Artist shares tale of lynching in posthumous memoir
NEW HAVEN ARTIST AND LYNCHING SURVIVOR SHARES LIFE STORY IN POSTHUMOUS MEMOIR
Artist Winfred Rembert was remembered as a New Haven “treasure” with an irrepressible spirit when he died last March at age 75. He was very open about the story of his youth in Jim Crow Georgia.
He told it in dozens of interviews since his discovery by the art world 20 years ago. He told it in an awardwinning 2011 documentary, “All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert.” But mainly he told it in the paintings he taught himself to make on leather.
In them he laid down his memories of sun-scorched cotton fields, jumping juke joints, brutal chain gangs and horrific lynchings — one of them his own. His depictions of town life are alive with human activity, marking him as a folk artist. But his paintings of cotton fields can be highly patterned, almost quilt-like. And his chain gang paintings border on the abstract. One of the most prized, “All Me,” bunches dozens of convicts into a single organism.
Now Rembert is about to tell his story once again — this time at length in a book, “Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South,” publishing Sept. 7. The chain gang chapter has already been excerpted in the The New Yorker and it could be Rembert’s final masterpiece, introducing him to his biggest audience yet.
It also will introduce a lesser known Rembert. Gone is the public raconteur who seemed to relish sharing his story. Replacing him is a more introspective Rembert, still struggling to explain to himself, as well as the world, the injuries inflicted on him in his youth, mainly by racism, but also by his own abandonment.
The book opens with teenage Rembert fleeing police for a crime he does not remember committing to seek sanctuary with a mother he hardly knew. She had given him away when he was three months old to be raised by a great aunt in rural Cuthbert, Ga. He follows railroad tracks to reach her and when he does, she challenges him: “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to turn and walk away to somewhere in the world where no one knew who I was. I felt like a nobody. I felt like nothing,” Rembert wrote in the book. “She spoke to me grossly, like she didn’t want to see me.”
The voice is Rembert’s own, but it is one he himself amended working with an unlikely collaborator: Erin I. Kelly, a Tufts University philosophy professor whose focus is on ethics and criminal justice. In an interview, Kelly said she first encountered Rembert’s art in 2015 when she was looking for cover images for an academic book of hers to be titled “The Limits of Blame.”
“I was googling Lawrence (the painter Jacob Lawrence) and I thought, ‘Hah! I haven’t seen those Lawrence paintings before.’ And then when I looked more closely, I saw it was Rembert,” Kelly said.
Kelly was not alone in seeing the similarity. Rembert, who learned to use leather when he was working in prison, has been compared to both Lawrence — best known for his depiction of the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the North — and to Romare Bearden.
She soon met Rembert at McBlain Books, the antiquarian book store in Hamden that first exhibited his work. Nudged by proprietor Phil McBlain, she and Rembert began working together on the memoir in March 2018. By then, Rembert felt a sense of urgency. In poor health, he feared he would die before finishing it.
Over the next two years, Kelly and Rembert met a couple of times a month at his home in the Newhallville section of New Haven, often with his wife Patsy present. His new voice emerged from the back and forth method they settled into.
“We’d talk and I’d write up pieces of the interview I thought would work in the book and I would read it back to him as a chapter and ask if that was what he wanted,” Kelly said. “And he’d come up with more thoughts, or make corrections, or add something here or there.”
The process opened Kelly’s eyes. “One thing I learned that I didn’t know from viewing the paintings and watching the documentary was the sense of fear and terror that people were living with in Cuthbert and I presume other areas of the South as well,” she said.
In the book, Rembert says, “With my paintings, I tried to make a bad situation look good. You can’t make a chain gang look good in any way besides putting it in art.”
Part of the book’s power derives from the contrast between his colorful, orderly paintings (often reproduced on full pages) and the text, where the casual cruelty of Jim Crow racism becomes vivid.
On the chain gang, prisoners could be confined for days in a cramped “sweat box” for punishment. Meanwhile in Cuthbert center, there was a “laughing barrel,” where any Black person could be stopped and ordered to laugh at any White person’s joke, the book details.
When Rembert, who had escaped from jail, was strung up by his heels by a lynch mob, he recalled in the book what was going through his mind as a deputy approached him with a hooked knife.
“That kind of thing was designed to keep you humble,” Rembert comes to realize. As an artist, the act of recollection and creation sometimes made him physically ill. Eventually he was diagnosed with PTSD.
Altogether Rembert spent nine years in jail, prison or on chain gangs. After his release in 1974, he married Patsy and moved north. Their first stop in Connecticut was in Bridgeport, where the son and grandson of the great aunt he called “Mama” lived. He worked as a longshoreman, got injured on the job and, desperate, discovered there was money to be made in the drug trade.
Kelly said she cannot know how Rembert’s family (he and Patsy eventually had eight children of their own and sheltered many more) will react to his book. But she guarantees he approved every word himself. He saw the final proof just before he died.
The opening chapter about following railroad tracks to find his mother corresponds with their very first interview, Kelly said. In it, Rembert says he always wanted to paint himself walking on those railroad tracks, but couldn’t.
Over the course of their interviews, he did manage to make the painting though. Titled “Looking for My Mother,” it shows a boy climbing the tracks as if it were a ladder and is the image that closes the book. “It was a very joyful thing that he was able to do it,” Kelly said.
In the text, Rembert explained that he painted the picture so viewers would see him moving forward. “It’s just a long, lonesome railroad just as far as I can see, but I’m not going to let that stop me,” he says. “I’m going to see my mother and if I can make it to her, I think I’ll be alright.”