Mischief Makers

by Nettie Jones

Rachel de Baptiste, young and beautiful, with but a "chocolate drop" of Negro blood in her veins, leaves her Detroit home and her black lover in the 1920s to become a nurse--a white nurse--further north. There, in the beautiful wilderness of Leeanau County, she meets Mishe Masaube, a Chippewa Indian, the man she will marry and by whom she will bear three daughters--Blossom Rose, Lilly, and Puma. Each daughter, exotically beautiful, with looks that defy all racial labels, ventures out into the wold to discover her destiny, and the double-edged sword of assimilation.

Haunting and magical, Mischief Makers is a visionary novel of color and class in America, and it confirms Nettie Jones as one of the major female black writers in the United States today.

163 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1989