Rembert’s Rep Rises At NXTHVN Celebration

His tale of triumph through art, grit, and love in Georgia’s 1960s cotton fields, including seven years on a chain gang and a near lynching, is already taught at Yale — and well might become required reading in high schools and colleges throughout the country. 

And a major motion picture should also be a consideration to get the story out far and wide.

Those were some of the ideas percolating Thursday night in a loving celebration of the life and art of Winfred Rembert, the increasingly celebrated Newhallville artist and chronicler of Black life in the American South.

More than 200 admirers from the art and social and reparative justice worlds, friends, family, and general admirers gathered at the NXTHVN art gallery at 169 Henry St. to celebrate Rembert’s Chasing Me To My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, which received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

Rembert died last spring, at age 75, before publication of the book, illustrated with images of his unique leather-tooled compositions. However, he had been able to read it all with his collaborator, Tufts University Philosophy Professor Erin Kelly, and was content, she said, that his story was now out in the world.

Thursday’s gathering was organized by the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School with a panel featuring, in addition to Rembert’s widow Patsy and Kelly, Yale Professor of American History and African American Studies Elizabeth Hinton, Kymberly Pinder, Dean of the Yale School of Art, and prize-winning poet and essayist Reginald Dwayne Betts.

“People need to be heard,” said Patsy Rembert, who was very much the center of Thursday evening’s panel discussion about her late husband. 

“We can’t undo what was done but we can correct ourselves from this point on. He wanted (through his art and the book) to make a dent in how young Black men thought and a lasting effect on their consciousness,” she said before assuming her seat in the center of the dais in NXTHVN’s spacious assembly room. 

“The only way change can come is if we talk. He was hopeful things will change down the line, hopeful his book would shed light on the treatment of Blacks and help bring about a sense of self for young Black men. We’ve been punished so much, he said, why punish ourselves? Those are things he talked about to me, with the children, as a family.” 

And that was very much the feeling of the evening, a kind of large extended, warm yet frank family discussion on race and society centered on what has been so arduously achieved and how much yet remains to be done; about the degradations of Jim Crow history and how they linger; about the role art and familial love play in the reparation of the individual soul as well as of society; and, at the heart of it all, the inspiring mystery of the resilience of the human spirit as personified by Winred Rembert. Thursday’s talk took place on the same week that a local arts nonprofit brought to Newhallville’s community management team its tentative plans to put up a new Winfred Rembert mural on the side of a publicly owned Bassett Street building.

Here are some highlights from Thursday’s panel:

Betts: ​“The most astonishing writer is one who finds commonality (universality) no matter the writer’s color or gender.” In addition to the book’s historical and story-telling virtues, Betts cited ​“the great depiction of the beauty of cotton,” in both the book’s narrative and visual theme of cotton recurring in so many of Rembert’s images; and then Rembert’s experiences in the cotton fields, from which he fled as a young man. ​“The necessity to show the horror with the light.”

Pinder: ​“It’s about generosity and love,” she said by way of a general response, the sustained habit of people who had so little continuing to give to others, ​“reparative gestures” that are the heart of healing. Then Pinder said Rembert’s story put her in mind of her own family’s: ​“When a white boy spat at him (Pinder’s father) and he punched him, that was his ticket out (of the South). He left for Baltimore,” where Pinder was born.

Hinton: ​“What is necessary for restoration is to know the true depth of our history. Winfred’s book captures things that are not in the archives. It is one of the best social histories of Jim Crow. It should be required reading. The conditions very much resembled slavery … people giving birth (right in the cotton fields), but there was joy there too … the book (also) illuminates how conditions (in the Jim Crow South) left people with few options other than to engage in unconventional, trangressive economic paths.”

Yale Professor Timothy Snyder, who was not on the panel, said he has already taught the book in his course on mass incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States. The book, he said, ​“connects very vividly the lived experience of Black people with how Blacks get incarcerated. And it’s a beautifully told story.”

Before the evening was out, he approached Patsy Rembert and asked to meet with her. ​“We have a lot to talk about.”

“I’d love that,” she said.

Rembert’s collaborator Professor Kelly said her hope for next steps and for the book is that more museums and collections would acquire Rembert’s work. ​“I think his art was under-appreciated in his lifetime and I hope it (appreciation and sales) will increase. I (also) think there should be a motion picture about his life.”

The book’s agent Stephanie Steiker said the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, already has plans to bring out the paperback in the spring.