“Postal Box Love” is one of 4 still unpublished stories Hughes attempted to publish using the pen name of “David Boatman.” He imagined them as stories that would be seen as White, “stories about love”–that is, not the racial-messaging he had become known for. “Postal Box Love” was inspired by his frequent walks into the countryside outside Reno, including a sunset walk to a “forlorn little mountain cemetery” outside of Reno, where he had a psychic experience he would later write was a premonition about his father’s death, in December 1934 in Mexico. 

The cemetery he writes about may be Mountain View, which appears to have been renovated & modernized.

images below are from Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University