River tides are famous for their effect on human life. I have included here some of the information in my recent book, Lowcountry Tides, Selected Poems of Florence Rubert Graves, where I commented on the impact of those tides. My book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Florence Rubert Graves, greatest of mothers, loving wife, best of daughters, and a loyal friend to many. She guided, mentored and encouraged all who had the good fortune to know and love her. She wrote many poems over a long lifetime. However, I selected the poems for this collection from those she either wrote during the years she spent in the tidal river lowcountry of Bluffton, South Carolina, or later poems written while remembering those times. Living near those tides has a daily impact on creativity. A tidal river can be seen and experienced as a metaphor for the ebb and flow of daily life; the highs and lows of human emotion—and everything in between. Click here for those thoughts, River tides and Creativity
Category Archives: South Carolina History
More Tales of Old Town Bluffton
More Tales of Old Town Bluffton is my newest book about the South Carolina Lowcountry. It is now available on amazon.com, along with all my other books. The first 31 pages can be viewed by clicking on Amazon’s Look Inside feature on their website.
Tales of Old Town Bluffton
My new book, Tales of Old Town Bluffton, The Complete Writings of Andrew Peeples, is now available in paperback from Amazon Books. Andrew Peeples’ stories are full of early twentieth century small town local color. He was born in 1905 in Bluffton, SC, and raised on Calhoun Street (the main street) in the house shown below. He was the seventh son in a family of fourteen children. He graduated from Bluffton High School and later from the University of South Carolina. For many years he worked as the Health Education Director for the South Carolina State Board of Health.
Testimony of the Infant Children, the Untold Story
On April 4, 1951 at 3:30 P. M., my brothers and I experienced a trauma that marked us for life: our father took us by force on our way home from school in Philadelphia and brought us back 700 miles to his and our home: Bluffton, SC. My twin brother and I were nine and one-half years old, and my younger brother was only six. None of us, including our father and mother, ever fully recovered from that event and the subsequent custody battles that followed.
John Samuel Graves, Jr., my father, and Florence Rubert, my mother, married on June 25, 1939. After 11 years of marriage my mother decided she wanted to think things over. She and my father agreed to a trial 3 month separation, and on June 3, 1950, Mother took us north to stay with her sister, her mother, and her grandmother. After about 10 months had passed without our father being allowed to see us he became convinced that he had to take matters into his own hands: he would return us to our ancestral South Carolina home. The details of that story are presented in my new book, Testimony of the Infant Children, the Untold Story, a non-fictional account of those and previous times in the Lowcounty town of Bluffton, South Carolina. The second edition will soon be available. Stay tuned.
For more information about the people described in my book please visit The Real People in my New Book tab on graveshouse.org.
My book is now available in its Second Edition on Amazon Books. Amazon’s Look Inside feature allows a viewer to read substantial portions of the book’s text. Please take a look! The Second Edition in not primarily different from the first edition. It has been re-edited for spelling, grammatical and formatting issues. The Second Edition also contains photographs that were not in the earliest versions of the book. Some of these additions and corrections have been posted for quite some time on graveshouse.org . See page Testimony Back Story & Photos.