I Was His Wife
The Story of Sophia Emery Graves Realf
By the waters of Life we sat together,
Hand in hand in the golden days
Of the beautiful early summer weather,
When skies were purple and breath was praise— Richard Realf
Introduction
“It is like calling up spirits from the vastly deep to look into that painful past of mine.”
—Sophia Emery Realf
History has not been kind to women who left no household of descendants to remember them. It has been still less kind to women who chose silence, who endured injury privately, who did not turn their pain into public claim. Men left speeches, offices, lawsuits, military records and some left published poems. Most women in the Nineteenth Century only left traces when someone else’s life crossed their own.
Sophia Emery Graves was the thirteenth of fourteen children, born in the early winter of 1829. She came of age on the edge of Penobscot Bay in central Maine, became a teacher, and followed her younger sister west.
Love found her in the midst of war, and heartache at the first bloom of peace. Heart-worn, she returned home to Maine, deeply tied to family yet without the household of her own that might have given shape to ordinary womanhood in her time. She had no children to raise, no settled home built around her name. Instead, her life would be held together by work, kinship, memory, and a protective silence she chose more than once, and for more than one reason.