Book excerpt: The Red Cotton Fields is story written in the tradition of great historical epics. The story begins on a Georgia plantation in the year 1850, ending on the gold fields of Australia in the year 1884. This is a story surrounding three southern families (the plantation owners, the plantation overseer's family and a Negro slave family) leading up to and including the Civil War. The reader will experience the demise of a southern plantation and follow two of plantation's previous occupants (Bart Royal, the white overseer's son, and Reiner Washington, an escaped slave) as they rise to become two of the richest men in the world. Also, The Red Cotton Fields is a classic love story between the plantation's owner's daughter, Holly Ballaster, and the overseer's son, Bart Royal, The Red Cotton Fields is destined to become a classic. Read it and you will understand why.