Rachel: A Play in Three Acts (AmazonClassics Edition)

When the curtains rise on Angelina Weld Grimké’s devastating drama, the Lovings―a Black family from the South―have settled into a small but immaculate apartment in an unnamed northern city. The widowed matriarch, Mary; her daughter, Rachel; and her son, Tom anticipate a more promising future here, but Rachel, a sensitive young woman, has a sudden reckoning with the past that throws her future into serious doubt. While she has a powerful desire to be a mother someday, she also now wonders: How can she bear to bring more Black lives into the world, knowing the inevitable pain that awaits them?

The first play with an all-Black cast to be performed before an integrated audience in the US, Rachel is an astonishing rediscovery that delves into the complexities of race, parenthood, and the devastating impact of racism through the generations.

Revised edition: Previously published as Rachel: A Play in Three Acts, this edition of Rachel: A Play in Three Acts (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.

Angelina Weld Grimké (1880–1958) was an American journalist, teacher, playwright, and poet born in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1902, Grimké began her career as an educator at Armstrong Manual Training School and Dunbar High School―both institutions for Black students in segregated Washington, DC. Pursuing a literary career, Grimké wrote essays, short stories, and poems, which were published in magazines such as the Crisis and Opportunity, and collected in the anthologies The New Negro, Caroling Dusk, and Negro Poets and Their Poems. In 1916 she wrote the play Rachel as a protest against racial violence. One of the first plays to explore the cultural roots of African Americans, Rachel has since been recognized as helping to usher in the Harlem Renaissance.