Diann Shaddox
Southern Dreams, a collection of stories of rhapsodies and struggles of the Bellamead family living on the Bella Oak Plantation established in 1844 in South Carolina.A letter clinched in the hand of a young Southern girl and a another letter being written in the dim light of a battlefield by a Yankee soldier tell of an enduring love that even the Civil War isn’t able to destroy. It is a yarn that weaves and binds the North and the South into a noble tapestry. Southern Dreams begins one Fourth of July picnic in 1861 when Olivia Rose Bellamead, a young Southern belle, and Jackson Seth Montgomery, a vast plantation heir-apparent, were to be publicly presented as an engaged couple, an arrangement made by her parents. However, a mysterious Northern stranger named Andrew Robert Drake arrived on the day of the picnic. He caught Olivia’s eye and that changed the course of both of their lives. Andrew rode north that day leaving his love behind promising someday to come back. He, a surgeon in the Union army, sends her letters, tales from the battlefields, stories of young men: Northern and Southern alike, each with their blue or grey uniforms but both so bloody that the surgeon could not distinguish between the Rebels and the Yankees; he only cared about preserving life.Olivia holds dear each letter she receives as she clings to her dreams of Andrew coming home. Struggling with death and destruction all around, she watches the South as it collapses to ruins. Looking out over her beloved Bella Oak plantation, she stands remembering the day she met Andrew and knowing that it was a time lost in the past, never to emerge again. She pulls out the unopened letter she has received, clinching it tightly. Her worst fear is that the letter would be one with different handwriting.
