Kelly, Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, he found his scribe. He wanted to write a book for years, but after meeting Erin I. To hear Rembert’s stories, read his memoir Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South. He began making art at age 51, encouraged by his wife Patsy, by translating his experiences into colorful leather canvases filled with characters and scenes of black America that rarely make it into galleries.

But he wants you to know what drove him from picking cotton at age nine to being a local basketball star to surviving a lynching, working chain gangs, and gaining renown as a visual artist. He didn’t remember exactly why he’d been arrested that first time.The artist Winfred Rembert accomplished unbelievable things in his seventy-five years, and he was the first to admit how unbelievable they seemed. Understanding may come faster when the story is told first-person, as it is in “Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South” by Winfred Rembert, as told to Erin I. This trip around the country and through time gives this book a quiet appeal that’s especially relevant for today. He writes about slavery in our cities, our prisons and even in death. Smith writes of the Whitney Plantation, where visitors can today see what slavery was like two centuries ago. There’s irony in the story of slavery at Monticello, where Thomas Jefferson wrote at length about liberty while he kept slaves. That’s just one place that Smith visited, in an effort to offer readers a wide-reaching look at how slavery sits within our collective story, in places that history books don’t always mention. The city of New Orleans had a big hand in slaveowners’ acquisition, and when Smith traveled there, he found that the city is working on a reckoning with its past.

Of course, that never stopped the import of human beings, but it did change the way that slaves were acquired. When the subject of slavery comes up, it’s often rarely mentioned that transatlantic slavery was outlawed nearly six decades before the end of the Civil War. Our House First Time Home Buyer’s Series.BOOK REVIEWS: 'How the Word is Passed' by Clint Smith and 'Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South' by Winfred Rembert - The Washington Informer Close

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