Look out! Here come Jessie Mitchell Blackshear and her equally dangerous double, Cousin Claire. Sexy, smart, and sassy, these powerful African-American women survive and thrive in the male-dominated w
Jessie and Claire make their unique mark on the rural South.
Look out! Here come Jessie Mitchell Blackshear and her equally dangerous double, Cousin Claire. Sexy, smart, and sassy, these powerful African-American women survive and thrive in the male-dominated world of the rural South. Thoroughly different and equally dedicated to getting their way, Jessie and Claire will entertain and amaze you-if they don't swallow you whole!
In these two hilarious and hair-raising novellas, Raymond Andrews has painted portraits of two very different black women whose means and modes of manipulation are mirror-opposites of each other, but whose motivations are frighteningly similar. The results-and their impact on those around them-are equally profound.
Welcome to the darkly comic world of Jessie & Jesus & Cousin Claire, vividly presented in the rambunctious and rollicking prose of a master storyteller and inspired seer into human nature. Published shortly before Andrews's death in 1991, Jessie & Jesus & Cousin Claire won a 1992 American Book Award.
Born in 1934 in Morgan County, near Madison, Georgia, RAYMOND ANDREWS was the fourth of ten children. At the age of fifteen he left his sharecropper home for Atlanta, where he worked during the day and attended night classes at Booker T. Washington High School, then the only public night high school for blacks in Georgia. After graduating, he served four years in the U. S. Air Force, including a tour of duty in Korea. He later attended Michigan State University.
BENNY ANDREWS has illustrated all of his brother Raymond's books. Educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, he is an internationally-known artist whose works hang in major museums around the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirschorn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and the Museum of African Art.
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