Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  The simple but elegant wedding took place at the home of Jimmy’s eldest sister, Helen. Pat, radiant in a ballerina-length accordion-pleated gown, stood before the makeshift altar adorned with evergreens and gladioli and said “I do” to Walter, dashing in a white dinner jacket. The jubilant crowd toasted the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Kane. Katherine and Jimmy danced and ate wedding cake. Their three girls—Joylette, age eleven; Connie, ten; and Kathy, nine—squealed with delight as they played hide-and-seek and hopscotch and danced with their cousins. The celebration continued late into the cool August night and trickled into the following day, as the Goble and Kane clans tarried to savor their last moments together before heading back to their workaday lives.

  Jimmy’s sister and brother-in-law, Margaret and Eric Epps, had journeyed from Newport News, and the newlyweds planned to accompany the Eppses back to the coast, hitching a ride to their honeymoon at Hampton’s segregated Bay Shore Beach resort. “Why don’t y’all come home with us too?” Eric asked Katherine. “I can get Snook a job at the shipyard,” he said, using Jimmy’s family nickname. “In fact, I can get both of you jobs.” There’s a government facility in Hampton that’s hiring black women, Eric told Katherine, and they’re looking for mathematicians. It’s a civilian job, he told her, but attached to Langley Field, in Hampton.

  Jimmy’s brother-in-law was the director of the Newsome Park Community Center. Since 1943, Eric Epps had coordinated community activities such as the semipro Newsome Park Dodgers baseball team, and he had been a strong advocate for the residents of his neighborhood with the local government, always fending off the demolition campaigns that never seemed to disappear. A former teacher in Newport News’s public schools, he had taken the Newsome Park job after being fired for joining what was one of the most bitter and contentious of all of Virginia’s teacher-pay-equalization lawsuits. Through his job and relationships with the residents in Newsome Park, he was one of the most well-connected individuals on the Virginia Peninsula, and knew many women of West Computing, including Dorothy Vaughan, who lived in the neighborhood.

  Katherine listened intently as her brother-in-law described the work, her thumb cradling her chin, her index finger extended along her cheek, the signal that she was listening carefully. She and Jimmy made a living as public school teachers, but their paychecks were modest. The needs of their three growing daughters seemed greater by the day, and Katherine pushed her math skills to the breaking point just to cover their basics and squeeze out a little extra for piano lessons or Girl Scouts. Deft with a sewing machine, Katherine bought fabric from the dry goods store and stayed up nights making school outfits for the girls and dresses for herself. During the summer break from school, the Gobles worked as live-in help for a New York family that summered in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The extra cash tided them through the toughest months during the rest of the year.

  Katherine enjoyed teaching. She felt a keen sense of responsibility to “advance the race,” instilling not just book knowledge but discipline and self-respect in her students, who would need both of those qualities in abundance to make their way in a society stacked against them in nearly every way. She and Jimmy hewed to the path that was so well-worn that the feet of Negro college graduates like them were trained to walk it almost automatically. But Eric Epps’s mention of the mathematics job in Hampton kindled the memory of a long dormant ambition, one Katherine was surprised to find still smoldering within her.

  It was late that night when Katherine and Jimmy tucked the girls into their beds and collapsed onto their own bed, but they stayed up even later laughing and gossiping, recapping the family gathering. Only after exhausting all the other stories of the wedding did they broach the topic that occupied both of their minds. Taking the road to Newport News would mean making a decision quickly. With the school year approaching, the Bluefield principal would need time to find replacements to take over their classes. They would need a place to live. Uprooting the girls on short order and enrolling them in new schools would be trying for all of them. Hampton Roads was far from Jimmy’s parents, and even farther away from Katherine’s parents in White Sulphur Springs, who doted on their granddaughters. In the mountains, even the summer nights were breezy. How would she manage that coastal heat? It would have been easy to continue with the stable small-town life they had created. But the possibility of this new job tugged at the curiosity that was at the core of Katherine Goble’s nature.

  “Let’s do it,” she whispered.

  Within one busy year, Katherine Goble and her family managed to fold themselves seamlessly into the Peninsula’s rhythms. Newsome Park was a natural place for the quintet to land, its endless city-within-a-city blocks a ready-made brew of neighbors, social organizations, and advice for newcomers. Eric Epps had made good on his promise to find employment for his brother-in-law Jimmy Goble, who had traded his teaching credential for a painter’s job at the Newport News shipyard. It was the kind of stable, well-paid job that gave Negro men—even those with white-collar credentials—a chance to pull their families solidly into the middle class. The girls loved their new school and marveled at living in such a large and dynamic black community.

  Langley’s personnel department approved Katherine’s 1952 application, but with a June 1953 appointment. The intervening year helped her make the transition to everything but the Virginia heat; many was the night she pined for White Sulphur Springs’ brisk summer nights. Filling the months in the meantime posed not the slightest problem. As a substitute math teacher at Huntington High School in Newport News, she had the perfect platform for meeting families in the area, and the Twenty-Fifth Street USO Club, which had continued operations as a postwar community center, recruited their new neighbor to be the club’s assistant director. From her involvement with the local chapter of her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and her choice of a church, Carver Presbyterian, Katherine gained a strong social network and a new best friend.

