Book description
October 11, 1864. The Civil War rages on in Kentucky, where Union and
Confederate loyalties have turned neighbors into enemies and
once-proud soldiers into drifters, thieves, and outlaws. Stephen Gano
Burbridge, radical Republican and military commander of the district
of Kentucky, has declared his own war on this new class of marauding
guerrillas, and his weekly executions at Louisville's public commons
draw both crowds and widespread criticism. In this time of fear and
division, a Kentucky journalist created a legend: Sue Mundy, female
guerrilla, a "she-devil" and "tigress" who was
leading her band of outlaws across the state in an orgy of greed and
bloodshed. Though the "Sue Mundy" of the papers was created
as an affront to embarrass Union authorities, the man behind the woman
-- twenty-year-old Marcellus Jerome Clarke -- was later brought to
account for "her" crimes. Historians have pieced together
clues about this orphan from southern Kentucky whose idealism and
later disillusionment led him to his fate, but Richard Taylor's work
of imagination makes this history flesh -- an exciting story of the
Civil War told from the perspective of one of its most enigmatic
figures. Sue Mundy opens in 1861, when fifteen-year-old Jerome Clark,
called "Jarom," leaves everyone he loves -- his aunt, his
adopted family, his sweetheart -- to follow his older cousin into the
Confederate infantry. There, confronted by the hardships of what he
slowly understands is a losing fight, Jarom's romanticized notions of
adventure and heroism are crushed under the burdens of hunger,
sleepless nights, and mindless atrocities. Captured by Union forces
and imprisoned in Camp Morton, Jarom makes a daring escape, crossing
the Ohio River under cover of darkness and finding refuge and
refreshed patriotic zeal first in Adam R. Johnson's Tenth Kentucky
Calvary, then among General John Hunt Morgan's infamous brigade.
Morgan's shocking death in 1864 proves a bad omen for the Confederate
cause, as members of his group of raiders scatter -- some to rejoin
organized forces, others, like Jarom, to opt for another, less
civilized sort of warfare. Displaced and desperate for revenge, Jarom
and his band of Confederate deserters wreak havoc in Kentucky: a
rampage of senseless murder and thievery in an uncertain quest to
inflict punishment on Union sympathizers. Long-locked and
clean-shaven, Jarom is mistakenly labeled female by the media -- but
Sue Mundy is about more than the transformation of a man into a woman,
and then a legend. Ironically, Sue Mundy becomes the persona by which
Jarom's darkest self is revealed, and perhaps redeemed.
""Richard Taylor's work of historical fiction, Sue
Mundy: A Novel of the Civil War, brings to light the chaotic setting
of guerrilla warfare in Kentucky.... Taylor develops an enlightening
narrative." --Project Muse" --
Richard Taylor is professor and Resident Creative Writer at
Kentucky State University. A former poet laureate for Kentucky, Taylor
has written several books, including Bluegrass, Earth Bones, Girty and
Stone Eye.
