Foreword by Bryan Stevenson -- Preface -- Walking to my mother -- From cain't to cain't -- Hamilton Avenue -- The everyday lie -- Doll's head baseball -- In deep -- A man don't know what he can go through -- Reidsville State Prison -- Finding Patsy -- The chain gang -- Out of the ditch -- Becoming a leather man -- Bridgeport docks and projects -- A good, bad man -- Patsy's story -- I had to scuffle -- Life on leather -- A thinking man's thing -- Homecoming -- Searching for the riverbanks

"A self-taught artist's odyssey from Jim Crow era Georgia to the Yale Art Gallery--a stunningly vivid, full-color memoir in prose and painted leather, with a foreword by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson. Winfred Rembert grew up as a field hand on a Georgia plantation. He embraced the Civil Rights Movement, endured political violence, survived a lynching, and spent seven years in prison on a chain gang. Years later, seeking a fresh start at the age of 52, he discovered his gift and vision as an artist, and using leather tooling skills he learned in prison, started etching and painting scenes from his youth. Rembert's work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country, profiled in the New York Times and more, and honored by Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative. In Chasing Me to My Grave, he relates his life in prose and paintings--vivid, confrontational, revelatory, complex scenes from the cotton fields and chain gangs of the segregated south to the churches and night clubs of the urban north. This is also the story of finding epic love, and with it the courage to revisit a past that begs to remain buried, as told to Tufts philosopher Erin I. Kelly"--