Several white persons were injured but so far as known none seriously. The tornado also tore off the corners and made fantastic mutilations on many of the buildings. Half a dozen negroes were killed here by a tornado last night and a dozen business buildings were almost totally destroyed. Rembert was born in the late 1940s, but it’s worth setting the scene of his hometown with a 1909 AP piece on a tornado that devastated Cuthbert, especially “the negro quarters.”Ĭuthbert, Ga., March 10. But the co-deity, in Rembert’s telling, was Black life: cafes, juke joints and pool halls on Hamilton Avenue, dance troupes, doll’s head baseball, feasts including giant batches of homemade Brunswick stew, and Christian celebrations. The scenes he chose for his artwork are deeply personal and yet many would be familiar, not only to Black people in his hometown, but to White people as well, and to others who lived in the rural South in the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s.” Rembert’s story tells of the extreme, often sadistic and deadly, racism that pressed on the Black community like a toxic, malicious god.

My review of Winfred Rembert’s memoir, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, is posted at At the Seawall here.įrom the review: “Rembert (whose name oddly echoes the word, remember) first told his life story not in words, but in vivid images carved, tooled, and colored on sheets of leather.

Chasing me to my grave