Excerpt from Chasing Me to My Grave by Winfred Rembert, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Jimmy got out, and I gave the police a chase until I ran the car in a ditch. Then I ran like hell. I was running and running and running until I got tired and climbed up a tree. A little while later, here they come with the most sorry-ass country hound I'd ever seen. I was up the tree and the dog was sniffing around underneath it. Nobody saw me and they left.

They probably went back there and talked to Jimmy. He might have told them it was me driving the car. People will talk when they think they're going to get in trouble. Some time after that, I was sleeping in an old raggedy car in Cuthbert. The police came and shined a flashlight through the window. They said, "Oooooh Shiiiiit. Look what we got! We got Winfred." They were really happy to get me.

The police roughed me up and locked me in the calaboose. A couple days later, the sheriff showed up and took me to the county jail. The cook in the jail, Minnie Cooper, told me that Buddy Perkins had been up there looking for me, like he had done before. But they wouldn't let me out. I never saw Perkins's face that day. I was in too deep. I don't know whether they told Perkins I was there or not. But there was nothing he could do; they weren't going to let him have me.

Weeks went by and I sat in jail. Poonk's sister, Yolanda Carter, yelled up to the window of my cell from the street. She wanted to know whether I was going to get out. She had to scream to talk to me. That girl got a lot of nerve. The police tried to run her away and she come right back.

I thought about my family, about Mama and all the things she tried to teach me about surviving in a White world, and I knew that old lady was worried about me. I was a young Black man with no structure in his life headed down a path with no good end. I could see that. I remembered men in prison stripes working by the side of the road in Cuthbert. I expected to end up there too, I just didn't know how long it would be before they sent me to prison.

Excerpted from Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing. Text copyright © 2021 by Winfred Rembert and Erin I. Kelly. Artwork copyright © 2021 by Winfred Rembert/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.