Write, Wire, or Call Me Real Soon

The letters were found near a fireplace in a Nashville home, close to what is now Music Row.

More than two hundred of them. Written between 1942 and 1945. Love letters between a Black soldier and the woman who became his wife.

This month, the Nashville Public Library made highlights from the collection available digitally for the first time. The letters tell the story of William Raymond Whittaker and Jane Dean—two students who met at Meharry Medical College, lost touch, and found each other again when war made the future uncertain.

Ray, as he was called, came from New Rochelle, New York. Jane was from Nashville. They dated at Meharry, then drifted apart. In the summer of 1942, Ray was drafted into the Army and stationed at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. From there, he decided to write to Jane.

The library does not have his first letter. But they have her reply, dated July 30, 1942. She addresses him formally: “Dear Wm R.”

“It sure was a pleasant and sad surprise to hear from you,” she writes. “Pleasant because you will always hold a place in my heart, and it’s nice to know you think of me once in a while. Sad because you are in the armed forces—maybe I shouldn’t say that but war is so uncertain, however I’m proud to know that you are doing your bit for your country.”

She signs off: “Write, wire or call me real soon—Lovingly Jane.”

By September, Ray was assigned to Fort McClellan in Alabama, helping organize the 92nd Infantry Division—an all-Black unit that would later see combat in Europe. The romance had heated up. In one letter, he teases Jane about military pay: a married officer draws $280 a month, a single one only $175. “Really, I can’t leave my excess amount of money to the government,” he writes, “and must have someone to help me spend it.”

Jane is skeptical. “What makes you think you still love me?” she asks on September 23. “Is it that you are lonesome and a long way from home. I’m sure I want you to love me, but not under those conditions.”

Ray wins her over. They marry in Birmingham on November 7, 1942. Two days later, Jane writes to her “darling husband”: “It’s a wonderful thing to have such a sweet and lovely husband. Darling you’ll never know how much I love you. The only regret is that we didn’t marry years ago… As it is now things are so uncertain and we are not together but such a few happy hours. But maybe this old war will soon be over and we can be together for always.”

Ray died in Nashville in 1989. The couple had no children. Archivists have not been able to locate any living relatives.

—

Eudora Welty spent her life writing about ordinary people in the American South. A Pulitzer Prize winner who lived most of her life in Jackson, Mississippi, she understood that the stories of regular people—their loves, their losses, their daily negotiations with a complicated world—are the stories that matter.

“Southerners love a good tale,” she wrote. “They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers… great talkers.”

Letter exchangers.

In her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty reflected on how memory preserves what time would otherwise erase: “The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.”

Ray and Jane Whittaker left no children. No living relatives. What they left were letters—two hundred of them, saved for decades in a house near Music Row, then donated to an archive, then digitized and shared with the world.

Because someone saved them, the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead can join and live together.

“You can’t help but smile when you read through these letters,” said Kelley Sirko, the library’s metropolitan archivist. “You really can’t. And this was just such an intimate look at two regular people during a really complicated time in our history.”

Two regular people.

That is what makes the collection precious. Not generals or presidents. Not famous battles or historic speeches. A man and a woman, falling in love during wartime, navigating racial barriers and military bureaucracy, and the simple loneliness of separation.

Someone in your family has letters like these. Someone in your community has a box in the attic, a drawer in the dresser, a folder in a filing cabinet. Love letters. War letters. Letters from a grandmother who crossed an ocean, a grandfather who worked the mines, a parent who came home from the hospital with news they did not want to share.

The Power of Authors calls writers to this work: Find the letters. Preserve them. Tell the stories they contain before the people who remember are gone.

Write, wire, or call someone real soon. Ask what they remember. Ask what they saved.

The memory is a living thing. But it needs someone to write it down.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why clarity of conviction matters more than cleverness on every page, starting with the first.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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