning out incredible works of art on leather canvasses using skills he learned in prison and figured out himself. But it is clear by the end of this memoir that gaining fame, praise, and wealth did not remove the suffering, the physical and emotional scars that would keep him from sleeping well.

Read this phenomenal memoir ASAP! I listened to it read by my favorite audiobook narrator - Dion Graham, who performed several wonderful James Baldwin novels - and then studied a physical copy of the book for all the paintings that you will miss out on otherwise. I definitely recommend that method, and it only took ~7 hours.