The first time I knock on Winfred Rembert’s front door, his son answers. “I think Dad’s asleep,” he says, but lets me inside while he checks. I wait in the hallway and peer into the room to my left.
Stacks of paper, leather strips, paint cans and books cover a desk in the center of the space, and two chairs face each other, their seats heaped with tools and brushes and newspapers. The shelves are lined with old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys; train sets; action figures. A toy sailboat dangles by a string from the ceiling, hovering above a carton of fireworks, stacked atop the box set of Harry Potter books one through four. A small canvas leans against the wall, covered in thick streaks of red and blue and green paint, punctuated with small dollops of white.
“That’s his office,” his son says, returning to find me staring at the clutter. He confirms that Winfred’s still sleeping—it’s only 9 a.m., so I can empathize. “Come back tomorrow,” he suggests.
When I come back the next day (at 10:45 a.m., this time), Winfred comes to the door right away, and leads me into the room. It’s transformed—the chairs are clear and ready for sitting; the collectibles are confined to the shelves; the papers have been cleared from the table. The only things covering the surface now are dried flecks of paint, and a wooden box filled with neat rows of metal tools.
Winfred’s daughter, Lillian, ducks underfoot, straightening one of the newly stacked towers. She gestures at a chair. “Sit down and you guys can talk.” I realize I’d caught the family off guard yesterday—today, they’re ready for me.
Winfred tells me he’s usually up and working by now every day, but it’s been an exhausting few months. One of his seven children had recently passed away, turning most of the fall into an extended mourning period. Then came Winfred’s birthday—he turned 70 this November. Aging has brought a worsening eye condition makes things that used to be easy, hard.
By December, Winfred has been slowly getting back to his normal routine: working on projects most hours of most days, and touring the country the rest. In the past fifteen years, he’s become nationally renowned for his art, which ranges from intricately etched leather tableaus, to painted portraits, to hand-crafted bracelets. He’s been profiled for a documentary, published a book, displayed his art at the Yale University Art Gallery. He travels to schools and gives lectures on art, history, and Civil Rights activism.
But for decades, he’s managed to live relatively undercover here in Newhallville, tinkering away in his basement or his office on viscerally colorful, brutally honest portrayals of black life in the South.
Winfred sits across from me and crosses his legs. He’s a large man, with a kind smile, deep dark skin, and a shock of white hair. He’s wearing sweatpants and a Star Wars shirt, the words “Don’t Fail Me Again” printed above Darth Vader with arms outstretched. Winfred loves Star Wars—I can tell by the Lego Death Star hanging above the doorway and the pair of three foot tall Storm Troopers that guard his living room, and because he tells me so. “It’s just a really great story,” he explains.
Winfred certainly knows what makes a good story.
***
Winfred likes to begin his own with the cotton fields of Georgia of the 1940s, where he began working alongside his mother when he was three years old. He was far too young then to be picking cotton under the hot sun, so he’d create art, instead: he crafted animals out of cotton fibers and maypops, small green egg-shaped buds that grew on vines and turned yellow as they bloomed. He’d use sticks as feet, and a rock as a head, and play pretend for hours.
When Winfred got older and began working in the field, he graduated to drawing people and landscapes for fun. It wasn’t a “skill” he “developed,” he tells me. He just liked to make pretty things.
As Winfred speaks, his words paint a swirling portrait of Georgia and cotton and pain, dotted with the same white orbs that illustrate the backgrounds of many of his pieces. I spy the canvas leaning against the wall again and realize what it depicts: black workers on the cotton plantation, backs sweating under the heat and the strain.
When he was 15, Winfred ran away from those cotton fields, and from his family, to Cuthbert, Georgia. He didn’t know what he hoped to do: “I just knew I wasn’t going to pick any more cotton. Cotton for me was out of the question,” he says. After sleeping in cars and on streets, Winfred was taken in by a man named Jeff, the owner of a pool room, who let him nest in the back with the balls in exchange for work.
Jeff’s pool room was on Hamilton Avenue, an all-black neighborhood of Cuthbert and the center of the Georgia Civil Rights movement. Each night, every civil rights leader would congregate at Jeff’s to meet and discuss plans for action. Winfred would listen.
“I had never heard no talk like that,” Winfred remembers. “Talking about civil rights, talking about blacks owning things: their own businesses, and their own stores. And having money and a savings account and that type of thing. Good things.” So Winfred decided to join the movement.
“I was a big talker. I was 16 and I talked a lot—sometimes I just literally would take over a meeting from the adults,” he says. Together, they planned sit-ins and protests and non-violent demonstrations. It was dangerous work—Klan members threatened their lives, and white police officers persecuted first and asked questions later. “They were all the same, back in those days. You go in these protests movements marches, you have to be prepared to die,” Winfred says. “Because sometimes that’s exactly what’ll happen: you’ll get killed. A black life didn’t matter.”
By the time Winifred was 17, everyone on Hamilton Avenue, black and white, knew Winfred’s name. But because of his activism, he was a target: one day, he was pursued by two white men with guns. “There was a car sitting there with the keys in the engine, so I took it,” he says, matter-of-fact. When he went to jail, he was seen as a martyr for the cause.
Winfred’s son interrupts to bring him his breakfast, setting a McDonald’s sandwich and a large Coke down on the table beside us. Winfred thanks him, gulps, and continues. He’s told this story before, but it doesn’t get easier—maybe he needs the liquid courage.
In 1963, only a year and a half after being detained, Winfred escaped prison. “I was just mad because they had kept me in so long without a trial,” he remembers. “So I took a roll of toilet paper, and I put it in the john, and flushed it.” The jail flooded, and the sheriff was furious. He unlocked the cell and began beating Winfred; they wrestled; the sheriff unsheathed his gun; Winfred grabbed it.
