The Mind of Mestizo America : MISCHIEF MAKERS <i> by Nettie Jones (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: $15.95; 160 pp.; 1-55584-164-3) </i>

Listen to the changing consciousness of a culture: It is the 1940s. We are in the home of a family of physicians, light-skinned African-Americans in Detroit. Lilly, the visiting granddaughter of the family has discovered “while eavesdropping on their housekeeper, Dorothy, and her friends that they were colored. The ‘Wednesday girls,’ as the maids were called, were playing cards and preparing food in Dorothy’s carriage house. Lilly overheard one of them refer to the doctors as ‘hankdie niggers.’ Lilly asked her grandmother what a ‘hankdie nigger’ was.

“ ‘That’s a Negro who thinks he’s above other Negroes.’

“ ‘Are you a Negro?’ she asked, sounding as innocent as baby Jesus. Her cousin, Amir, had put her into colored-consciousness training an hour after they’d met. Dorothy, who was black, was almost a pure Negro. Amir didn’t know that Dorothy was as much Seminole-Creek-Choctaw as she was African. As a child in the South, Dorothy had learned not to talk about her Indian heritage. Possessing that blood made you a ‘hankdie nigger’ too.”

This passage, from Nettie Jones’ slim new novel, “Mischief Makers”--a sensuous, often poetic compression of America’s history of color and class conflict and racial amalgamation--suggests a broadening ethnic consciousness among black writers, a willingness to acknowledge and affirm their complex ethnic and racial heritage in America.

The story begins with a cliche character: Raphael de Baptiste, young, beautiful with but a “chocolate drop” of Negro blood in her veins. This passing beauty leaves her comfortable Detroit home, her physician father and her black lover in the 1920s to become a “white” nurse in northern Michigan. There, she meets and falls in love with Mishe Masaube, a Chippewa Indian, with whom she has three daughters (of whom Lilly is one).

Raphael and Mishe are, in a word, hot. The sexual heat is portrayed with a straightforward earthiness that also teeters close to “Me Tarzan. You Jane,” dialogue, punctuated with lines like: “Following her wishes he stroked her until she knew, he knew, that he’d seeded her.” (Really, Ms. Jones.)

More often, the book has the sound of music: razor-sharp riffs, and measures of words--very short measures--that call to mind the sonorous wail of the blues from a tenor saxophone.

Mishe speaks when he and Raphael first meet:

“ ‘Been out in the woods yet with a man?’ A tiny smile rested at the corner of his eyes.

“ ‘Never!’ She got into this game with him. ‘Never. Except for with my father. He loves trees and birds.’

“ ‘Would you? With an Indian?’

“ ‘Before I would anyone else. That’s for sure. Long as you promise me that berries or flowers are all we’re gonna hunt.’ She felt naughty. Her eyes fastened upon his belt, thick and black. The buckle was bone.”

Mishe proves to be as passionate a father as he is a husband. The portrayal of this Chippewa man’s sacred connection to nature and the spiritual bonding with his children are among the most beautiful in the book. They converge in this passage about the birth of the couple’s first child:

“All her life this child was called by both her names as if one were inseparable from the other, as if they were one sound: Blossom Rose. Never Blossom. Never Rose.

“The first mother she knew was Mother Earth. Mishe had taken her out of (the attendant’s) arms the moment she was cleaned and bundled, and run outside with her. No one made any attempt to stop him as he held her up to the glow of the moonlight. She herself did not make a sound. (The doctor) watched as Mishe lay her down for a moment on the muddy earth. The little dance that he performed as he brought her back into the house amused no one, for it was not a dance of amusement. It was joyful. Mishe’s eyes blazed as he reentered the bedroom with the now muddy bundle. He ripped the blanket off, exposing his naked baby. Slowing down, he placed her onto his wife’s tit. As he watched, he himself undressed, got into bed with them. (The doctor) felt that if Mishe could have, he would have fed her himself.”

Jones lingers long on nothing, leaving the reader tantalized and hungry for more. At times, this book seems almost a skeleton of a novel. The author’s cut-to-the-bone prose style is emotionally effective--in this book as well as her first novel, “Fish Tales.” But I felt short-changed on the story. I wanted to know more about the lives of her characters: Mishe, Raphael, their three daughters and secondary characters introduced with some fanfare but put to little use--a black collegiate football star invited to a society dance by his rich, white friend and a black chauffeur from the Carribean who mentions, to Mishe’s confusion, that he has ancestors from France. If you a bring a 2,000-pound elephant onto the stage you better use him.

But the swift-paced sensuality of the novel provides an accessible context for the book’s main themes of race and class. These are perennial issues in African-American literature. Increasingly, however, “black” writers are portraying the multiracial reality of their heritage as a source of pride rather than shame, an affirmation of their Americanness. For in what other country have so many of the planet’s people merged? Among what other American ethnic group has the blood of so many others blended?

The act of rape, the sexual brutalization of black women by white men during and after slavery, is the shame that fuels the African-American’s rejection of her white ancestry. But that, of course, was and is not the only source of the group’s mixed genetic pool. (And rape was not always the context for sexual relations between African-Americans and European-Americans.) The genes of millions of Native Americans have been absorbed into the so-called black population. That particular amalgamation was not a source of shame, but of pride for many African-Americans in the past--so much so they set themselves apart from other blacks and thought themselves “hankdie,” as Jones writes. A class apart. And the lighter the complexion, the straighter the hair, the keener the features, the more they were a class apart. They and other “blacks” who physically approximated the “white” ideal formed much of the early African-American bourgeosie until the 1960s.

But there’s more amalgamation mischief going on in Jones’ book than class and color tensions among African-Americans.

What’s the obvious consequence of “black” people passing? They get married to people who don’t know they are black. Sometimes they marry into prominent “white” American families, like the captains of industry who reside in Michigan. Or they marry ordinary folks, like the real-life Susie Guillory Phipps did, a Louisiana woman who looked Caucasian, thought she was Caucasian. In the early 1980s, she found out her birth certificate identified her as “colored,” because of an 18th-Century black relative. The state of Louisiana refused to change her racial designation.

There are millions of Phippses in America, with and without colored on their birth certificates. And there have been millions of “blacks” who looked like Raphael de Baptiste who either passed or, like her daughter Lilly in the novel embraced her African ancestry but was rejected by darker-skinned “blacks.” In either case, the pain they experience is deep, sometimes deadly, Jones shows us.

Jones’ book is being touted as a “visionary novel of color and class in America” by its publisher. Hyperbole, but not purely promotional blather. Articulating the sentiments of millions, Jesse Jackson has called for “blacks” to reclaim the name African-American. What does this mean?

As the 21st Century breathes down our necks, prods us to wake up to the expanding melange of races and cultures shaping the nation, interacting with each other, will the term African-American be as much of a racial and cultural obfuscation as the term black? Or will it be an ethnic label describing people with a shared culture descended from Africa, transformed in America and genetically intertwined with the myriad ethnicities of the United States?

If Afro-Americans can’t embrace the totality of who they are, and if Euro-Americans who maintain socio-political control refuse to acknowledge it, there is much tragic cultural mischief still to be made.