Melissa Bailey Photo
"The guy keeps winning": The late Winfred Rembert in the Newhall Street apartment where he made the magic happen.
Estate of Winfred Rembert / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Looking for My Mother, 2019; reprinted in Chasing Me To My Grave.
Lillian Rembert dropped her mail sack on Shelton Avenue to see why her phone was blowing up with alerts — to discover that her late father won a Pulitzer Prize.
Her father was the late Winfred Rembert, whose powerful leather-carved portraits of Southern cotton fields and chain gangs and juke joints and personal survival have continued to inspire the world well beyond his Newhallville home.
Co-author Erin Kelly discusses the book on WNHH's "Dateline New Haven."
The latest recognition came in the form of the announcement this week that the Pulitzer board gave this year’s award for biography to Rembert’s book, Chasing Me To My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of The Jim Crow South. Rembert collaborated with a Tufts University philosophy professor named Erin Kelly to produce the book, telling his story of triumphing over poverty, a near-lynching, discrimination, and the drug war by producing stunning original artwork.
“Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and painted leather that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society,” the Pulitzer panel wrote.
The book was published last fall (read about that here), six months after Rembert died at the age of 75. (Read about his life here.) Before his passing, Rembert was still living in the Newhall Street home where he had meticulously carved his dyed leather masterpieces, drawing from 100 hand tools to produce bright, vivid, colorful scenes. The world was beginning to catch up with him, as galleries from Harlem to L.A. to the Library of Congress featured his work and writers and documentarians sought to share his story. He teamed up with Kelly so he could tell the story himself, with all its brutality, beauty, disappointment, joy, and love for life.
“This award is a beautiful recognition of the importance of Winfred’s art and life,” co-author Kelly told the Independent Wednesday.
“It was a great privilege to know Winfred and to create this book together. I wish we could celebrate this wonderful recognition with him, but I am moved and deeply appreciative that he will be long remembered and appreciated for his remarkable accomplishments. Winfred was very proud of what Black Americans sacrificed and how they survived. I believe this award commemorates the courage of many ordinary people who have struggled and are still fighting for justice in this country.”
Rembert’s daughter Lillian delivers the mail in Newhallville for the U.S. Postal Service. She didn’t stop when the first buzzes of text messages started popping from her phone while she was on her route Monday. “These people know I’m at work,” she told herself.
Finally she paused to see what the fuss was.
“I looked at it. It said we won the Pulitzer. I stopped and put the mail down and just started reading.”
Then she started crying.
It was the latest occasion — like the fancy gallery openings, the official ceremony back home at Cuthbert, Georgia, the burial in New Haven’s storied Grove Street Cemetery — for Lillian, her mom Patsy, and other family members to marvel at what proved possible in Rembert’s life.
Lillian said each occasion presents a new “shock.”
“He never graduated high school. He never went to school. To us, [the Pulitzer] seems like something far-reaching, more a white America thing that Black people rarely get to be a part of. You don’t think in those contexts.
“Every time they went to an art show — it was all new,” she said. When he was buried on Grove Street, “we couldn’t figure out how he did that. All these white people … he was America too. I said, ‘Dad, you’re like Langston Hughes. You’re your own Harlem Renaissance!’ It’s a beautiful thing.”
Lillian Rembert said the Pulitzer prize is the latest reminder from her dad’s life “we can always accomplish” dreams despite adversity.
“The guy keeps winning no matter what,” even after his death, Lillian reflected. “That is the lasting legacy Winfred Rembert has left for his children and grandchildren. Even in the darkness, we will find light and make it brighter and brighter.”
Rembert's depiction of a lynching scene.