  Eunice Smith lived three blocks down, and Katherine delighted in learning that her soror, neighbor, and fellow worshipper was also a nine-year West Computing veteran. In the early days of June 1953, when Eunice Smith drove over to Katherine’s house to pick her up for work, the two women started a routine that would persist for the next three decades. They made small talk as they drove through the tidal flatland of Hampton, Katherine’s cat-shaped, wire-rimmed glasses lending her face a seriousness that matched her demeanor.

  The morning commute ended at Mrs. Vaughan’s office in the Aircraft Loads Building. It was a great and pleasant surprise to find that Katherine’s new boss was not just a fellow West Virginian but the neighbor who had spent so much time with her family back in White Sulphur Springs. It didn’t take long for Katherine to appreciate Dorothy’s talents both as a mathematician and as a manager. When they needed more computing power, engineers trusted Dorothy to staff the right person for the job, often hoping that she was at the top of her own list.

  Matching ability with assignments was only part of the challenge. The more subtle management skill was to match temperaments with the groups. The engineers could be a quirky lot, often brusque, temperamental, or authoritarian. One girl’s brusque was another’s cruel. Working closely in a team was key to the entire operation, and Dorothy had both a license and an obligation to see to it that her computers were set off on the best career paths possible.

  For two weeks, Katherine worked the desk, learning the ropes. Her honors degree in mathematics, her time in graduate school, and her years teaching math added up to the very modest job rating of SP-3: a level 3 subprofessional, the entry-level fate of most of the women hired at Langley, regardless of their professional and educational credentials. Nearly twenty years after Virginia Tucker first came to Langley, and despite the fact that hundreds of women had gone through the position, it was still expected that the women would accept their new jobs with a little gee-I’m-just-glad-to-be-here gratitude. “Don’t come in here in two weeks asking for a transfer” to an engineering
group, the human resources director said to Katherine Goble on her first day of work, a comment she didn’t appreciate. But she nonetheless felt “very, very fortunate” to have lucked into a job that paid her three times her salary as a teacher.

  In the first few days, Katherine caught on to the routine of filling in data sheets according to equations that had been laid out by Dorothy Vaughan or one of the engineers, who made regular appearances in the office throughout the day. Two weeks after Katherine arrived, when a white man in shirtsleeves came into the office and approached Dorothy Vaughan’s station, initiating a quiet conversation, Vaughan nodded her head and scanned the array of desks, scrutinizing their occupants as she listened. After he left, Vaughan called Katherine Goble and another woman, Erma Tynes, to her desk. “The Flight Research Division is requesting two new computers,” Vaughan said. “I’m sending you two. You’re going to 1244.”

  For Katherine, being selected to rotate through Building 1244, the kingdom of the fresh-air engineers, felt like an unexpected bit of fortune, however temporary the assignment might prove to be. She had been elated simply to sit in the pool and calculate her way through the data sheets assigned by Mrs. Vaughan. But being sent to sit with the brain trust located on the second floor of the building meant getting a close look at one of the most important and powerful groups at the laboratory. Just prior to Katherine’s arrival, the men who would be her new deskmates, John Mayer, Carl Huss, and Harold Hamer, had presented their research on the control of fighter airplanes in front of an audience of top researchers, who had convened at Langley for a two-day conference on the latest thinking in the specialty of aircraft loads.

  With just her lunch bag and her pocketbook to take along, Katherine “picked up and went right over” to the gigantic hangar, a short walk from the West Computing office. She slipped in its side door, climbed the stairs, and walked down a dim cinderblock hallway until she reached the door labeled Flight Research Laboratory. Inside, the air reeked of coffee and cigarettes. Like West Computing, the office was set up classroom-style. There were desks for twenty. Most of the people in the space were men, but interspersed among them a few women consulted their adding machines or peered intently at slides in film viewers. Along one wall was the office of the division chief, Henry Pearson, with a station for his secretary just in front. The room hummed with pre-lunch activity as Katherine surveyed it for a place to wait for her new bosses. She made a beeline for an empty cube, sitting down next to an engineer, resting her belongings on the desk and offering the man her winning smile. As she sat, and before she could issue a greeting in her gentle southern cadence, the man gave her a silent sideways glance, got up, and walked away.

  Katherine watched the engineer disappear. Had she broken some unspoken rule? Could her mere presence have driven him away? It was a private and unobtrusive moment, one that failed to dent the rhythm of the office. But Katherine’s interpretation of that moment would both depend on the events in her past and herald her future.

  Bemused, Katherine considered the engineer’s sudden departure. The moment that passed between them could have been because she was black and he was white. But then again, it could have been because she was a woman and he was a man. Or maybe the moment was an interaction between a professional and a subprofessional, an engineer and a girl.

