Our book clubs have become so popular that we can’t wait for our third book chat! Black narratives of the Civil War are few. The slender 1902 volume, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, by Susie King Taylor, is written with earnest simplicity.
Susie King Taylor’s account records the wartime camp experience of a woman born into slavery who was a regimental laundress and nurse in the Thirty-third United States Colored Infantry for 4 years.
Like our other book clubs, this book will stay with you long after you have finished reading it. And there are some surprising things Taylor says about the lived Black experience in America at the time of publication (1902) that directly link to events that have occurred in the very recent past.
You can download it for free via https://archive.org/details/reminiscencesofm00tayl