Winfred ran straight from the cell to a friend’s home, but the friends promptly called the police to turn him in. When he woke up the next morning, 100 white people had circled the house. He was beaten, handcuffed, and driven back to jail.
Winfred recounts all this with the slow drawl of memory, tracing and retracing the lines around his ancient bloodstains and bruises. But when he mentions the ride back to prison, he gets up abruptly, reaching for something behind his desk. His large frame takes awhile to maneuver, but he emerges with a thick sheet of leather shaped like the interior of a car.
“He beat me,” Winfred says, pointing to the police officer etched in the left side of the leather. He’s painted a shocking blue, and looking backwards at the man sitting behind him. “That’s me. Handcuffed. And that’s the blood,” he points. Red seeps from Winfred chest, flowing down onto the backseat and to the hand of the other police officer sitting shotgun.
“Now I tell my kids, never argue with a police officer.” We’re silent for a second, thinking about 1960, and about 2016.
***
Winfred’s wife, Mary, tiptoes into the room and shakes her head. “You need to wear this,” she says, handing him an eye patch. She’s perfectly perfumed, spritzing fragrance from room to room with her presence, and wears a shiny pearl necklace layered over her black long-sleeved shirt. She’s thrilled I’m here, she says. So proud of him. So honored students are taking an interest.
Winfred met Mary when he was in prison. He was given a fair(-ish) trial this second time around, and stayed in jail for only seven out of the 27 years he was given, four of which he spent getting to know the pretty young 16-year-old who lived near the prison. “It took me a long time to get her to accept my letters and things,” he smiles. “But she finally did, and we started talking.”
When Winfred wasn’t flirting with Mary, he was learning the craft that would become his passion—leather work. A fellow inmate, imprisoned indefinitely, spent his days making pocketbooks and billfolds from leather. Winfred quickly picked the practice up from him.
Winfred and Mary moved to New Haven in 1970, and were married on December 28, 1974—Winfred recites the date without hesitation. They started having children, and building a life far from Georgia.
“One day we were sitting at the dinner table and my wife said to me, ‘I know what we can do with these stories—you put them on that leather and make pictures out of them!’” he remembers. “‘When you’re gone, the stories gonna be gone with you. But if you leave something, people will know about these stories.’”
***
Winfred settles onto his work bench and lays out a strip of light brown leather. It’s etched with the face of a man, mouth wide in song. Winfred runs his thumb over the thin grooves of his cheeks and lips, and carefully pours a few drops of water in the corner by the clasp. Then he reaches for a sharp metal tool, and carves out the five letters that spell my name. It’s a bracelet, Winfred says. It’s one of a kind, and it’s for me.
In 2000, years after moving to New Haven, Winfred’s artistic gifts were discovered by Jock Reynolds, the head curator of the Yale University Art Gallery. Winfred had heard about a meeting planned between leaders in the New Haven art community, and had showed up dressed up like a businessman, a picture of a cotton field rolled up in a scroll under his arm. “Next thing I know, Jock Reynolds is giving me a show.”
“I think I’m the only living artist that had a show there,” he smiles, adjusting his eye patch. “From there, things went smoothly.” His work has been featured in the Hudson River Museum, Adelson Galleries in Boston, small New Haven exhibitions, and within private collections.
But these days, Winfred is happy to spend his afternoons sitting outside in his garden with his wife, looking out onto Newhall Street. He loves New Haven: the people, and the museums, and the restaurants downtown. He loves his house, filled with antique tchotchkes and Star Wars memorabilia. He collects toys because he never had any growing up, he tells me.
Winfred doesn’t like to think about how similar 1960 was to the present. The police might not bind and whip, and the Klu Klux Klan hasn’t come to New Haven, but he knows that new forms of racism have emerged, new forms of violence. New injustices that stem from old roots. He paints and he lectures to illustrate those roots, and offer solutions. “I don’t know,” he sighs. “Today, honey, it’s just a mad world. And I don’t know how to get through it.”
Later in the week, Winfred has plans to fly to Minnesota and speak with a school there, but what he says he really wants to do is speak to the kids in his own neighborhood. “New Haven won’t invite me to any school,” he says. “I haven’t been to one school in New Haven. Not one.” He wants to tell the students to remember how lucky they are—most of them don’t have to worry about getting to school with two shoes, or how much cotton they’d have to pick to get by, or whether they’ll find a place to spend the night. He’d remind them not to use the N-word—“There’s a price we pay for being free, and for being free of that word”—and to pay attention in class—“The teacher has to get all the curriculum done!”
Winfred doesn’t paint much of his life after Georgia: he’s got too many stories to tell—all seventy years’ worth. “I wake up in the morning and I think, am I going to do a picture about Miss Mary? About Black Masterson? Or something about Bubba Duke n’ Pete? Or Ranko Red? Or Butch Jordan? And on and on,” he says. “Those are people that I knew growing up on Hamilton Avenue.”
He excuses himself for a second, and hobbles back inside. He emerges with a book, and signs it carefully. “For Sarah, From Winfred.” I leaf through the pages. There’s All Me II, which layers portrait of dozens of prison stripe clad African Americans in a dizzying collage; The Lynching, where three men dangle limply from a tree; The Dirty Spoon Café, an homage to a Hamilton Avenue restaurant filled with dancing pairs wearing knee-length skirts and bowler hats.
And then there’s Amazing Grace. Rows of cotton stretching upwards from the center of the frame, white fields reaching towards sky, black hands reaching to gather the crop. A little boy sitting between the bushes, maybe playing with a maypop. Dreaming of freedom.