Author: Donna Hills
Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
ISBN: 0-312-27299-5
I felt rhythms. I felt rhythms, in my soul moving my thoughts and encouraging wonderful moonlight dreams towards pure understanding of self. I felt rhythms of the love between my man and me that arise currents of mountainous love. I felt rhythms of the many choices I use to make that lead me floundering for guidance, but only after self-analysis, I began to reconnect my inner strength to maneuver the rhythm of life towards empowerment.
Rhythms of choices. This is what I received in a nutshell from Donna Hill’s fictional story titled: Rhythms. Donna’s story begins during the golden years of the Harlem Renaissance era. The book is broken up in three main book series, the first part, book one, begins with Cora who is the daughter of Joshua and Pearl Harvey. The family lives in Rudell, a small town just beyond Alligator, Mississippi…down in the Delta.
Joshua is the pastor of the only Baptist church and he is the very fiber of strength in the Negro community. Both of Cora’s parents are very protective and they set the tone for being very influential to the way Cora perceives the world. Cora begins to question her viewpoints towards life outside of Rudell due to the onset the young and only black male doctor, David Mackey, in which they both fall in love with each other.
Cora Harvey main dream besides wanting to marry David is her undying desire to sing and be famous like the legendary Bessie Smith. She gets her chance to leave Rudell and follow her dreams after the brutal death of her parents in a house fire by the white hooded nightriders. She heads to Chicago, IL to live with a family friend’s daughter, Margaret, only to end up waiting on tables in a nightclub.
After a few unsightly episodes of city life, Cora decides to leave Chicago because it is not what she envision. However, Margaret takes ill preventing Cora to return to Rudell. Margaret pivotal request of a favor to have Cora take her place as a housemaid for the rich Rutherford changes Cora’s life forever. In which, she ends up in the wrong place of the house at the wrong time when Mr. Rutherford loses everything due to the stock market crash on, October 30, 1929.
In his despair and anger of losing everything, Mr. Rutherford ends up raping Cora. She is so ashamed of losing her virginity and to a white man that Cora watched her father protected her against. Cora leaves Chicago and heads back to Rudell ending up marrying David and chose to keep her pregnancy a secret. The town’s people are blooming with joy of their reunion and anticipate the birth of their first child. The joy evaporates, however, when the baby arrives with David leaving Cora, the town’s people treating Cora and her baby as out casts, and Cora extreme burden with the secret of how this ordeal occurred end up cripples her to despair...
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