Sarah's Creek

The Chesapeake! The mere sound of the words ring with mystical historic significance. Award winning author Gordon Tucker has once again graced the publishing world with a masterwork, a searing and unforgettable historic Civil War account of a people in revolt.

The story concerns a handful of families in the Gloucester Point area of Virginia as they build and care for their own little corner of the glorious world across the York River from Yorktown. It was named Sarah's Creek for a remarkable woman.

Carrying the unborn child of Clay Bickford, heir to Bickford Plantation, Sarah, a social nobody, is banished from the only home she has ever known. Clay, himself a victim of lies about Sarah, doesn't know of her fidelity, or that the child she carries is his. Then the Yankees come calling.

Jud, the son, will never know that the man he greatly admires is his blood father. When war with the North begins and Clay joins the confederate army, Jud, now seventeen, must stay behind; but when two drunken soldiers attempt to rape his mother, Jud unintentionally kills them and runs away to join the army and serve with Clay.

For two years they endure the hell of war, fighting for a Cause destined to fail. Both wounded at Fredericksburg and captured by Federal soldiers, they escape and make their way home. Even then, neither one knows that they are father and son.

When Sarah gets a message that she is sorely needed at Bickford Plantation, she doesn't know that Clay, severally wounded, has returned from the war, or that her son is with him.

Sarah's Creek is an epic story of the Civil War: the men who fought in it, the families they left behind. The author has turned nineteenth century fictitious characters into living and breathing realities. Slaves, poor farmers, tobacco growing plantation owners, fishermen, blockade runners, soldiers both blue and grey, they are all here, a microcosm of the American experience.