All of the people in my new book,  Testimony of the Infant Children, the Untold Story, were real people, not imaginary. (See The Real People in My New Book above.) Perhaps you knew some of them, or know about some of them. Perhaps you are related to some of them? One of the most important people in my book, besides my mother and father, was my father’s lawyer, W. Brantley Harvey, Sr. (1893-1981) He was a well known South Carolina lawyer and politician. He is often referred to as Senator Harvey in the book because he was a South Carolina senator for 24 years. Senator Harvey’s words are on almost every page of the court testimony recorded in my book. You can learn more about him at https://harveyandbattey.com/attorneys/firm-history/.

Included on the last page of my book is a reprint of the meditative article, Tombstone Thoughts, the Historic Bluffton Cemetery, by  the  Very Reverend Dr. Charles E. Owens, III, Rector of  Church of the Cross, Bluffton, S. C.  His  reflections on memories of past lives, and how cemeteries remind  us of the transitory nature of our lives,  made a fitting ending to my book, which is primarily about the impact of lives now over on those of the living. Many of my relatives lie buried  in the Bluffton Cemetery. The word  cemetery comes from Latin and Greek words that mean “sleeping place.”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 go get us and 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. This new book is now available in paperback.  Please click here for more information.