Virtually all that is known about Susie King Taylor is drawn from her 1902 autobiography, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S. C. Volunteers , an extraordinarily complex, if also deceptively simple, memoir. It conforms so precisely to the rhetorical conventions of other former slaves' autobiographies of the post-Reconstruction era that it stands indisputably as a compelling representative of its tradition and times. While unequaled in the particular life story that it tells, it nonetheless features many rhetorical and stylistic similarities to other postbellum slave narratives. Yet, but for fleeting mention of her alongside Clara Barton and Thomas Higginson in a handful of Civil War chronicles, there are no records of the life of this patriotic African American former slave who served the Union as nurse, teacher, seamstress, launderer, cook, and scribe. Though modest and self-effacing, she possessed an unwavering sense...