I put my flashlight up to the opening and looked into the space behind it, and I set my screwdriver down real slow, because it was not what twenty years in the trade had taught me to expect behind a wall a man went to that much trouble to hide. It was a tin box, and inside it, wrapped in wax paper, was a stack of letters tied with string, and two old photographs.
The photographs were a man and a woman, and they were young, and they were plainly, deeply in love, you could see it in the way they stood together. And it took me only a moment to understand why somebody would hide their love behind a dead junction box in a wall, because the man was white and the woman was Black, and the letters ran through the nineteen fifties and sixties, here in West Virginia, in years when a love like theirs could get people run out of a town, or worse than that.
They could not be seen together. They could not marry, not here, not then. So they wrote to each other, in secret, for years, and they hid every letter behind a fake box in the wall of a house one of them must have lived in or worked in, the one place in all the world no eye would ever slide to, because who looks twice at a plain gray junction box. Decades of a love the world of that time would not allow, kept alive in ink and hidden in a wall.
The last letter was the one that put me down on the basement floor. They will not let us have this life. But I will not let them have these letters. I am putting them where love can wait safe until the world is a better place than it is now. Maybe someday somebody kinder than our times will find them, and know that we were real, and that we loved each other true, no matter what they told us we were.
Somebody kinder than their times turned out to be a fifty-year-old electrician with a flashlight, in a year those two never lived to see. And I will tell you, I sat down on that basement floor and I was proud to be the one, and heartsore for two people I never met who loved each other in a world that would not let them.
The young couple who bought the house helped me look, and we found them, or found the record of them anyhow. Both gone now, years back, each one having lived a whole separate life the world made them live apart. But their letters are real, and they are safe, and we are giving them to the state historical folks who keep this kind of history, so that their two names go down in the record together, at last, the way the two of them never once got to stand in public in their own lifetimes. They wanted somebody kinder to find them someday. We did. And we are making sure that everybody knows they were real, and that they loved each other true.