This magnificent book tells the story of Winfred Rembert's life and art, and is beautifully illustrated with four-color photographs. His work is reminiscent of Jacob Lawrence's and Bill Traylor's and its three-dimensional quality can resemble quilting. Rembert grew up under Jim Crow laws and experienced terrible events and circumstances. He worked in cotton fields as a young child, rarely was able to go to school, and spent years in jail or prison for car theft and other offenses. He experienced terrible violence while in prison and after escaping he was recaptured and hanged upside down by a white mob and nearly castrated. A leader of the mob decided they could "make better use" of him by putting him on a chain gang and to work in cotton fields...again. His various sentences added up to at least a life term but he was miraculously released after ten years: he had been dropping a letter everyday with his story and request for help on the road he worked with the gang. One day he was given a letter by prison authorities telling him he would be released in ten days. He never learned how that came about but believed someone influential must have been given one of his letters.
While in prison Rembert learned to read and write and do leatherwork. After his release he worked various jobs such as driving heavy equipment, he married and had eight children, and in his spare time made various objects by carving leather and coloring it with permanent dye. He began to carve scenes from his life which were so beautifully done and startling in color and subject matter that they began to sell. Rembert exhibited his carvings in prominent galleries and museums and was a guest lecturer at colleges such as Yale, and his carvings sold for as much as $80,000.
A documentary was made about him in 2011: "All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert."

Winfred Rembert is someone with so many experiences that it's hard to understand how he fit them all into one life. He's most known for his stunning art, scenes from his past imprinted and dyed on leather. But he was also a cotton picker in rural Georgia, a civil rights activist, a member of a prison chain gang for seven years, an attempted lynching survivor, and a loving husband and father of eight. This memoir tells his incredible life story, alongside images of his art.

This book truly feels like sitting down and having a conversation with Winfred Rembert. His voice is so clear in the prose, and his art ties in perfectly with his memories. Rembert has had some incredible experiences in his life, but he doesn't shy away from sharing the hardest parts of his life either. This is a thoughtful, earnest memoir that packs in so much history of African American life from the 1940s through today.

Wilfred Rembert is a man who has survived being a field hand in southern Georgia during the Jim Crow era; almost getting lynched; going to prison and working on the chain gang; moving to the northeast and entering the drug trade in order to support his family; then finding redemption, therapy, and solace in his artwork during his later years. Mr. Rembert tells the story of his life through his unique art, dyed and hand-tooled leather, as well as through his words in this engaging and thought-provoking memoir. Recommended for book clubs.

This book reads like sitting at the kitchen table listening to elders tell random stories of days gone by. Like those times, there is an intimacy, but also disconnect between the different vignettes that loses something for the people who are external to the people and events being discussed. A separation remains that I found very frustrating. There are portions of this book that WORK when the stories line up with the art and offer the human experience of social phenomena. A bit more editing and coherence would have this easily being a 5 star, adopt for school, recommend to everyone book. ***This is not in the narrative style or voice of Mr. Rembert, but rather tying the various stories together to better communicate the larger narrative.***

The intro left me thinking I would be reading about the art and the lived experience of Jim Crow that led to that art. Instead, it is a loose biography, with lots unsaid. There are other portions that left me saying What did I just read? Why is there no context to this? Why are they leaving the things that explain these actions out? The legacy of Jim Crow and how it appeared in later parts of Mr. Rembert's life is missing. It's implicit, but really needs to be explicit. The narrative unravels without it, and turns it into a scrapbook rather than an art exhibit, to follow the art world comparison.

That said, it's a great jumping off point. Readers CAN and SHOULD do the work of finding the implicit connections here. If you have a book club that does that work, then this is a perfect read. If you don't do the work, then I would recommend other works that will better do that work for you. Doing it yourself is worth it.

Thank you to Winfred Rembert, Erin I. Kelly, Bloomsbury USA, and Netgalley for an ecopy of the book in exchange for my honest opinion