Baby Sweet's
A Novel
Title Details
Pages: 232
Illustrations: 15 illus.
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 07/01/1988
ISBN: 9-780-8203-1069-5
List Price: $25.95
Series
Related Subjects
Other Links of Interest
• Learn more about Raymond Andrews at the New Georgia Encyclopedia
Baby Sweet's
A Novel
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- Description
- Reviews
Bawdy and sometimes horrifying, hilarious on the way to being tragic, Raymond Andrews's Muskhogean County novels tell of black life in the Deep South from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the 1960s, from the days of mules and white men with bullwhips to the moment when the pendulum began to swing.
This story tells of a venture between John Morgan Jr., the dissolute heir to Appalachee's leading white family, and Baby Sweet Jackson, owner of the once-vibrant Red's Cafe in Dark Town. On Independence Day, 1966, the partners open Muskhogean County's first bordello, with two dark-skinned black women, Lana Lips and Fig, ready for the expected white clientele. Then a mysterious woman, announcing herself as the 'third whore,' arrives—and proclaims that her body will be 'for colored only.'
Stylish and funny, a pleasure to read . . . The novel is related as smoothly as a tale told on a back porch.
—Frederick Busch, New York Times Book Review
A superlative storyteller with a keen ear . . . Andrew's characters are so robust they virtually leap off the page.
—Kansas City Star
One reads Andrews for his raucous and robust humor, his really profound knowledge of the South, his ultimately accepting and benign vision—of a world in which blacks and whites sometimes hate and mistreat one another but ultimately arrive at an understanding—and most of all for the entertaining voice that tells the stories.
—Washington Post
