How Winfred Rembert Made It Home

The railroad tracks stretched ahead for miles and miles. Winfred Rembert walked them all day and half the night, searching.

It would take a full 60 years for him to reach his destination, to find what he was truly looking for. He found it right before he died. And laid it out for the rest of us to see.

Rembert was ​“16 or 17” years old when he set off on those tracks. The police were after him in rural Cuthbert, Georgia. He hoped the tracks would lead him to the town of Leslie, to the house where the mother who had abandoned him now lived.

He hoped they would lead him home. He hoped they would lead him to peace and security.

It didn’t work out that way. Rembert would spend years more on the run. After countless more adventures — with racist, murderous Southern police, on a chain gang, in juke joints — Rembert settled in New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood. In his later years he mastered a skill of creating evocative scenes by carving and painting pieces of leather. The pictures told the story of his life, as well as the story of a grueling chapter in American history.

His artwork eventually found a national audience. They made a documentary about him. They exhibited his work in galleries across the country. They wrote a book about him. The New Yorker aired a video about his life. Collectors bought his piece for as much as $35,000. In the end, even New Haven’s public schools invited him into the classroom to meet the kids. He was New Haven’s artistic genius of this century.

Before he died, Rembert wanted to tell his story — about survival in the Jim Crow South and then amid demons in the north — not just in art hanging on walls or in public performances. He wanted the story preserved alongside the art in between hard covers. He connected with a Tufts University philosophy professor named Erin Kelly. She spent years recording his words, then crafted them into a seamless, riveting narrative. The words were placed alongside dozens of his memorable pieces. They have now been published in a new book called Chasing Me To My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of The Jim Crow South.

Rembert died this March at the age of 75. So he didn’t get to see the book published. But he got to tell the whole story.

The book does the story justice.

“I felt a responsibility to get it right” when presented with the opportunity to capture Rembert’s amazing story, Erin Kelly said Thursday in an interview about the book on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. (Watch the interview above.)

Independent readers are probably familiar with the numerous accounts we have published about his emerging fame, the facts of his near-death in a lynching, his escape from mobs, his beautiful singing voice and stunning artistic skill.

The new book takes his story to a new level. The book is packaged as an instructional tale for people seeking to understand our nation’s current debate over the criminal justice system. Rembert’s story certainly provides that. But the book, and Rembert’s story, are much more than that. Without sugarcoating the brutality of his experience, of racism and mob injustice, it tells the story about art and beauty, about how a person can overcome adversity and process it through making painful, honest pictures. And die not fully at peace, but at least with understanding and acceptance.

Co-author Kelly said she sees the book as ​“two love stories” — the sustaining love between Rembert and his wife Patsy; and the ​“disappointed love story” of Rembert and the mother who abandoned him early in life for her aunt to raise.

Kelly had that arc in mind when she made a crucial decision: starting and ending the book with the story about Rembert walking the railroad tracks.

At the time, back in the 1950s, Rembert was disappointed. He indeed found his mother’s house. He was able to stay there for a while. But she didn’t embrace him. She didn’t show him love, support. She didn’t welcome him into her life. He was still on his own to face a cruel world.

He carried that disappointment with him throughout his epic life adventures. Later, settled at home in Newhallville, his wife Patsy suggested he take up the leather-art technique he had once learned in prison to process the demons keeping him awake at night about his Southern youth, and now recreate those scenes. It worked: He produced rich images of cotton fields, lynch mobs, pool halls and juke joints, church sanctuaries.

In the end, he returned to the railroad tracks. And to mom. He recreated that ​“forty-something”-mile walk in a piece that appears last in the book, Looking for My Mother.

As the book, and Rembert’s life, neared its end, the artist reflected on the mechanics of carving the image of the boy on those railroad tracks — and, a lifetime later, what he finally saw in that picture.

Spoiler alert: The following excerpt is the climax of the book. It moved me deeply, in part because it came at the end of hundreds of pages of reading about Rembert’s life journey. Reading it now won’t spoil the many surprises in the book, but you may wish to hold off until you buy your own copy:

When I do a picture, I always think about the angle you are looking from— nine o’clock, ten o’clock, twelve o’clock. Imagine you’re the sun and you’re looking down. Twelve o’clock high is straight down over the railroad tracks. One o’clock tilts the perspective a little bit. A six‑o’clock angle is low. You could only see a little bit of the track because you’d be looking straight down it, like you’re standing on it. In my mind I see the picture from all those angles.

For the railroad tracks, I chose three o’clock because I wanted to show the whole track and how far it goes. It’s just me on those railroad tracks. No other people and no animals. No buildings. Just those railroad tracks in front of me. If you look at the person — me —in the picture, you can tell how you’re looking at him. You’re behind me from a three o’clock angle and I’m moving forward. I’m going to see my mother. If I can make it to her, I think I’ll be all right. So I jump on that railroad and I look down and I don’t see nothing. It’s just a long, lonesome railroad just as far as I can see, but I’m not going to let that stop me.

Here we go. Me and her. I’m walking down the railroad tracks and I’m getting closer and closer. You know, when railroad tracks come to a crossing, they go every which way. When those railroad tracks started parting — one, two, three — I got to make up my mind which one of them is leading to Leslie, Georgia. Me and directions got a good relationship. My directions have always been good. I kept going east, the way the morning sun is shining. So I’m painting those railroad tracks and all kinds of possibilities are going through my mind — the way things could have been, or the way my mother could have been thinking at the time she gave birth to me — and it changed my perspective about her. I had mercy on her a little bit. Mercy is when you forgive people for what they’ve done, or for what you feel they’ve done. You say, well, I’m not going to hold that against them anymore. I’m just going to be lenient, and just go with it, like, from the good side.

Now that I’ve done the picture, I look at it and I think about stories. Me and Patsy sit down and talk about my mother. I think my mother had a way of showing her love. For a long time I didn’t understand it, but now I think she showed love the best way she could. By opening the door and letting me in.

It means something when you’re in trouble and you open up the door and your mother is standing there. That means something. It was important to me to look for her. I am looking for her. I never thought about my mother so much as now, after I did this picture. And that’s a good thing for me. I like to think about her. I like to think that when I’m gone from this world, my mother will live. When people look at the picture and read what I’ve said about it, my mother will be remembered. She don’t know it. She’s gone, but she’s remembered.

As is, needless to say, the great Winfred Rembert.