Shattered Dreams: Stories of the South We Knew

By: Stephen Graham, Marcia Graham

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Three dreams, two of which come from the pages of history, are the subject of three novellas that comprise this book. The subject of the first novella, The Picker Stick, is a dream embraced by hundreds of thousands of mill workers from the southeastern Piedmont. Theirs was the vision of a more just and secure life that propelled the largest labor strike in United States history, the Uprising of ’34. This historical event is the setting of the story, although the characters are imaginary. Intensely personal, the second novella, Chasing Rainbows, is based on Marcia’s fictionalized recollections of her mother’s dream of living her senior year in high school in a small textile mill village in the foothills of North Carolina during the 1930s and 1940s. The events of the third novella, The Wrath of the Lamb, occur five years after Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his I Have A Dream speech. Black and white southerners are the fictional characters of this piece, drawn together in the little known but very real tragedy of the February 8, 1968 Orangeburg Massacre on the campus of South Carolina State College.