  Outside the gates, the caste rules were clear. Blacks and whites lived separately, ate separately, studied separately, socialized separately, worshipped separately, and, for the most part, worked separately. At Langley, the boundaries were fuzzier. Blacks were ghettoed into separate bathrooms, but they had also been given an unprecedented entrée into the professional world. Some of Goble’s colleagues were Yankees or foreigners who’d never so much as met a black person before arriving at Langley. Others were folks from the Deep South with calcified attitudes about racial mixing. It was all a part of the racial relations laboratory that was Langley, and it meant that both blacks and whites were treading new ground together. The vicious and easily identifiable demons that had haunted black Americans for three centuries were shape-shifting as segregation began to yield under pressure from social and legal forces. Sometimes the demons still presented themselves in the form of racism and blatant discrimination. Sometimes they took on the softer cast of ignorance or thoughtless prejudice. But these days, there was also a new culprit: the insecurity that plagued black people as they code-shifted through the unfamiliar language and customs of an integrated life.

  Katherine understood that the attitudes of the hard-line racists were beyond her control. Against ignorance, she and others like her mounted a day-in, day-out charm offensive: impeccably dressed, well-spoken, patriotic, and upright, they were racial synecdoches, keenly aware that the interactions that individual blacks had with whites could have implications for the entire black community. But the insecurities, those most insidious and stubborn of all the demons, were hers alone. They operated in the shadows of fear and suspicion, and they served at her command. They would entice her to see the engineer as an arrogant chauvinist and racist if she let them. They could taunt her into a self-doubting downward spiral, causing her to withdraw from the opportunity that Dr. Claytor had so meticulously prepared her for.

  But Katherine Goble had been raised not just to command equal treatment for herself but also to extend it to others. She had a choice: either she could decide it was her presence that provoked the engineer to leave, or she could assume that the fellow had simply finished his work and moved on. Katherine was her father’s daughter, after all. She exiled the demons to a place where they could do no harm, then she opened her brown bag and enjoyed lunch at her new desk, her mind focusing on the good fortune that had befallen her.

  Within two weeks, the original intent of the engineer who walked away from her, whatever it might have been, was moot. The man discovered that his new office mate was a fellow transplant from West Virginia, and the two became fast friends. West Virginia never left Katherine’s heart, but Virginia was her destiny.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Turbulence

  At six months and counting, Katherine Goble’s temporary assignment in the Flight Research Division was starting to look terribly permanent. So at the beginning of 1954, Dorothy Vaughan made her way to Building 1244 for a sit-down with Henry Pearson, the head of the branch that had “borrowed” her computer and forgotten to return her.

  Katherine’s offer to begin work at Langley in 1953 had come with a six-month probational appointment. Successful completion of the trial period would make her eligible for promotion from the entry level of SP-3 to SP-5, with the raise that accompanied it. Though Katherine had spent only two weeks physically in the West Area Computing office, she was still Dorothy’s responsibility. Katherine could have been classified as a permanent member of West Computing, like the rest of the women who reported to Dorothy, available to rotate through other groups on temporary assignments. Or Henry Pearson could make Katherine an offer to officially join his group, as Kazimierz Czarnecki had done with Mary Jackson. One way or the other, however, Dorothy Vaughan and Henry Pearson needed to resolve Katherine Goble’s situation.

  “Either give her a raise or send her back to me,” Dorothy said to Henry Pearson, sitting upstairs in his office in 1244. A Langley engineer in the old style, Pearson had graduated from Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts and started work at the lab in 1930. He was a keen golfer, a horn-rimmed glasses wearer, the epitome of the New England WASP. Pearson was not a big fan of women in the workplace. His wife did not work; rumor had it that Mrs. Henry Pearson had been forbidden by her husband from holding a job.

  As a branch chief attached to the high-profile Flight Research Division, Henry Pearson stood a level above Dorothy in the Langley management hierarchy. By the time Dorothy came to the laboratory in 1943, Pearson had already served as an assistant division chief for many years. Fearless as she was, Dorothy would have approached Henry Pearson even if she weren’t a manager, but the official title of section head
lent her additional authority. It put her on equal footing with the other female supervisors and—theoretically, at least—with men of the same rating, and it afforded her a degree of center-wide visibility. When calculating machine manufacturer Monroe asked Langley for its help producing a handbook on how to work algebraic equations with its machines, Dorothy was drafted as a consultant, working on a team with other well-respected women at Langley, including Vera Huckel from the Vibration and Flutter branch and Helen Willey of the Gas Dynamics complex.

  The meeting between Dorothy Vaughan and Henry Pearson ended as they both knew it would, with Pearson offering Katherine Goble a permanent position in his group, the Maneuver Loads Branch, with a corresponding increase in salary. Dorothy’s insistence also had a collateral effect: one of the white computers in the branch, in the same limbo position as Katherine, had herself gone to Pearson to petition for a raise. The white woman’s request had fallen on deaf ears. The rules are the rules, Dorothy reminded Henry Pearson. Dorothy wielded her influence to win promotions for both Katherine and her white colleague.

  The fact was, the engineers who worked for Henry Pearson realized soon after Katherine Goble took a seat at her desk in 1244 that their new computer was a keeper, and they had no intention of sending her back. Katherine’s familiarity with higher-level math made her a versatile addition to the branch. Her library of graduate-school textbooks crowded onto her desk next to the calculating machine, ready references if she needed them.