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Chasing Me to My Grave
- Author
- Winfred Rembert
- Narrator
- Dion Graham, Karen Chilton
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 6 November 2021
- Run Time
- 6 hours 47 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager.
He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of fifty-one and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather-tooling skills he learned in prison.
Chasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert’s breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert calls forth vibrant scenes of Black life on Cuthbert, Georgia’s Hamilton Avenue, where he first glimpsed the possibility of a life outside the cotton field. As he pays tribute, exuberant and heartfelt, to Cuthbert’s Black community and the people, including Patsy, who helped him to find the courage to revisit a traumatic past, Rembert brings to life the promise and the danger of Civil Rights protest, the brutalities of incarceration, his search for his mother’s love, and the epic bond he found with Patsy.
Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and paintings that celebrates Black life and summons listeners to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society.
Includes a bonus PDF of artwork.
Critics Review
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“A love story…[that] documents racial and economic violence under white supremacy as a living history. It also gives us an example of how to live without bitterness or seeking revenge.”
Chicago Review of Books
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“A stunning portrait of hope in the face of evil, barbarity, and racism.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“Brutally honest storytelling helps us see the sacrifice and grit it took for Black Americans to survive in the Jim Crow South, something he said should make families proud and want to talk about their history.”
NPR
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“Rembert’s self-portrait in word and image belongs in every library.”
Booklist (starred review)
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“An ultimately uplifting journey from the ugliness of virulent racism to the beauty of art.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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“A gift to history.”
Library Journal
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“Narrator Dion Graham…has an aged, comfortable tone, as if Winfred is sitting around the table telling the whole family his life story. Though Karen Chilton, who portrays Patsy, the love of Winfred's life, delivers fewer passages, both voices—heartfelt and down-home—complement each other.”
AudioFile
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“Winfred Rembert paints a world too little depicted and a reality we can’t afford to forget.”
Albert Woodfox, author of Solitary
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“Rembert…reveal[s] truths about the human struggle that are transcendent, to evoke an understanding of human dignity that is broad and universal.”
Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author
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“A profoundly moving, devastatingly painful, and wonderfully transformative experience.”
Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield
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“At turns harrowing and haunting…And through it all, joy, no matter how elusive, never disappears.”
Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine
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“Rembert’s account reminds us that it is in the remembering of the past that we keep it from becoming prologue.”
Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Winfred Rembert
- Narrator
- Dion Graham, Karen Chilton
- Duration
- 6 hours 47 minutes
- Release Date
- 6 November 2021
- ISBN
- 9798200682959
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Biography: general, Ethnic studies, Biography: general
Synopsis
Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager.He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of fifty-one and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather-tooling skills he learned in prison.Chasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert’s breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert calls forth vibrant scenes of Black life on Cuthbert, Georgia’s Hamilton Avenue, where he first glimpsed the possibility of a life outside the cotton field. As he pays tribute, exuberant and heartfelt, to Cuthbert’s Black community and the people, including Patsy, who helped him to find the courage to revisit a traumatic past, Rembert brings to life the promise and the danger of Civil Rights protest, the brutalities of incarceration, his search for his mother’s love, and the epic bond he found with Patsy.Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and paintings that celebrates Black life and summons listeners to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society.Includes a bonus PDF of artwork.
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