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

In this captivating posthumous memoir coauthored by Kelly (The Limit of Blame), the well-known American painter Rembert (1945–2021) describes growing up as a Black man in the segregated South, elaborates on the experiences that informed his paintings, and recounts his journey to becoming an artist. He was born in Cuthbert, GA, to a young single mother and raised by his aunt, a kind woman he called “Mama.” She carried him in a sack on her back as she worked the cotton fields when he was a baby, and he began working in the fields as soon as he was able. Images of Rembert’s Georgia experiences—including lynchings (both seen and experienced), baptism, town life, home life, civil rights protests, and incarceration—populate his dynamic paintings on leather. Creating art meant revisiting haunting and traumatic events, which took an emotional toll that Rembert bravely describes. This volume makes the case that Rembert’s artistic talent was a gift; his use of that talent to create memorable images—of an era before modern cameras were ubiquitous—is a gift to history.