A collection of over 200 intimate love letters, chronicling a couple’s courtship and marriage during the Second World War, is now digitally accessible through the Nashville Public Library. The trove offers a poignant insight into romance amidst global conflict.
Penned by William Raymond Whittaker and Jane Dean, the letters were discovered in a Nashville residence that had belonged to Jane and her siblings. They were subsequently donated to the Metro Nashville Archives in 2016. William Raymond Whittaker, known as Ray, hailed from New Rochelle, New York. He relocated to the Tennessee capital to attend the historically Black Meharry Medical College, where he met and began dating Jane, a fellow student, according to Kelley Sirko, the library’s metropolitan archivist.
The pair lost contact after Ray departed Nashville. In the summer of 1942, he was conscripted into the Army. While stationed at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, he decided to re-establish contact with Jane, who was then working as a medical lab technician at Vanderbilt University. The library doesn't have Ray's first letter to Jane, but it does have her reply. She greets him somewhat formally as “Dear Wm R.” “It sure was a pleasant and sad surprise to hear from you,” she writes on 30 July, 1942.
Just two months after the first letters, the romance has heated up. Ray has been assigned to Fort McClellan in Alabama, where he will help organize the reactivated — and segregated — 92nd Infantry Division. In an undated letter from September 1942, he tells Jane, “I have something very important to tell you when I do see you and you will be surprise to know as to what it is.” He teases her by saying that if he goes to officer training school, he will be able to “draw down a fat juicey salary” — about $280 a month if he is married and $175 if single.
At first Jane is skeptical. “What makes you think you still love me?” she asks on 23 September. “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.” A 24 September letter from Ray is more serious. “Events are changing so rapidly these days that one can't really plan for the future. But I am going to make a decisive decision in matters of most importances,” he writes. Soon Ray wins her over, and they are married on Nov. 7 in Birmingham.
Beyond a love story, the collection gives “this in-the-moment perspective of ... what it’s like just navigating certain racial issues, certain gender issues, their work, the life of a soldier, all of these things,” Sirko said. That's why the archivists wanted to make it more accessible to the public. The couple did not have any children, according to an obituary for Ray, who died in Nashville in 1989.
