Rachel

Rachel is a young, educated, middle-class woman born into an African-American family in the early 20th century- a world in which ignorance and violence prevail. Her dreams of getting married and becoming a mother collide with the tragic events of her family's past as she confronts the harsh reality of a racist world.

Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958) was a poet, dramatist, journalist, teacher, essayist, radical feminist and lesbian icon. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, into an unusual and distinguished mixed-race family which, within the three preceding generations, included slaveholders and slaves, free black people, white abolitionists, and advocates for women's rights and women's suffrage. She is widely regarded as a leading forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of the First World War and the middle of the 1930s including such seminal figures as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.